About NDT

About Nikkei Decolonization Tour (NDT)

We are a network of diaspora organizations based in Turtle Island, known colonially as the “North American continent,” shaped by people of diverse backgrounds, as well as by diversity of race and ethnicity, sexuality, gender, class, ability, generation, and age. 

As both Nikkei and hisabetsu non-Nikkei of Japan (those living under ongoing Japanese colonial subordination within its jurisdiction), we recognize our shared inextricable stakes in Japan’s future, and we collectively advance peace, justice, and liberation, 

and ensure that none of our communities is left behind on this path, through healing and belonging, education, action and solidarity-building,

so that we can envision a new future and achieve it, wherein "Japan" is post-Imperial as it is post-war, and fully grounded in its past histroy and truth, as well as celebartion of our shared cultural roots with the larger archipalgic region once known as Japonesia. The Korean peninsula and the coastlines and Islands of today's China as well as Japanese Islands were Inhabited by the very people who actively traversed the seas In all directions for centuries upon centuries. This too, is our ancestral heritage, and our claim to our collective entitlement to the remembrance and reclamation of the Pre-Contact 'japan.'

History:

Nikkei Decolonization Tour (NDT) evolved through more than a decade of grassroots exchanges between Japan and the United States. These exchanges began as pilot tours initially organized by Eclipse Rising, a US-based social justice group of Zainichi Korean diaspora, to cultivate direct solidarity between marginalized communities in the US and Japan. Manami Kishimoto and Miho Kim worked with blessings and encouragement from Yuri Kochiyama to make grassroots solidarity possible between the Third World peoples on both sides of the Pacific, a vision that she and Malcolm X shared.

NDT is grassroots and volunteer-run, with self-raised funds and donations. We conduct delegation tours to Japan to bridge not only the ‘Nikkei diaspora,’ as conventionally defined by Japanese ancestry, but also the diaspora of all subjects of the Japanese Empire and its descendants in/of Japan today, including (but certainly not limited to) Zainichi Koreans, Okinawans, Ainu, and Buraku-min. We want to work with everybody who has a stake in Japan's future to shape a Japan we can all be proud to claim.

NDT fundamentally centers the experiences and knowledge of those firsthand affected by the ongoing legacies of tennou-sei (Japan’s imperial racial hierarchy), as well as other marginalized communities like migrants, workers, women, and queer people. By doing so, NDT aims to reveal hidden truths about Japan, its people, and its history; unearth the rich indigenous and local histories throughout the archipelago; and expand Nikkei identity beyond the racial nation-state. Instead, NDT wishes to see Japan moving towards visibility and inclusion of all people who share a stake in the archipelago, regardless of ancestry or other distinctions that have been used to deny belonging.

By centering oppressed social groups in/of/from Japan (Hisabetsu Nikkei), NDT empowers a new generation of diasporic people of Japan — whether of Japanese ancestry or colonial diaspora — to collectively claim the term Nikkei. Through this collective empowerment, we strive to see past nation-state borders. We wish to eclipse the prevailing racial premise of belonging in Japan. And we hope to grow strong roots in our shared ancestral heritage of resistance, solidarity, and wisdom to reach for an international people’s movement for healing, belonging, justice, liberation, and self-determination of all peoples.