About NDT

About Nikkei Decolonization Tour (NDT)

Decolonizing “Nikkei” — April 2026

Background
NDT began in 2002, when Yuri Kochiyama first learned from Buraku and Zainichi Korean women about the ongoing realities of racism and exclusion in Japan—histories obscured by both U.S. and Japanese imperial narratives. What followed was a transpacific effort to connect communities positioned within the underbellies of an inter-imperialist world order.

NDT creates political and relational spaces where communities shaped by colonialism, militarism, and racial capitalism can meet, learn from one another, and build solidarity. It centers the lived experiences of those confronting racism, state violence, and dehumanization as a basis for collective analysis and struggle across borders and positionalities.

Over the years, NDT has organized solidarity tours (2009–2012), supported the movement to establish the “Comfort Women” memorial in San Francisco (2015–2019), and led delegations to Okinawa, Miyakojima, and sites of colonial violence, forced labor, and massacre—from the 1923 Korean and Chinese Massacre to WWII-era industrial exploitation.

Today, NDT is sustained by a transnational, intergenerational grassroots network. It challenges state-centered histories and nationalist identities by forging relationships across communities rendered invisible within both empire and diaspora.

Reframing “Nikkei”
NDT rejects the confinement of “Nikkei” to Japanese nationals and their descendants. We instead reframe it to include those historically produced as marginal within the Japanese empire and postwar state—Zainichi Koreans, Okinawans, Ainu, Buraku communities, and others whose lives are inseparable from Japan’s past and present. This is not an expansion of identity, but a political intervention into how belonging itself is constructed.

Goals
NDT is grounded in the understanding that those who have experienced oppression must be central to transforming it. The knowledge produced through lived experience is indispensable to dismantling structures of domination.

By connecting diaspora communities racialized under U.S. empire with communities marginalized within Japan, NDT seeks to:

• Reclaim suppressed histories and fragmented collective memory shaped by empire

• Build shared critical analysis of structural inequality across borders

• Strengthen solidarity toward forms of coexistence not predicated on erasure

Approach (Praxis)
NDT is rooted in praxis—the dialectical relationship between theory and practice. Lived experience does not simply inform theory; it transforms it. Through direct engagement, dialogue, and collective reflection, participants interrogate dominant narratives of nation, history, and identity—including what it means to be “Nikkei.”

This is not tourism. It is political education grounded in encounter, accountability, and relationship-building with communities in struggle.

Core Principles

• Memory, storytelling, and lived experience are sites of political knowledge and resistance

• Liberation cannot be achieved without the leadership and participation of those directly affected

• Solidarity is a material practice that builds collective power beyond institutional constraints

• Rights are not granted from above, but won through struggle

• Social transformation requires both structural change and shifts in consciousness

Message from Miho Kim
Japan is often described as “postwar,” yet it remains deeply structured by empire. These continuities are most visible in the lives of those still marginalized and excluded. Their voices are not peripheral—they are essential to understanding the present.

We each occupy shifting positions within systems of power shaped by interlocking empires. Confronting this requires listening to suppressed histories and building relationships that make new forms of collective life possible.

NDT invites you into a process of people-centered learning, reflection, and struggle to expand what “we” can become across the interconnected maritime worlds of East Asia.

Get Involved
NDT is a grassroots, volunteer-run initiative. We welcome those committed to building solidarity across the fault lines of empire.