The gathering is small, perhaps no more than a dozen people, but they scream out loud, which in Japan is quite unusual. They chant mostly in Japanese, sometimes in English. The slogans are familiar: “stop the genocide”, free Palestine “from the river to the sea”, and “end the Israeli apartheid now”. 

In front of them, a line of candles and small lanterns laid down. Behind them, well illuminated, the Hiroshima Peace Memorial, more commonly known as the Atomic bomb dome. 

The building was originally designed by Czech architect Jan Letzel and was realised in 1915, to host art exhibitions in what was at the time the city business district. 

On 6 August 1945, at 8:15 am, the atomic bomb dropped by the United States razed the entire city to the ground. No buildings remained standing close to the hypocenter. With the exception of the Dome, thanks to its structure of steel and stone, despite being almost right below where the bomb exploded. In the 1950s, the park was established around the building as a space to host different memorials. In 1966, the city council took the official decision to preserve the dome. The restoration was minimal, and the dome itself shows clear signs of the impact. Its purpose, and that of the entire park and the institution running it, is one: to convince humanity never to use that weapon again. 

Aoe Tanami sensei (the Japanese term for “teacher”), as the others used to call her, was among the first ones to organise the vigils. She is an associate professor at the Faculty of International Studies at Hiroshima University and specialised in Palestinian culture. On 26 October, she was there, playing a tambourine and leading the chants. After the event, she invites all the participants to have dinner at her office. The group is quite diverse: most are Japanese, including some involved directly with local anti-nuclear movements, but also some foreigners. 

Two Palestinians are also there. Lara lives in Hiroshima, where she moved in October 2024, and she works as a counselor at the Hiroshima International School. Her mother came to visit from Canada. For the occasion, at the specific request of her daughter,  she cooked ful (fava beans), while others brought Japanese dishes. 

In the conversation, an aspect emerged that many people around the world during the last two years can relate to: Palestine is not only a cause to fight for, but rather an entry point to better understand the society they live in, create a community, find a sense of humanity in a world where violence and human rights violations are often met with silence and avoidance. 

The Palestine-Hiroshima Vigil Community

The first gathering, around 30 people, took place spontaneously on October 13, 2023, to mourn the Palestinian and Jewish lives lost, and protest the ongoing massacres in Gaza. Some of the participants insisted on continuing. The vigil took place every day, for 500 consecutive days. At least one person was always there, with a banner and candle. Later, the group became known as the “Hiroshima-Palestine vigil community”. Before summer 2025, it was decided to limit the gatherings to weekends only.

In early 2024, the community delivered letters to mayor Katsumi Matsui and the city council questioning their silence over the Gaza massacres. For them, Hiroshima has a specific responsibility. The city built up its post-war identity as an example of turning its status of victim into resilience, recovery, and promotion of nuclear disarmament through advocacy, education, and documentation of survivors’ experiences. In fact, the city evolved into a relevant actor on the international diplomatic scene when it comes to peace and disarmament. 

The term hibakusha, to design the victims of the bomb, including those suffering from the effects of radiation, acquired a global dimension. In 1957, the Japanese government recognised the issue and provided the victims with specific forms of support. 

However, this role, according to members of the community, soon became frozen into memorialised rituals, limited only to nuclear weapons, and often disconnected from other contexts. In front of the genocide unfolding in Gaza, despite its previous generous contributions to humanitarian aid in the region, Japan took a very timid stance, very close to US policies. It didn’t put any diplomatic pressure on Israel, didn’t impose any sanctions, and rather continued business as usual. 

When UNRWA was defunded by the US and their allies, Japan followed. The country has consolidated trade relations with Israel. Not only through weapon companies, but also large investments in the Tech sector. The Japanese pension fund, the largest in the world, invests billions in Israeli companies, including those directly involved in the genocide. 

Holding gatherings in front of the dome has a strong symbolic value. It gives the “never again” slogan a wider breath, to embrace weapons of mass destruction and the endless cycles of violence that characterize our world. Shouting in this place also assumes a specific meaning, as it disrupts the silence of the memorial and the calm of the city. If Japan in general tends to be quiet and avoid social nuisances, in Hiroshima the act appears even more dissonant. When demonstrators approach people passing by to hand over leaflets to them, most of them turn and walk away. 

Japanese people passing by the vigils tend to ignore them. Very few decide to stop by, and even less decide to join the community. This is why the group decided to keep doing it in front of the dome, instead of more crowded places like the Hondori street, one of the city’s most important shopping hubs. Not only because of the symbolic value, but also because in that place they are more visible to tourists. 

