Reflections from the Refugee Café at Sophia Universisty (Tokyo)
Anyone who has travelled frequently to Japan is likely familiar with Google Maps’ peculiar tendency to direct users to the back entrance of buildings: an entrance that is often locked, leading to lengthy detours around the block. This was precisely my experience on a Sunday in May 2025, when I was attempting to reach the Refugee Café at Sophia University. The café is a monthly initiative organised by the Sophia Refugee Support Group (SRSG). Attending this event had been on my mind for some time, ever since I first met Professor David Slater (the director of the initiative) and several student members the year before. At that time, I was still in what I would call the “thinking” or pre-writing phase of what has since become areUsafe, and I was eager to connect with people I could question (perhaps I can even say “interrogate,” given how urgently I sought answers) about what a “safe space” in a university setting might actually look like. The concept of safe spaces is often fraught with ambiguity as it raises critical questions: what does safety mean and what makes someone feel safe? Moreover, the performative nature of safe spaces cannot be overlooked, as educational institutions may adopt this terminology for marketing purposes while failing to implement genuine support systems. This is why a student-led initiative —intentionally designed to be a safe space for refugees, not just students, but more broadly migrants— became a natural starting point for my inquiry. My interest deepened when SRSG members shared with me an article that wove together the idea of safety and the Japanese concept of ibasho (居場所). Ibasho has no exact English equivalent, as it is most often used colloquially, yet in the past three decades it has also gained currency in scholarly discussions concerning well-being, identity, and belonging. This concept can be understood through three intertwined elements: a place —physical or virtual— where one feels accepted; an environment where good and supportive relationships are cultivated; and a space in which marginalised individuals can envision a future for themselves. This definition opens up a broader understanding of safety that moves beyond mere acceptance or shelter. While creating a supportive environment remains a crucial first step, feeling safe only becomes possible through nurturing relationships, which make growth and future-making possible.
When I finally arrived at the Refugee Café, I was immediately struck by the joyful and welcoming atmosphere of what was clearly an informal yet intentional gathering. In a couple of rooms and along a long corridor, I observed around 30 to 40 refugees and a comparable number of students engaged in activities, initially centred on games and food-sharing. David’s welcome framed the gathering as “a place where everyone can discuss their own problems in order to see beyond their problems”. The context makes this initiative particularly significant. Being a refugee in Japan is notoriously difficult. Japan has one of the lowest proportions of immigrants among high-income countries, and it admits only a very small number of refugees: fewer than 1% of asylum applications are approved, according to government statistics. During my time in Japan, I spoke with several people from refugee backgrounds, and their stories repeatedly emphasised experiences of extreme isolation, lack of social networks, and profound loneliness. Universities themselves generally reflect this broader exclusion. The Japanese Initiative for the Future of Syrian Refugees (JISR) facilitated the enrolment of a number of Syrian students in the aftermath of the 2011 uprising. As noted by Gracia Liu-Farrer, Wendy Pearlman, and Mohammed Al-Masri, the programme's reliance on a neoliberal humanitarian framework produced ambivalent outcomes. While many participants initially enrolled with hope and anticipation, their experiences were often marked by professional disappointment, legal insecurity, and financial precarity. Ultimately, the programme failed to deliver the sense of sanctuary it marketed, and it certainly did not provide a safe space built on relationships and future-making. In 2022, some universities enrolled Ukrainian nationals following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. They did so creating a special category for them: “evacuee students”. Even in this case, the creation of a distinct, more “palatable” label was crucial to justify their acceptance without necessarily opening the door to refugees from other less welcomed backgrounds. Within migration studies, such dynamics has been described as differential inclusion: the way states and institutions, including universities, construct hierarchical categories of belonging, in which some groups are selectively welcomed while others are excluded. Applying this lens reveals how even “safe spaces” are shaped by these logics, extending protection to some while withholding it from others on racialised, nationalised, or politicised grounds. In a landscape characterised by bureaucratic hurdles and societal stigmas, the work of the Refugee Café stands out as a practical counterexample: a grassroots effort to create inclusive safe spaces in spite of broader pressures for exclusion.
