Black Lives Matter in Japan Too

This article offers an analysis of the Black Lives Matter movement in Japan and focuses specifically on the awareness it has raised regarding police racial profiling of Black and Brown residents. Social media played an essential role in circulating videos of police harassing and illegally questioning Black and Brown residents, and these videos galvanized support for what is now the Stop Racial Profiling movement. One organization, Japan for Black Lives, has been instrumental in maintaining pressure on the government to address the problem of racial profiling. The strategies adopted by Japan for Black Lives and other advocacy organizations that are at the forefront of the Stop Racial Profiling movement, such as interviews, data collection, workshops, online petitions, and demands for reform, have been effective at bringing national attention to this problem and have already yielded some political successes. This article will analyze the benefits and limitations of those strategies and consider the possible next steps that the movement can take. To that end, there will also be a detailed discussion of the institutional barriers to progress, such as the conservative judicial system and the opaque nature of rules governing police behavior.