‘Refugees have power and strength’: how refugee agency influenced asylum policy process in Japan

Despite increasing scholarly appreciation of the exercises of agency by refugees and migrants, little research has explicated exactly how their agency influences asylum policies that structure their life choices and everyday opportunities. My research aims to address this gap, based on three empirical cases in which refugees’ autonomous and purposeful actions resulted in clear changes in the asylum policies of Japan. Despite the restrictive asylum policy tightly controlled by the Japanese government, independent and deliberate actions of refugees functioned as a necessary condition for ideational change to occur among key policymakers, which then was translated into institutional, regulatory, and operational changes in Japan’s refugee integration and resettlement policy at critical moments over the past 50 years. Since Japan can be seen as an unlikely case for such pro-refugee policy transformations, the close empirical investigations presented here offer implications for other countries, both for advancing academic understanding of policy processes and for enhancing the practical impact of refugees’ agency on asylum policymaking.