The objective of this book was to explore the connection between citizenship, language, and community. The case of Japan offers an important angle for examining this connection. In the context of migrant activism, English does not necessarily work as a global lingua franca to facilitate the communication of local activists and migrant protesters. Instead, Japanese is used as a primary working language at demonstrations, meetings among activists, negotiations between NGOs and government agencies, and collective bargaining between migrant workers and their employers. This challenges the assumption that participants of activism are more or less able to communicate successfully. By approaching the question through the Japanese experience, the activity of translation emerges as central to both our practical and theoretical understanding of the topic.

By looking at interactions between people who are supposedly united to fight for the same cause but nevertheless disunited because of language barriers, this book has identified multiple locations of citizenship struggles. Participants navigate various instances where the tension between audibility and inaudibility becomes contentious, such as in interactions between migrant workers and their Japanese supporters, discussions between migrants and immigration lawyers, and conversations facilitated by Japanese and migrant volunteers who act as interpreters. These everyday interactions reveal a dynamic aspect of community making that takes place in the linguistic encounter between local activists and migrant protesters. This book has aimed to investigate the connection between citizenship, language, and community by looking at such instances of citizenship struggles.

This objective has structured my conceptual and empirical investigations. In Chapter 1, I introduced a peculiar tension between language and community. On the one hand, language draws a boundary that separates the inside of the community from the outside. On the other, language disturbs the boundary to create an ambiguous space of belonging. Chapter 2 focused on the specific implication of this tension to the analysis of multilingual migrant activism. Drawing on the acts of citizenship scholarship as well as the works of Jacques Ranciere and Gloria Anzaldúa, I discussed migrant activism as a key site where language becomes a tool to sometimes divide citizens from foreigners – the former dominate the domain of speech at the expense of the latter's silence, and at other times, challenge such division.