By Aya Hasegawa
These are just a few examples of how artists use artistic expression and storytelling to expose the repression of Palestinian voices and restore their memory and humanity in ways that speak to broad audiences.
Despite the Palestine/Palestinian solidarity movement’s long history in Japan since the 1970s, its activism has largely been marginal, in the sense of being on the edge of the Japanese political mainstream (i.e., formal politics). This is due to a wider social hostility in Japan, evident since the 1970s, toward political protests. Violent incidents involving radical leftist groups (most notably the Asama Sanso incident, a 10-day hostage incident in Karuizawa in 1972) fostered a general distrust of dissenting voices in Japan.
As a result, literature, music, film, theatre, visual art, and other forms of cultural engagement have played an important role in raising and sustaining Palestine-related political awareness over the past 50 years.
Israel’s ongoing genocide has reinvigorated Japanese artistic solidarity, investing it with a new lease of life and producing visual works, musical projects, and intercultural collaborations to inspire political engagement vis-à-vis genocide. This article considers the ‘lessons’ that have emerged from this development, with a view to examining how solidarity can be made and translated into political actions via cultural engagement. In the process, it also acknowledges the risks inherent in cultural activism.
Culturally Resisting Palestinian Dehumanization
Kuroki Yui’s art exhibition ‘Drawing Lines on Earth: Palestine/Israel’, on the erasure of Palestinian individuality by international media reporting of Israel–Palestine, was unveiled at HAPS OFFICE on September, 21, 2024, being presented to the public as part of the HAPS KYOTO selection. The exhibition consisted of 43,096 postcards, the number of Palestinians confirmed by Al Jazeera to have been killed between October 7, 2023, and the day before the unveiling. Each postcard had a bedsheet and a single line above, to depict a martyr. Kuroki explained he wanted the exhibition to speak of ‘a distance that reduces people to mere numbers and a reality in which the only way to convey the urgency is turning them into statistics’.
Shigeru Takashima, in a review published in Artscape on October 25, 2024, observed that each line was hand-drawn and, therefore, slightly different. He noted that this subtle variation would surely escape observers, just as the nuances and small details of Palestinian individuality slip beyond comprehension when refracted through the lens of international news coverage. The exhibition received extensive attention on social media and was, in response to public demand, extended by two weeks.
This theme also resonates in the work of ‘We Are Not Numbers’, a Gazan writer-led project that helps young Gazan writers to resist the silencing force by producing English-language written content for Western audiences, including journalist interviews and translations of Palestinian social media posts.
‘Two Palestinians’, a song released by Tavito Nanao on December 24, 2024, was dedicated to the resistance artists Ghassan Kanafani and Naji al-Ali. The lyrics, set over a slow expressive acoustic melody, trace life trajectories, speaking of displacement, political awakening, and assassination. Directly challenging epistemic violence that downplays Palestinian resistance and reduces it to ‘terrorism’, it also affirms writing as a revolutionary commitment: “You could not choose either a pen or a stone, so you held a pen in your right hand and a stone in your left.”
These are just a few examples of how artists use artistic expression and storytelling to expose the repression of Palestinian voices and restore their memory and humanity in ways that speak to broad audiences.
Cultural Projects as Intercultural Encounters
Palestinian embroidery is a remarkable example of cultural initiatives that enable Palestinian and Japanese artists and activists to meet, collaborate, and learn from each other.
After the Nakba, which disrupted every aspect of Palestinian life, Palestinian women preserved tatreez (Palestinian traditional embroidery), which persisted as both a means of economic survival and a form of resistance. Along with being inherited by daughters from mothers (discussed by Leila El Khalidi in The Art of Palestinian Embroidery), it is also transmitted via “cross-cultural influence” beyond Palestine, which opens up space for intercultural collaborations, including the Palestinian Embroidery Obi Project.
In 2014, the Japanese entrepreneur Maki Yamamoto launched this project, which combines Palestinian tatreez with Japanese obi, a traditional sash worn with a kimono. She drew on her country’s rich textile history to situate the project within a longer history of kimono culture that incorporated materials and designs that travelled along the Silk Road, which extended from China to Turkiye from the seventh century onwards. In seeing the project as a natural extension of this intercultural exchange, she sought to develop it as a site where Palestinian and Japanese creativities can work together.
Through the project, she aims to support Palestinian craftswomen by establishing fair and sustainable partnerships, and also by increasing Japanese awareness of the occupation. After October 7, the project organized more exhibitions and tatreez and tatreez obi workshops, where Palestinian public figures and activists speak of their lived experiences and call for political action to end Israeli violence. The project’s sashes have also been worn by prominent Palestinian cultural figures, including Hanin Siam, a Gazan activist who lives in Japan, and Bashar Murad, a Jerusalem-born Palestinian pop singer.
