I would. Sure, in most cases people don't actively dislike you when compared with some Japanese people that spew vitriol and really have it out for Koreans or Chinese, but you still get treated differently and often not in a good way.
I've met many, many people over the years, myself included, who wound up developing a love/hate relationship with Japan because of the racism.
> But ethnicity, not just nationality, seems to matter a lot in Japan
The correct modern terminology for that is racism.
Something most people don't know a lot about, because as a culture Japanese tend to be very outwardly polite so a lot of racism is very subtle and can't be spotted by someone who's just visiting.
20 years a gaijin here. Pretty much agree with your observations.
I would argue that Japanese themselves are subjected to immense pressures to conform to social norms. More so than foreigners, but its the same pressure in both cases.
I think that foreigners get along fine in Japan if they can accept this fact. If not, they are likely to feel constantly rejected and some, out of ignorance may deem it racism.
Racism in Japan when you are white is not that bad. Ask your Korean or Nigerian friends in Japan what it is like and you will get a much different answer.
>Japan also treats non Japanese people differently. Nobody says anything bad about Japan.
What? I see claims of Japanese racism everywhere on the internet. A load of people seem to think it's one of the most racist countries on earth.
Yet in my 5 years here, and as someone visibly foreign, I've never been treated differently from a local. If anything, being treated completely normally put a lot of pressure on me early on since the only thing holding me back was my own lack of language ability.
I politely disagree with your observations, though I acknowledge that I may not be right, I have observed and discussed this behaviour dozens of times with Japanese people in Japan for over twenty years and most find your parent's observation to be correct.
Please don't call people a racist for espousing reasonable views that you don't happen to believe.
That's surprising to hear. I have lived in Tokyo a fair amount of time (5+ years) and only experienced true racism, e.g. being kicked out of a place for being non-Japanese, a handful of times. Not doubting your experience, just putting this here as another data point.
Most of the times being treated differently was just other people being scared of talking English and avoiding me, but that usually fixed itself when they realize I speak Japanese.
Unrelated, but I think a lot of the foreigners in Tokyo are oversensitive to racism because they have never experienced looking different in their own country - that leads itself to interpreting all kinds of tiny acts as racist when something doesn't go the way they want. But in reality many of the acts have a different cause behind them, like the insecurity of the other person.
>> Why not accept that it's a huge country with 120M people and a multitude of experiences?
It is both a place worth visiting and also full of what we would call racism. The overly-politically correct crowd in America would be (and often are) shocked at what passes for acceptable race-related behavior in Japan.
> if you believe that people are perfectly fungible and that an Indonesian man will become accepted as Japanese
This is never going to happen going from the firsthand accounts I have heard from non-ethnically Japanese people who are by all accounts Japanese. As in born and raised in Japan, Japanese as first language, Japanese culture, norms etc.
Japanese society is simply too racist or xenophobic at its core. If you don’t look ethnically Japanese you’ll never be accepted as Japanese. And that’s even if you are white and even if your partly ethnically Japanese. If you have dark skin you at in for an even tougher time, and any hint of it going back several generations will label you as “the outsider”.
It might not seem like it from the outside because the racism isn’t as outspoken in media as in the US, but imagine spending your entire childhood living with everyone you ever come across acting like you don’t belong to the only country and nationality you have ever known simply because your fathers father was Scottish, it’s rough and a hell on its own.
> Extreme fasciation with the Japanese way of life has always struck me as roundabout white supremacy or misogyny cloaked in a cosmopolitan facade.
You're not wrong about the xenophobic tendencies and obvious monoculture, but the situation is far more complicated and nuanced that you're allowing.
An example: I have a black American friend who's lived in Tokyo for 30 years and plans to be buried in Japan. He lives in Japan because he never has to fear for his physical safety due to the color of his skin, like he does in America. While he will never be seen as "Japanese", for him your xenophobia is more typically represented as wariness or caution around foreigners, people not sitting next to him on the train because he is tall and looks different, versus in America having to contend with actual white supremacy, racist police, and hate crimes. His story is far from unique.
(As an aside, I think this is part of why these discussions about upsides/downsides of Japan are so interesting - it defies any simple explanation and the closer you look the more nuanced it becomes)
> but you just don't know it because Japan is 99+% Japanese with <1% being ethnic minorities.
Racism is discussed on Japanese SNS quite often. There are also frequent demonstrations both for racism and against racism. I think the reason people don't really know because it's wasn't actively reported, even on Japanese media.
Additionally, there are 2.93 millions foreigners in Japan [0]. Japan population is 127 millions. That's already 2.3%, and not even counting Ainu and Ryukyuans. It's not large, but it's much larger than <1% you claimed.
I hear this a lot and I'm not sure where people get it from. In my experience Japanese overwhelmingly discriminate between races - that is, they see themselves as a separate race from everyone else. But to me racism implies discriminating against races, and naturally that happens but I've never heard any evidence that it's notably worse here than elsewhere.
For example, a black friend once commented that Japan felt more welcoming than home (New York), because here, while he was seen as a foreigner, he also wasn't seen as any different from any other foreigner.
> Contrast that to countries like most of the West, where at least a solid proportion of people consider it socially unacceptable to discriminate socially based on someone's looks or origins..
Those things are also socially unacceptable in Japan. My experience is that the often discussed "micro-agressions" against foreigners happen about as often in Japan as they do in my own country (US, grew up in Texas).
Of course, the only complaints that foreigners in Japan can make is about trivia. The US is so fucked up that we cannot seem to stop shooting unarmed black men, we're separating mothers from babies, and as of last week now tear gassing families at the border. So not sure if you are American, but many of the foreigners in Japan that complain of discrimination are, and I just want to say that I think it takes a lot of balls for an American in Japan to be like "hey, you guys can do a lot better with the discrimination thing."
As horrifying as someone being impressed with your ability to use chopsticks is, it's not quite so horrifying as being literally shot for walking on the street.
Many people in the US freeze up if a black person so much as walks by them on the street. And on the other side of the pacific? Ask a random stranger for directions; 9 times out of 10 they will stop whatever they are doing and walk with you to wherever you are going.
On the contrary, it's an institutionalized xenophobia/Racism deeply embedded in the national Japanese psyche. take for example these (recent) cases of blatand racism.
True. But the knee-jerk reaction by Westerners is to call it racism, which it isn't, just like the majority of things called racist.
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