Since 2017, the Café has hosted regular gatherings where support is offered irrespective of participants’ political backgrounds, economic circumstances, or religious affiliations. Catholic, Protestant, Muslim, and non-religious participants all take part, while refugees fleeing persecution, civil wars, or political repression are also welcomed without distinction. The Café thus offers a concrete example of how notions of safety and belonging can be enacted in ways that resist and complicate state-imposed hierarchies. Reading the day’s programme on the blackboard, all the pillars of ibasho emerged quite clearly. The job-hunting session, for instance, illustrated how relationships, networks, and lived experiences can be leveraged to create pathways through which refugees may access (potentially) better employment opportunities in Japan (future-making prospects). I was particularly struck by the testimony of one participant, who shared his experience of entering an MBA programme in Japan and made a compelling case for other refugees to consider pursuing a similar path. Having benefited from ibasho, this participant extended it to others. As Sarah Dryden-Peterson has argued, individuals from refugee backgrounds rarely point to laws or inclusive policies as defining factors enabling them to pursue their educational aspirations. Her extensive research shows that what most consistently supported refugees in accessing education were relationships grounded in a sense of belonging and collective inclusion, rather than exclusion. Laws, policies, and even scholarships are certainly essential, but they remain insufficient if not accompanied by relational spaces such as the Refugee Café, where these connections can meaningfully take shape.
After the event, in conversation with David, we unpacked how his life as an academic has been interwoven with the SRSG. The SRSG itself emerged as an outgrowth of disaster relief efforts following the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake, tsunami, and subsequent nuclear meltdown. For David, a Chicago-educated anthropologist, the disaster functioned as a profound wake-up call, raising the urgent question: “What are we doing that is at all relevant to what is going on here?” His immediate response was to redraft his entire syllabus on disaster studies. Yet, it was his students who pressed for a more direct engagement: not only to study disasters, but to participate actively in relief efforts by organising field trips and support activities on the ground. This dual pressure (from both the disaster itself and the students’ demands for meaningful engagement) became a catalyst for reimagining his academic trajectory. Over time, his scholarship became increasingly embedded in praxis, understood here as the reflective and critical application of theory to real-world action. Through this engagement, David came to recognise a significant gap in Japanese society: the absence of safety nets for individuals from migrant backgrounds. Reflecting together on this story, it became clear that his ability to act as a catalyst for creating such spaces was intimately connected to the security provided by his tenured position. According to Bourdieu, the academic field operates as a space of relative autonomy where cultural capital holds particular value. David’s decades of academic work had in effect been converted into what might be termed security capital: a form of symbolic and cultural capital that affords insulation from external pressures and thus enables risk-taking. This security was not confined to the personal but cascaded outward. Tenure, by safeguarding him from employment precarity, provided the freedom to dedicate time and resources to refugee support work in a country where these activities are rare and risky.
This reflection leads to a conceptual framing of “safe spaces”. In the case of the Refugee Café, and in David’s reflections, safety emerges not as passive protection but as an active capacity: the ability to take risks, to host controversial events, and to support marginalised groups. Safe spaces are not only sites of protection but also mechanisms through which privilege is mobilised to extend safety to others. David’s tenure thus operates less as a form of personal comfort and more as an instrument of social justice: institutional safety (tenure) enables individual risk-taking, which in turn fosters community safety. This insight is especially salient at a moment when global threats to higher education increasingly erode the sense of security —the habitus of security, in Bourdieu’s terms— that underpins academic freedom. Recognising how institutional protections can be harnessed to generate broader forms of safety underscores the urgent need to defend them. Just as a safe space is defined through multiple layers, so too is the process that generates said spaces; particularly in contexts where macro-level institutions, such as the state, discourage them. Therefore, the creation of safe spaces requires engagement not only from individual actors at the micro level but also from the meso-level institutional structures that provide recognition and support. While individual security is a necessary condition for fostering safe spaces, they remain vulnerable to shifting institutional priorities, personal transitions, and broader systemic inequalities, especially at a moment when universities are facing ongoing global crises. But for this reason, it is particularly relevant to move the conversation beyond safe spaces as sites for acceptance and protection, towards a framework of active capacity and social engagement that demands critical reflection on equity, inclusion and justice in higher education.
The following works informed this piece:
1. Bourdieu, P. (1988). Homo Academicus. Stanford University Press.
2. Dryden-Peterson, S. (2022). Right Where We Belong: How Refugee Teachers and Students Are Changing the Future of Education. Harvard University Press.
3. Fukuoka, C., & Slater, D. (2023). Creating safe spaces, a sense of belonging and ‘ibasho’ for women refugees in Tokyo. Melbourne Asia Review, 16.
4. Liu-Farrer, G., Pearlman, W., & Al-Masri, M. (2025). Neoliberal humanitarianism: Contradictory policy logics and Syrian refugee experiences in Japan. Migration Studies, 13 (1).
5. Green, D., Unangst, L., & Tomita, E. (2024). Refugees by Another Name: Displaced Learners in Japanese Higher Education. In L. Momesso & P. Ivanova (Eds.), Refugees and Asylum Seekers in East Asia. Palgrave Macmillan Studies on Human Rights in Asia. Palgrave Macmillan.
6. Mezzadra, S., & Neilson, B. (2013). Border as Method, or, the Multiplication of Labor. Duke University Press.