“Hiroshima is a conservative city. It is not chaotic and loud like Tokyo, and people here tend to respect the rules. For this reason, with small numbers, the vigils have to create some noise in order to attract attention: drums, music, shouting. It has to be disruptive and inappropriate”, says Lara. 

Takuya Kirihara, a painter/musician originally from Saitama, agrees. In Hiroshima people tend to follow the rules, he says, and judge harshly those who don’t, even more than in other places in Japan. Despite its prominent anti-nuclear stance, in the last elections many voted for the far right party Sanseito, which promotes the idea of returning to atomic weapons.

Born in a communist family, Takuya was pushed by his parents to make his own experience abroad. He left Tokyo for Berlin, where he remained for 16 years. He came back in 2023, this time to Hiroshima. He says:

What I can do is to bring a perspective from Europe to the country. A friend of mine introduced me to the people of the vigil, and they invited me to join the gatherings. The noise music scene in Japan is very small, almost absent in Hiroshima. So the music serves the purpose of instilling curiosity. It tells people that something different is happening. But in general most of the Japanese are not interested in these issues. And we are a country where concepts like ‘human rights’ or ‘nation state’ have been imported and have a quite recent history.  

Sailor Kannako is another member of the community.  She is a DJ and singer who started her career in Tokyo. Her name recalls the manga character Sailor Moon. She is very involved in activities of solidarity with Palestine, including performances in which she mixes noise music and political slogans. About the vigils, she says: “When we stand at the Atomic Bomb Dome, many passersby avoid photographing us. They take a photo of the Dome, then quickly move on. This scene, which plays out almost every day, feels like a symbol of Hiroshima today”. 

Most of the members, says Tanami sensei, didn’t have any activism experience before the vigil. 

At the same time, today the community is visited by different groups: representatives of the postal workers’ union, women’s groups, and many of the old guard anti-war and anti-nuclear activist groups, members of Kakuwaka, and at a certain point even the Nihon Hidankyou, the hibakusha movement that won the Nobel Peace Prize last year. 

Connecting Gaza genocide and the bombing of Hiroshima is important but also problematic, Tanami sensei explains. Of course there are similarities: the level of destruction, the civilian victims. But the people in Gaza are without a homeland, they are refugees. The bombing of Hiroshima was a war crime, but it happened in the context of a war, against a state. Moreover “Japan committed crimes against people in Korea, or before in Okinawa. In many ways we can say it was the Israel of Asia. So I am generally against drawing a comparison between Hiroshima and Gaza beyond a certain line”. 

But being in Hiroshima has also advantages, she adds: “Here at the university they stop me and they congratulate me for my ‘peace activism’. Even if this is not what I do, framing it like this facilitates my acceptance. When I go to Tokyo, I am perceived only as a radical”. 

For Lara, political activism in Japan as a Palestinian was quite a transformative experience:  

Before coming here, I searched on google Palestine related things in Japan, and the vigil community came out first. The first weekend I went to the Dome, just to observe, and I started getting to know the group, and soon they invited me to speak at the events. It was a very interesting experience for me, as a Palestinian, because in Japan they focus a lot on education and awareness. Despite their limited numbers they have a very balanced and diversified approach: they can be disruptive, but also set up events for raising awareness, boycott campaigns, and academic work. 

Since 7th October, it has been devastating. I was in Jordan at the time, which enabled me to grieve collectively with Palestinians there. I could watch the news, mourn, and share with others as a Palestinian, without the need of explaining or teaching anything. So when I came to Japan I was very worried. I was extremely glad when I discovered the vigil community. I am really proud of the work they do to inform and educate. In a context where they are quite isolated, they realise they have a greater responsibility, and they do a lot of effort in order to achieve the same outcomes as in other contexts. 

In this sense, Japan has taught me the value of community. Living here was a transformative experience: here you really learn that you, as a single individual, are not important. Elsewhere, people are always struggling to get their place. Here is different, they value the collective more than individuals. 

A Decolonial Café in Tokyo

Sawa Sawa is a community café established in July 2025 in the calm Arakawa neighborhood, in Tokyo. The name is composed of two words with the same sound but different meanings. In Japanese ‘sawa’ (さわ) means ‘a chat over tea’, and in Arabic (سوا) it means ‘together’. 

It was founded by a group of Japanese and Palestinians who felt the need to have a safe space in which they could meet and discuss issues that, they realised, are interconnected. Many of them met before, as they were engaged in educational events, running different campaigns, including BDS, over the last two years. But they lacked a physical place to talk comfortably and meet people sharing similar values and interests. While there are other venues engaged with political issues, like the Friends of Palestine in Kobe, or the anarchist queer Namnam community in Kanagawa, or small punk communities scattered here and there, Sawa Sawa is the first one focusing on a comprehensive decolonial approach. 

