There is racism in Japan, just like everywhere. When I lived in Canada, I saw a sales manager where I was working throwing how CVs with Indian names. I asked him what he was doing. "There's no point in hiring someone whose name I can't even pronounce", was the reply. In the UK I couldn't get on a bus without somebody complaining about how dark people were taking over the country. Racism is everywhere.
It's a good point that in Japan you will almost never run into racism in polite company -- because, as you say, it is considered impolite. However many expats who live here complain about racism. What's going on?
IMHO it's not racism, it's culturalism. In my experience, if you speak Japanese well and you know how to act as a Japanese person, you will see almost no racism. However, if you are a visible minority (as I am) people often expect that you are ignorant of Japanese culture. They put on the "you are a guest" routine, which is fine except that it wears thin when it is your home. One or two gestures and a word or two of fluent Japanese almost always snaps them out of it.
Just to illustrate the difference, I once went to Takayama with my wife (who is Japanese). We stayed at a traditional ryokan (inn). Takayama has a very famous festival and fairly large old town, so it is popular with tourists. Because my wife changed her surname to mine, the woman running the ryokan assumed she was not from Japan (although she is very obviously of Japanese ethnicity). It took quite a while for the woman to twig that my wife was, in fact, Japanese and lived in Japan. It was the first time my wife experienced that difference and it surprised her quite a bit.
I have experienced some racism in Japan, but I really don't think that it's all that much different than anywhere else. Sometimes I think that people don't see the racism where they live -- often because they are not a visible minority. When they become a visible minority for the first time, it's a shock. When I went to University the CS department was composed mostly of foreign students from China or India and most of my friends were from there. It was the first time that I really noticed the racism in Canada.
I've run out of time, but at least in my experience, it is relatively easy to live in Japan if you decide to be Japanese. They don't do melting pot here. If you want to hold on to your own culture and to act like you did in your home country, you're going to have troubles being accepted. But if you decide to accept Japanese culture completely, I don't think you will run into any problems. The if part is hard, though, and I've seen many people run into the brick wall that is Japanese culture.
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.
The model I have in my head is that the average Japanese who doesn't know your deal will put you in one of two categories:
A) You are a temporary visitor. A tourist on vacation or business trip.
B) You are a full fledged member of Japanese society.
So the more "foreign" you seem, the more likely you are to be considered "A". I'm particularly interested in Southeast Asians: are they expected to be more Japanese/Asian or "other"? I guess the temporal nature of their visas helps cement them as the latter.
Another acquaintance is dark skinned (I can't remember where he's from) and has similar Japanese ability. I think he's has a softer landing. Even I get it pretty easy sometimes and my Japanese ability (both language and culture) is pretty middling. There is a kind of role in society where you can be the "friendly gaikokujin". Everybody wants to talk to you and learn about foreign places. They want to know how cultures are different in other places. If they feel like they can treat you as a Japanese person, you get a kind of celebrity treatment. I think this is probably only the case in the country side, where I live. In the big cities, they see enough foreigners that it isn't so special.
Most problems I've seen come from people using their "Super Gaijin Powers" (can't remember where I heard that first -- I didn't make it up). Basically if you look different, you can often ignore societal rules with no apparent penalty. You do whatever you want. You dress however you want. You say whatever you want. Nobody will complain. But there are huge unseen penalties and when those penalties become apparent, people get very angry.
A good example of this that I saw often when I was working as an assistant language teacher at the high school was foreigners not going to work parties. At the end of special events (and randomly through the year) there are parties where you go and eat and drink (often a lot). Some of my colleagues just refused to go because they said that they couldn't speak to anyone, didn't drink, didn't like the food, it was too expensive, etc, etc. I would tell them, "You have to go. If you don't go, you won't get along with anyone." They would reply, "Nobody cares if I go. I just tell them I'm not going and nobody says a thing." One or two years later: "Everybody is so unfriendly. Nobody talks to me. They all avoid me. They never listen to my ideas. They pretend that they don't speak English, even though I know they do. They are all two faced bastards. I can't wait to get out of here". It's so frustratingly predictable...
