Email this article Japan’s community psychology through the decolonial lens: Exploring colonial mentality and pathways to social justice
Abstract
This article critically examines the development of community psychology (CP) in Japan through decolonial and social justice lenses. Drawing on eight months of collaborative dialogue among six scholars across generations, disciplines, and training contexts, it examines how colonial legacies, epistemic dependence, and disciplinary silences have shaped the field. Historically, Japanese CP took shape at the intersection of post-Swampscott imports and domestic professionalization; diffusion primarily proceeded via mental-health and school-counseling channels. These routes enabled growth while also tilting agendas toward clinical neutrality, leaving Japan’s internal colonial contexts comparatively underarticulated in mainstream discourse. Employing collaborative autoethnography, the paper presents three reflections that illuminate tensions between importation and localization, institutional neutrality and advocacy, and global frameworks and local practice. Across these narratives, silence emerges as a disciplinary infrastructure that normalizes epistemic coloniality while obscuring issues of structural violence and inequality. The paper argues that decolonial CP in Japan necessitates epistemic disobedience, co-production with marginalized communities, and hybrid “third-space” frameworks that resist both the replication of Western paradigms and the insular rejection of global dialogue. Policy implications include fostering reflexive dialogue, centering structural violence in research and practice, developing decolonial curricula, and building solidarities across Asia and beyond.
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