Belonging in Translation: Solidarity and Migrant Activism in Japan is a welcome addition to the Global Migration and Social Change series published by Bristol University Press. The aim of the series is to offer a platform for new scholarship in refugee and migration studies that is open to different disciplinary perspectives, theoretical frameworks and methodological approaches. Reiko Shindo's book does it, proposing an original take on citizenship, community and migrant activism from the perspective of language and translation in Japan.

Based on ethnographic case studies of Japan, this book investigates how political claims for citizenship are made in multilingual migrant activism. Noncitizen political participation in Japan takes place in a multilingual setting where participants do not share a common tongue. This is a unique feature which has never previously been addressed by scholars in citizenship and migration studies. The existing research on migrant activism has predominantly used examples from countries such as Canada, USA, UK and France where noncitizens often have the ability to speak the same language as citizens, such as English and French, because of their colonial ties to the host states. Meanwhile, migrants in Japan more often have a limited ability to speak Japanese.

Through an interdisciplinary approach that employs politics, political philosophy, sociology and linguistics, this book highlights how language plays an indispensable role in reimagining community, and reveals various ways in which miscommunication shapes interactions between citizens and noncitizens and how such miscommunication challenges the existing contours of community.

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.

Moving beyond scholarship on activism and visibility, Shindo makes an important contribution to the literature by theorising the significance of audibility to the constitution of political subjectivity. Not just in the more tradition sense, of migrants being heard and understood, Shindo argues, but also through its opposite, that is, being inaudible, speaking a language that the listener cannot understand, or even by sewing one's own lips.