Tokyo Midtown in Roppongi is where elegant Tokyoites, dressed in matching attire with their partners, dine in upscale Western and high-end Japanese restaurants. Because of the weak Yen, they also share space with rather loud Western tourists dressed in shorts and mismatched clothes, often covered in tattoos, a body art that most Japanese associate with membership in criminal gangs. I am standing in front of a fancy Italian restaurant hoping to get an oven pizza and a glass of white wine, the type of food one cannot easily find at any corner in Tokyo. Unfortunately, I am wearing my sneakers and, like many tourists, am rather casually dressed. After a few months in Tokyo, I have learned that when I am told the tables are full or all reserved, even when the restaurant is literally half empty, they want to protect their Japanese customers, who often dread loud, underdressed non-Japanese. As I stand frustrated outside the restaurant, I suddenly see a Halal certification document glued to its window. Thinking that I may be misreading the document, I go closer, take a picture, and for a second stand there in confusion.
Fig.1 Halal Certification in Italian Restaurant (photo by author)
This blog post is about that second of confusion. Why was I indeed surprised to see such a certificate hanging outside a fancy restaurant in a high-end Mall? I seize this moment of surprise to examine the history of my own assumptions about the relationship between class and Muslim piety practices, as a diasporic Iranian living in Europe.
The number of Muslims in Japan is around 110.000, of whom 10.000 are converts, mainly women married to practicing Muslim men.
Fig. 2 Instructions on how to wear a headscarf at the entrance of the Turkish Mosque in Tokyo (photo by author)
As birth rates have consistently dropped in Japan over the past decade and a half, the number of migrant workers has been on the rise. Like Europe, Japan is facing a significant labor shortage, requiring approximately a million new foreign workers annually to remain competitive on the global market. Most of these laborers come from impoverished countries; the majority of them are Muslims from South Asia, while some, like the Vietnamese, have seen their country undergo an economic boom in the last decade. At McDonald’s, convenience stores, and airports, the number of brown laborers from Nepal, Pakistan, and Bangladesh is significant. These migrant workers often stand further in the background, sometimes literally behind Japanese workers, who represent the “official” face of the company.
Geographically, the divide between local and migrant and Muslim dominated neighborhoods in the city is quite visible too. Like many other examples around the world, the new migrants move to neighborhoods where older-generation migrants from different countries have already settled. Korea Town in Tokyo has an entire side street with small Pakistani and Bangladeshi restaurants, travel agencies, and food markets that offer halal food.
In addition, as part of its colonial ambitions beyond neighboring countries (Korea, China, and the Philippines, among others), Meiji Japan was also exploring the expansion of its territories westward to Central Asia, including Afghanistan and Iran. In its attempt to find allies against Russia in WWII, Meiji Japan considered allying with Tatar Muslims to pursue a policy of divide and conquer. In fact, the Japanese government had invited some of these Tatars in 1938 to settle down in Tokyo. This Muslim community had built a small mosque on the grounds, which the Turkish government has now converted into a magnificent Ottoman-style mosque, situated in an affluent part of Tokyo. The mosque features a large cultural center and a supermarket that sells Halal meat and Middle Eastern goods.
Fig. 3 Inside view of the Turkish Mosque in Tokyo (photo by author)
My confusion as I stared twice at the Halal certification in front of the Italian restaurant in Roppongi stems from the fact that halal food, therefore, can be seen in popular neighborhoods associated with lower-income migrants as well as in luxury malls offering Italian food. Knowledge of Western food names and dining at restaurants offering European cuisine, particularly Italian food, in Japan and South Korea is one way for locals to accumulate cultural capital. In other words, the intersection of class, race, and religion is different from that in Iran and Europe in that religion does not stand in for either class or race. In both countries where I spent most of my life, explicit signs of Muslim identity were identified with lower-class status. Indeed, in Europe, Halal certification is mainly displayed in eateries in lower-middle-class neighborhoods with large migrant communities. While race stands as a visible marker of difference and hierarchy, religion does not (yet) seem to play a larger role in identity politics in everyday life in Japan.
Fig. 4 Instagram post by Indonesian creator Aufa featuring a Kimono-Hijab
The image that emerges then is that Islam is not a politicized topic in Tokyo, instead locals rally in large numbers to vote right wing political parties such as the recently established Sanseito in the elections of July 2025, with its slogan of Japanese First because they are fed up with Chinese real estate investments, with fear of migrants (Nepali, Kurds, Bangladeshi, Vietnamese, Chinese, Brazilians,…) seemingly making their country unsafe. They are also protesting against Western (90% White) tourists who consistently break the social norms. Being loud, standing out with their ‘immodest’ dresses, carrying their backpacks in metros, and taking too much space in crowded hours, displaying openly their tattooed bodies, in addition to pushing prices of goods and hotels up, and displaying disrespectful behavior at temples. All these factors trigger a large number of Tokyoites to vote for right-wing parties, bypassing the reality of a collapsing economy without migrant workers and tourism.
If a neoliberal late capitalist country like Japan can shrug shoulders about women who wear the headscarf or doesn’t bother to put a halal sign in a fancy restaurant but gets furious and has public debates on TV over how Australian tourists misbehave in temples and wishes to bar them from entry to tourists sites, then perhaps our problem in Europe is also not Islam or visible signs of difference (headscarf or halal certifications in restaurants) in itself but our confusion about the values that we collectively want Europe to stand for. The example of Japan’s relation to Muslims and Islam shows that there is nothing inherently problematic about the religion itself, as right-wing traditions in Europe advocate. It is the historical context of the interactions between Europe and the Muslim World, the consequences of colonialism, and the migration patterns since the 1960s that decide what in Europe is imagined as Islam and what Muslims are about, rather than about any objective criteria that would define the qualities of a religion or a people.
If the Canadian Philosopher Charles Taylor calls the modern person ‘a self-interpreting animal,’ constantly producing an identity by interpreting her position in a given environment, maybe our way out of the current deadlock is to tell better stories about ourselves and our confusion in Europe. For me, these new stories need not be drawn along the intersections of race, class, and religion, but rather along the lines of those who are capable of critical self-reflection, recognizing patterns of domination and power, and those who are unwilling to acknowledge their relative privileges. Maybe we can start telling more compelling stories to create new, more inclusive definitions of ourselves, and by extension, about who belongs to the West. Perhaps the chaos we are experiencing is part of a new growth spurt; the old colonial intersectional identities are falling apart, and the new ones are too raw, too alien to digest for everyone, including those who have been historically marginalized. We are debating, disagreeing, protesting, fearing, hating, loving, withdrawing, and wondering. As the Japanese saying goes: Fall seven times, stand up eight! When we stand up the eighth time, maybe the centers of power will not be in the hands of those who repeat old mechanical tales of division and civilizational superiority, putting themselves above Muslims, and holding on to uninspiring, monotonous stories.
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