Migrants’ Story: Agalyn Salah Nagase – from a war-ridden province in Mindanao in the Philippines to being one of the founders of the Filipino marriage migrant community in Japan.
I first met Agalyn in 2012 at a ceremony at ABS-CBN’s Bayaning Pilipino Award in Matsudo City in Japan where a fellow Filipino and a member of Migrante Japan was one of the awardees. During that brief encounter, I learned that she was also a former awardee of the said organization and was also an active organizer of Filipino communities.
Agalyn, 59, came from the province of Saranggani in Mindanao, Philippines. Her parents were farmers who came from the Sangil and Maguindano tribes. During her teenage years, a year after her father died, their family experienced being displaced by the brutal military operations in their community where the army shelled bombs recklessly on their lands during the local civil war. She and her siblings were forced to go separate ways to save themselves and were only able to meet after 6 months all in good health.
“I grew up waking up to the sounds of war, raging bullets, and bombs. I got used to it, I am not afraid..”
Since her father died at her early age, her mother raised all of them, 9 children, by herself and with the help of their community. She and her siblings were able to finish school by self-support and neither one of them opted to work for any private companies or seek a job in the government. Instead, most of them chose to work among people’s organizations and NGOs helping other communities. By being a development community worker herself, Agalyn also experienced vilification, red-tagging, and harassment from the state forces that even placed her under the order of battle by the Philippine army. She then was forced by the church administration to relocate whilst two of her colleagues were kidnapped and killed by suspected state forces.
When she finished college, she was able to get hired by the United Council of Churches in the Philippines (UCCP) as a church worker. Being a Muslim, she focused on community work bridging Christians and Muslims. It is her volunteer work in church-based projects that led her to meet her husband, Riei Nagase, a Japanese national who went to the Philippines as a volunteer among the victims of the Mt. Pinatubo eruption in 1991. They met in Manila in 1992 and worked together as volunteers. Soon after they got married in 1995, at which they flew back to Japan to raise their family. They had one child, a son, whom they practically raised as a Japanese citizen.
In Japan, being a highly mono-cultured country, it is a common attitude for migrant households to assimilate with the local community culturally to avoid uncomfortable treatment among the locals who expect them to more or less be like Japanese. As such, issues of bullying and harsh comments among migrants from the locals have been frequent forms of discrimination. Children often experienced being victims of bullying. There are at least 280,000 Filipinos in Japan, the majority of which are either spouses or children of Japanese nationals or blood descendants (Nikkei-jin) of former officers of the Japanese colonial forces during the Filipino-Japanese war. Nearly 70% are women who came to Japan for the entertainment industry in the late 1980s.
In Japan, as a marriage migrant, she also experienced discriminatory treatment among locals since she had a hard time communicating in Japanese which made her feel alone and uneasy. Her husband directed her to come to a library facility to have language education facilitated by the local government. This allowed her to meet fellow Filipinos who are also married to Japanese nationals and are also experiencing common issues among their households. Through her experience as a development worker in depressed communities in the Philippines, she was able to harness her organizing skills in pursuing the issues of marriage migrants in Japan. She found out that most marriage migrants also experienced the same hardships and some of them are even victims of domestic violence and abuse. At first, they started with a small group of women who were attending Japanese classes with her. They made time after each class to spend some time together and share stories about their experiences in Japan and their lives back in the Philippines.
Their group grew from a few handfuls into some 30 women coming from various places in Kawaguchi city, to which they were able to form an organization called Kawaguchi Filipino Neighborhood for Empowerment (KAFINE) in 1998. KAFINE became the seed of a more comprehensive Filipino grassroots organization soon to be formed in the year 2001 with the help of Migrante International. KAFINE was then transformed as Kalipunan ng mga Filipinong Nagkakaisa or KAFIN which not only advocated for women’s rights and welfare but also campaigned for the issues of migrant workers of not only Filipino migrants but of other nationalities as well. Since then, KAFIN has been at the forefront of pursuing better democratic spaces for foreign migrants in Japan. More importantly, KAFIN played a major role in pressuring the Japanese government to revise its nationality recognition law pertaining to born children of Japanese nationals with unwedded love partners. KAFIN launched the campaign together with local supporters from various sectors of the academe, advocacy groups, and groups of law practitioners. This marked the unequivocal role of the organized grassroots organizations of migrants as a defining factor in achieving the democratic rights of foreign migrants in Japan.
KAFIN has achieved membership among other prefectures in Japan from Tokyo to far away provinces of Iwate in northeastern Japan and to the far south as Kyoto and Osaka during the early years from 2001-2010. Through time, since the fluid mobility and relative instability of livelihood among foreign households, its members have also scattered in various places all over Japan.
At present, KAFIN was able to maintain two grassroots chapters in Saitama and helped to establish the chapters of Migrante in Tokyo and Nagoya. Through its effort of forming solidarity relations among locals and their organizations, KAFIN was able to solidify its service and welfare projects through the KAFIN Migrant Center or KMC. KMC provides assistance and necessary support for migrant women and their families, Japanese-Filipino children, and migrant workers. Just recently, KMC was formally registered as a Non-Profit Organization in Japan being managed by Filipino migrants.
Agalyn Nagase is now the Executive Director of KMC and also the chairperson of the KAFIN Hanno-Iruma grassroots organization. She is also a Board Member of the Hanno City International Exchange Society (HANIES) and an active designated key person for foreign migrants in Saitama Prefecture as appointed by the prefectural government. At age 59, she is still active in pursuing her advocacy in the hope to empower more women and migrants.
Roger Raymundo.
Spokesperson, Migrante Japan. Vice Executive Director, KMC
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