Living in Connection – Ehiopians in Tokyo –

Living in Connection – Ehiopians in Tokyo –

Directed by Itsushi Kawase 49 min, Japanese, Amharic (English subtitles), 2024

Japanese society is home to people with roots in many different parts of the world and cultures. Among them, the lives and activities of immigrants from Africa are not widely known.
Nearly 200 Ethiopian immigrants live in the Katsushika and Sumida wards of Tokyo.
They are connected through meetings of the Ethiopian Orthodox Christian Church and interact with local residents through music and food. This film shows Ethiopian neighbours who have put down roots in Japanese society while maintaining their own culture, rather than being ‘foreign human resources’ to be exploited to solve problems such as a declining birth rate, an ageing population and labour shortages. The aim of this film is to
provide an opportunity to think about Japan as a nation that embraces cultural diversity.

About the Director: Itsushi Kawase is an anthropologist, filmmaker, and poet born in Gifu, Japan.
He has conducted research on Ethiopia’s poet-singers since 2001. He has won numerous awards for his writing and films, most recently the 2022 Umesao Tadao Literary Prize. He is currently a professor at Japan’s National Museum of Ethnology and the Graduate University for Advanced Studies where he also co-edits the multimodal journal TRAJECTORIA.
https://www.itsushikawase.com/index.html
https://trajectoria.minpaku.ac.jp/