Since its birth, the place has hosted film screenings about Palestine and the Ryukyu Islands (the modern day Okinawa), but also fundraising events, workshops, and discussions. 

Hanin is one of the founders. Born in Gaza, she moved to Japan when she was eight, and she returned in 2023, after 10 years in the Gulf. After the 7th of October, the political atmosphere in countries like the United Arab Emirates was suffocating, and she decided to move back to Tokyo. In Japan, Palestinian residents are only a few dozen (in 2023 they were 95). As the country doesn’t grant refugee status, almost all of them are there to work, or to study. And yet, she says, here you can speak freely, and she found a community of engaged and like-minded people. 

Sawa Sawa is the evolution of that community. “It is a place to decolonize minds”, she says, “where you can have conversations about different oppressions all over the world. Not only Palestine but also Sudan, Congo, and, of course, Japan”. 

Because of the context, the approach is quite different from the vigil community in Hiroshima, says Hanin: 

We want to attract people in a calm, subtle way. That’s also why we didn’t choose a name that was too clearly political. Sawa Sawa wants to be a space where you can slow down in order to unlearn and relearn while taking a pause from a hyper capitalistic metropolis like Tokyo, where everyone is always on the go. 

As someone coming from Gaza, it is not always easy for me. I feel so much rage, I want to be disruptive. But there is a thin line between being disruptive and damaging the cause. In other places in the world it would be completely fine, but in Japan you can become alienated very quickly. Or we would be banned. Here it is like this: when you make a mistake, they immediately take strong measures. There is a big debate among us, and sometimes we go in smaller groups to protest at events. Other times we need to change strategy in order to attract people and raise awareness.  

Some of the campaigns they launched were quite successful. Itochu, a massive trading company that signed an MoU with Israeli Elbit systems, canceled it after a boycott call that started in Japan, and then became global and particularly effective in countries such as Malaysia and Canada, where the company has also a strong presence. 

Palestine Solidarity as a Mirror and a Community 

For Hanin, Palestine is not only a topic, but rather a way to start a discussion. 

For a lot of Japanese people, Palestine is like a mirror. It is a way to look into their own country’s history. In a way, people woke up because of Palestine. It is an entry point, and they look at different parts of the world and realise there is oppression and exploited people everywhere. 

Imperial Japan is not much discussed in Japanese society, especially if we consider the education system. After the Second World War, there was a lot of ‘peace washing’. Peace education is great, but it cannot remain in theory. So Palestine often becomes part of a larger conversation that involves the anti-nuclear and anti-war movement. But it should be louder and bigger than it is at the moment. More difficult is to connect this to Japan’s colonial past. Not only what they did in southeast Asia, but also to the Ainu people in the north, and in the Ryukyu islands.

In this context, Palestine becomes an entry point to also reflect about the Japanese imperial and colonial past. Not only the occupation of Korea and China and the war crimes committed there, but also the older issues, such as those concerning the Ainu, an indigenous people located in Hokkaido, in the North, and gradually forced into assimilation, or the more recent annexation of the Ryukyu islands (Okinawa) during the Meiji period, at the end of the XIX century. 

The case of Okinawa is the easiest one to bring into the debate: after the Second World War, the island was forced to host more than 70% of the US military bases in Japan, and it was for a long period administered directly by the US. The decision to impose this burden disproportionately on Okinawa has been read by many of its inhabitants as another proof of the colonialist and racist attitude of the mainland towards them (the island has its own specific  identity, language, and ethnicity). The continuous US military presence is also often perceived as a humiliating subordination to US imperialism and its political agenda in the region.  

“When I was a University student, I was an anti-imperialist activist”, says Aoe Tanami, “I think the topic is very important of course. But it is not always connected with Palestine. Bringing up the issue of Japanese colonialism when we speak about Gaza could be counter-productive. And when it comes to talk about imperialism, it is even more delicate, as it is related to the figure of the emperor, and even some of our members in the vigil community don’t want to talk about it”. 

In Japan, some aspects of the past have been washed through the pacifist stance the country adopted after the Second World War, which rejected armed conflict, as stated by article 9 of the constitution adopted in 1947. And yet, revisionist narratives are becoming stronger, and the rightwing populist Sanseito party, which glorifies the imperial period and aims at removing article 9 from the constitution, is on the rise. 

In this context, Palestinian solidarity movements in the country, as in many others, acquire a larger meaning and scope. As Hanin concludes: “It’s not so much how much we can do for Palestine sometimes, but how much Palestine is doing for us, right?”

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