I woke up to messages asking if Japan has shut the door to Africans or if Africans are about to flood Japan. Both claims are false. What is true is simpler and more revealing. A small cultural program became a lightning rod for fear, and that fear exposed old prejudices that many would rather ignore.
Three Japanese cities sit at the center of this storm: Kisarazu, Nagai, and Sanjō. They were paired with African countries in a Japan International Cooperation Agency effort to spark friendship, school exchanges, artisan showcases, and small-town revitalization. That is all. No special visas. No resettlement lanes. No plan to import workers by the thousands. Yet a stew of mistranslation and online rumor turned a cultural handshake into a story of mass arrival. City inboxes filled with hostile messages. Comment sections boiled over. Fear drowned out facts.
I always test such storms with a simple question. My fellow Africans, did you wake up today dreaming of moving to Japan, and not just to Tokyo or Osaka, but to Kisarazu, Nagai, or Sanjō? Most of us did not. I respect these communities. I have friends who love the craft culture of Niigata and the quiet dignity of small Japanese towns. But reality is reality, and reality does not match the rumor.
Start with climate. Sanjō and Nagai live in snow country. Winters there can bury roads, slow trains, and ice your breath. If you grew up in Accra, Dar es Salaam, or Lagos, that is not a trivial adjustment. Many Africans thrive in winter cities across the world, so this is not a weakness. It is simply a fact that makes these towns less obvious magnets for large new communities from Africa.
Look at scale. Nagai has roughly 24,000 people and only a few hundred foreign residents. Sanjō has closer to 90,000 people and still a small international base. These are not places with established African churches, grocery stores, hair salons, or community centers. Newcomers build bridges, but it is harder to build from zero. Kisarazu, closer to Tokyo Bay, is more diverse than the others, but daily life still runs in Japanese. That language gap is another quiet barrier that rumor mills do not mention.
Consider the local economy. Sanjō is part of the Tsubame–Sanjō metalworking cluster. The quality is legendary. The knives, the tableware, the precision tools are art you can hold. Jobs in that ecosystem tend to require technical Japanese, shop floor communication, and embedded skills. They do not open easily to people who just arrived and speak English or French but not Japanese. Again, this is not judgment. It is a reminder that niche excellence does not automatically translate into broad, newcomer friendly job markets.
When you stack climate, scale, and industry together, the idea of an African “flood” dissolves. What remains is a pattern we have seen in many countries. Rumor plus anxiety equals anger. Anger quickly seeks an object, and in our age that object is often the foreigner, especially the Black foreigner.
This is where we face the harder truth. Japan is not uniquely racist, yet it has its own history with race that deserves honesty. In 2006 a United Nations rapporteur found deep racism affecting minorities and foreigners. Years later Japan passed a hate speech law that critics still say has weak teeth. After the murder of George Floyd, people in Tokyo and Osaka marched against racism, which showed conscience and courage. In the same season the public broadcaster aired an insulting animation about Black Lives Matter, then apologized. That contradiction is the point. Progress and backlash walk side by side. They do so in Japan. They do so in Europe. They do so in the Americas. They do so in Africa too, when xenophobia targets our neighbors.
Add policing to the picture. There have been warnings about racial profiling. There have been lawsuits and testimonies about how foreigners are stopped and singled out, with darker skin often paying the highest price. None of this means every officer is biased or every Japanese person is hostile. It means there is a pattern that cannot be denied. When false stories about an African influx hit social media, they landed on soil that already knew how to grow suspicion.
Now pull the camera back and look at the numbers. By the end of 2024, Japan had around 3.8 million foreign residents. Only about 25,000 were African. That is less than one percent of all foreign residents. In a country of about 124 million people, Africans are roughly two hundredths of one percent. The math does not whisper. It shouts. There is no flood. There is not even a stream.
If anything, small Japanese towns are the ones that need people. Many are shrinking. Some are aging faster than they can replace themselves. That is exactly why JICA tried to plant cultural bridges in the first place. A music exchange here. A school partnership there. A craft fair that teaches Ghanaian design principles to Japanese artisans and lets Japanese metalworkers coach young Ghanaian makers. None of that requires visas. All of that builds human capital.
So what should we, as Africans, do with this moment? We learn from it. We do not let anyone define us as a threat. We do not perform for rumor or bend our backs to suspicion. We also do not fall for the fantasy that salvation lives in somebody else’s small town. Salvation is a word for faith. Development is a result of work. Our work is here.
I say this as a Pan-African who loves the world and believes in exchange. I want our students to visit Japan and return with new skills. I want our entrepreneurs to sell knives forged in Sanjō alongside shea butter from Ghana and coffee from Tanzania at a pop-up market in Nairobi. I want our engineers to learn from Japanese precision and then apply that discipline to African manufacturing. Exchange can be a bridge without becoming a crutch.
But the dream we chase is not in Kisarazu’s snowy streets or in Nagai’s silent evenings. It is not even in Tokyo’s neon. The dream is in African classrooms that teach code and craft. It is in local factories that turn cassava into starch for export and turn metal into tools for farmers. It is in cities that plan for people, not only for cars. It is in counties and provinces that cut corruption and build trust. It is in leaders who listen and citizens who organize.
The numbers do not lie. Africans in Japan are few. The panic is false. The lesson is clear. Build Africa. Build the schools, the workshops, the labs, the studios, the farms, the courts, and the councils that make staying an act of hope, not of resignation. When we do that, partnerships abroad become equal conversations, not desperate exits.
Our future does not wait in the cold. It rises where we stand.
