Tsunagu/Connect

To Britain from Japan, in our own words

No one knows how many Japanese women live in the UK.
No one knows their reasons for moving here.
No one knows their varied loves or hates, their achievements or mistakes, their opinions and contradictions. 
No one knows their stories...

So we asked them.

From Aberdeen to Huddersfield, Belfast to London, we have collected stories that amazed, shocked and delighted us, upending tired stereotypes and celebrating the multiplicity of voices and experiences of Japanese migrant women.

Tsunagu/Connect is a multi-phased, multi-year project that started in the Spring of 2020. With the help of 12 volunteers, we gathered oral histories from over 30 Japanese women who have settled in the UK since 1945. Inspired and informed by these interviews we have created an immersive theatrical adventure, part exhibition, part promenade theatre, that poses the vital question: 

“What price must we pay to create a third space, neither one nation nor the other, where we finally have room to be ourselves?”

Tsunagu/Connect was made possible by The National Lottery Heritage Fund and Arts Council England. Supported by The Japan Society, Museum of London, artsdepot, London Metropolitan Archives, Goldsmiths University of London, The Great Britain Sasakawa Foundation and Shoreditch Town Hall.