Fifteen years is a long time to wait for permission to exist. For Sunday, a Ugandan asylum seeker living in Japan, that wait hasn't been spent sitting quietly. It's been spent navigating a bureaucratic labyrinth that treats human lives as paperwork, punctuated by stints in detention centers like Shinagawa and a constant, draining reliance on charity to feed his children.
Then, the rules tightened further. Proposed and implemented shifts in Japan’s immigration laws put individuals like Sunday squarely in the crosshairs of deportation. When the state tries to reduce your existence to a deportation order, you have two choices. You can let them win, or you can pick up a camera.
Sunday chose the camera.
The Reality of Limbo Under Japanese Immigration Policy
Japan’s refugee recognition system is notoriously stringent. Acceptance rates hover around one to two percent annually, leaving thousands of asylum seekers in protracted legal limbo. They aren't legally allowed to work freely, yet they can't be easily deported back to danger. They live on provisional release orders—known locally as karimenkyu—which require regular check-ins with immigration authorities, forbid official employment, and strip away access to national health insurance.
For Sunday, this meant more than a decade of staring at closed doors. Feeding his kids became an exercise in relying on civil society networks, religious charities, and whatever irregular help he could scrounge together.
When you're trapped in a system that demands your invisibility, creativity becomes an act of open defiance.
Why a Samurai Film Made Sense
Instead of making a standard talking-head documentary about his struggles, Sunday channeled his reality into fiction. He started directing a samurai film inspired by Yasuke, historically remembered as Japan’s first Black samurai during the Sengoku period.
It’s a brilliant conceptual parallel. Yasuke arrived in Japan centuries ago as an outsider, navigated an alien culture, and earned a place in history through sheer grit and resilience. Sunday saw his own reflection in that history.
Filmmaking isn't a hobby for someone facing deportation; it’s an anchor. Antonio Rui Ribeiro, Leo Nelki, and Golriz Kolahi captured this creative resistance in their documentary project tracking Sunday’s journey, highlighting how art provides a voice when the legal system tries to mute you entirely.
What the Statistics and Headlines Miss
Most coverage of immigration policies focuses purely on the macro numbers—parliamentary debates, amendment clauses, and border control metrics. What gets lost is the human cost of administrative stagnation.
When a person spends a decade and a half unable to plan for next week, let alone next year, psychological toll takes over. Yet, Sunday's project proves that agency cannot be completely legislated away. By stepping behind the lens, he shifts from being the passive subject of a deportation case to the active creator of a narrative.
If you want to understand how immigration systems fail human potential, look at the backlog. If you want to understand how people survive those systems, look at Sunday's set.
Support independent documentary storytelling, share stories of marginalized creators who refuse to be silenced, and look past the cold text of immigration statutes to see the real human beings trying to make art out of survival.
