Ugandan Asylum Seeker in Japan Turns to Samurai Filmmaking as Deportation Looms

A Ugandan man who has spent more than fifteen years living in immigration limbo in Japan is fighting to tell his story through an unlikely artistic medium: a samurai film drawing on the life of Japan's first recorded Black warrior.

The documentary "Sunday in Japan," directed by Antonio Rui Ribeiro, Leo Nelki and Golriz Kolahi, profiles the asylum seeker, identified only as Sunday, whose long-running battle to remain in the country has left him in a state of prolonged uncertainty. The film is part of Al Jazeera's Witness documentary strand and was published on 1 October 2026.

Sunday's time in Japan has been marked by confinement and precarity. He was once held at the Shinagawa immigration centre, one of the country's main detention facilities for foreign nationals facing removal. Although he is no longer detained there, he remains under strict reporting obligations, required to present himself to immigration authorities on a regular basis. His day-to-day survival depends in part on charitable assistance, which helps him put food on the table for his children.

The emotional weight of his situation is compounded by changes to Japan's immigration laws, which mean he could now face deportation. For Sunday, that prospect transforms each routine visit to the authorities into a potential turning point in his life and a threat to his family's stability.

Rather than accept his fate as an anonymous case file, Sunday has chosen to respond through cinema. He has thrown himself into the production of a samurai film inspired by Yasuke, the African retainer who served the warlord Oda Nobunaga in the late sixteenth century and is widely remembered as Japan's first Black samurai. The project is both a creative outlet and a statement of defiance.

Yasuke's story has long been a source of fascination in Japan and abroad. Brought to the country in the service of a Portuguese missionary, he entered Nobunaga's orbit and reportedly earned the warlord's favour before disappearing from the historical record after Nobunaga's death in 1582. For Sunday, the figure represents a rare historical precedent for someone who, like him, occupied the position of an outsider navigating Japanese society.

The film's title and subject matter carry clear metaphorical weight. By casting his own experiences through the lens of a samurai narrative, Sunday transforms his struggle against bureaucratic inertia into a story about honour, endurance and self-determination. Filmmaking, in this reading, becomes an act of survival as much as an artistic pursuit.

The documentary also sheds light on the broader condition of asylum seekers in Japan, a country that has historically maintained some of the strictest refugee recognition rates among advanced economies. Advocates have long argued that Japan's immigration detention system leaves applicants in protracted uncertainty, with limited work rights and few pathways to permanent stability while their claims are assessed.

For people in Sunday's position, the daily routine of reporting to immigration offices serves as a constant reminder of their conditional presence in the country. It also complicates efforts to build a normal life, find secure employment or plan for the future. Sunday's reliance on charity to feed his children illustrates the material hardship that can accompany years of unresolved legal status.

The Witness documentary places Sunday's personal story within this wider policy context, showing how individual lives are shaped by laws that often operate far from public view. His decision to make a film about Yasuke can be understood as an attempt to reclaim agency in a system that has otherwise determined so much of his existence.

The choice of a samurai narrative is especially resonant given Japan's own cultural traditions. Samurai films have long explored themes of loyalty, sacrifice and resistance to unjust authority. By adopting that genre, Sunday inserts himself into a Japanese storytelling lineage while asserting a distinctly outsider perspective on belonging and identity.

The documentary is one of several recent Witness films examining migration, justice and human rights around the world. Its release follows other instalments in the strand, including investigations into missing migrants at the US-Mexico border and a father's pursuit of accountability after Greece's worst train disaster.

For Sunday, the stakes extend beyond artistic expression. With deportation a live possibility under the revised immigration rules, his film also functions as a record of his presence in Japan and a testament to the life he has built there over more than a decade and a half.

By turning to filmmaking, Sunday resists being reduced to a statistic in debates over immigration policy. The documentary presents his project as an assertion of dignity and hope, offering a counter-narrative to the bureaucratic language that so often defines the lives of asylum seekers.

"Sunday in Japan" ultimately asks viewers to consider what it means to live indefinitely in limbo, and whether creativity can offer a measure of freedom even when legal status remains unresolved.