These collaborations symbolize cross-cultural exchange and also political solidarity in the Palestinian struggle. Upholding and operationalizing mutual respect and a shared political commitment, they sustain, and are reproduced through, collective creative processes of making and ‘bridging’ relationships that stretch over the long distance (cultural, geographical and political) between Palestine and Japan.
Cultural Works Engage Apolitical Audiences
The Japanese–Palestinian rapper Danny Jin’s body of work speaks to decades of Palestinian struggle and the Japanese government’s continued silence about Israeli oppression. While his output is deeply political, his audiences are sometimes disengaged from politics and live in a society (that he also grew up in) where there is strong social pressure to avoid political confrontation. In an interview with AJ+ (Al Jazeera’s digital network producing news and cultural content via social media channels), he claimed this directly influenced his strategic mobilisation via music, asserting “(i)f the sound is good, they will listen, and then after that they will see the lyrics”.
Graphic artists, such as Ribeka Kimura and Ai Teramoto, are also using art to express solidarity with Palestine. They have produced stickers calling for a ceasefire, which many creators have uploaded online, both for others to use in everyday spaces and/or protests and to spread political messages. The feminist artist Noa Hamachi’s comic story (‘F*cking World’) critically engages the hegemonic discourse around the genocide in Gaza, showing how Japanese society’s apoliticism is directly implicated in this violence.
By engaging through familiar mediums, these artworks challenge political disengagement by guiding audiences towards political action.
‘Tears for Palestine’ is an artistic protest project led by Palestinian and Arab residents of Japan since November 2023. At demonstrations across Japanese cities such as Tokyo, Hiroshima, and Sapporo, the names of killed Gazans are read aloud, as protestors draw red teardrops on a white banner to mourn the lives lost. By the end, the banners, covered by countless red tears, are a visually powerful expression of solidarity. Images of the protests have been shared on social media and reproduced by news outlets, including the Asahi Shimbun and the Mainichi Shimbun.
In a society where political protest is often seen as confrontational or disruptive, cultural activism and culture more generally have taken on a particular importance and significance, becoming important entry points that attract wider audiences and make political solidarity more accessible.
Cultural activism also has limitations and presents risks
While cultural projects can help to create robust connections, they do have potential pitfalls. Slater and Steinhoff, for instance, note that while art may reach out to broader audiences, this will not always lead to concrete political engagement. This has been acknowledged by artists themselves—in accepting that cultural expression cannot be an endpoint (and must, by implication, become political engagements that oppose structures sustaining colonial violence in Palestine), they have explicitly signposted audiences to political actions, including boycotts, fundraising, participation in protests, and petitioning.
Cultural expression can also be appropriated or distorted, as the ‘With Handala’ project demonstrated. From January 2024 onwards, the project sought to articulate a visual, collective demand for a ceasefire in Gaza by encouraging Japanese cartoonists to draw their comic characters as Handala, the iconic image of an exiled Palestinian child whose hands are tied behind his back. Some Japanese contributors, however, went beyond the project organiser’s call for an immediate ceasefire and called on both Israel and Hamas to seek peace, a dangerous moral equivalence that flattened the asymmetric power dynamics of colonisers and colonised. Other Japanese activists and artists, in insisting on the need to clearly oppose settler colonial violence and center Palestinian voices, swiftly criticised them
These and other moments highlight the need to critically examine cultural activism: Do we amplify Palestinian agency or merely consume the cultural works from a distance? Are we building meaningful solidarity or reproducing harmful stereotypes?
This reflexive attentiveness continues to shape Japan’s Palestine/Palestinian solidarity movement. In October 2025, soon after Israel and Hamas agreed on a fragile ceasefire agreement, a ‘ceasefire≠goal’ placard began to appear at Tokyo demonstrations. Alongside this, civil mobilisation for Palestinian liberation continues, as cultural platforms – craft workshops, film screenings, music performances, and visual arts exhibitions – continuously seek to mobilize Japanese audiences into sustained political action.
Through critical engagement and reflexive attentiveness, artist-activists work to ensure that cultural solidarity continues as a site of resistance that supports Palestinian liberation.
– Aya Hasegawa completed her MA Middle East and Politics at the University of Exeter. Her research focuses on the intersections of settler colonialism and transnational solidarity, with a particular emphasis on Japan-Palestine relations. Her MA dissertation examines Japan’s engagement with Israel in the context of the 2020 Abraham Accords, analysing the discursive strategies through which Japan strengthened diplomatic and economic ties while maintaining a narrative of neutrality. It also explores how these official narratives have been challenged by grassroots activism in solidarity with Palestine.