But, anyway to the point: If you look Japanese enough and speak Japanese well, then you probably won't get away with abusing your gaijin super powers -- so in the long run it might be easier. Even for me, I had bit of a health problem and had to cut out drinking for a few months. It happened to coincide with drinking event -- which I attended but where I drank tea. One of the other teachers was so upset that he lodged a formal complaint against me (it's on my permanent record!) I later apologised profusely and went out drinking with him and we were the best of friends after that. There is no way that he would have complained if he didn't consider me "close enough" to Japanese.
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.
[1] http://www.debito.org/?p=15013
[2] http://www.debito.org/?p=14950
[3] http://www.debito.org/?p=14981
[4] http://www.debito.org/?p=14954
[5] http://www.debito.org/?p=14989
also this
"Japan racism survey reveals one in three foreigners experience discrimination"
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/mar/31/japan-racism-s...
I've thought about bringing my parents over but Japan just doesn't do cultural diversity, and I'm not sure my parents are ready for being Japanese in Japan.
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.
Maybe I'm unduly influenced by a small number of such anecdotes.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dirty,_dangerous_and_demeaning
The problem from my pov is people get defensive when someone says "Japan is great. it's so much safer than the US it makes the US feel like a 3rd world country" which is true IMO and it's said to emphasize how the US (and many other countries) take for granted the amount of crime. And sadly instead of getting the intended message which is "the level of crime you live with in the USA is something to be fixed" instead they resort to pointing out the bad parts of Japan so they can ignore the harsh conclusion.
I guess one can say that generalizing something so dire about an entire population would also, perhaps unwittingly, be racist.
Would it be racist to say that slavery in the pre-Civil War United States south was a societal issue? Or to say that racism in Nazi Germany against Jews was a societal issue? I don't think so. (I give these example to demonstrate that there is some line a society can cross where you'd hopefully agree it's an issue.)
I don't know whether the claims are true or not about Japan, but I don't think it's inherently racist against the Japanese to claim that xenophobia or racism are societal issue there.
To believe that all such accusations are inherently racist is to believe in a form of moral relativism in which no society can ever be justifiably called racist.
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.
Yes, Westerners call it this. And in our eyes, it is. Japanese don't particularly buy that brand of shame, though.
'Racism' is a loaded term that has little meaning in most situations because it entirely depends on context.
Sure, if someone is calling a black guy the n-world, well then yes, we can safely use that term.
But if we consider that the vast majority of the world is inherently ethnocentric, then term 'racism' as a hard pejorative can only effectively be used in New World / Western / Anglosphere contexts, as elsewhere it would have an entirely different meaning.
The paradox of 'diversity' is that culture and ethnicity are the root basis of differentiation in this world, and without it, there literally is no 'diversity' - and yet, any general ideal which recognizes ethnicity is deemed 'racist' (in the pejorative sense), usually by New World / Western / Anglosphere types who generally lack perspective, in my view.
So, yes, Chinese treatment of non-Han types may be 'racist' in the ugliest sense, but it requires far more nuance than this simple term can imply.
The very essence of 'diverse' ideals should be founded upon respecting the fact that other groups have a different view of the world (and have different histories) than 'we' do; instead, we all to often end up with ideals of 'diversity' which amount to 'diversity of skin colour and last name' and utter conformity on all other levels.
The way the Japanese treat outsiders needs a whole other term of it's own, really.
Affirmative action is a clumsy policy to fix the legacy of such issues, but more targeted ones like substantially increasing education and social funding for disadvantaged groups, or reparations, are politically beyond the pale.
I guess I was more asserting it doesn’t happen to white people.
The first time I’ve experienced anything close to discrimination here was when looking for a house. Despite the kind real estate agent trying his best on the phone, he couldn’t convince the landlord’s wife to even show us the house. She kept saying she couldn’t trust me and my wife to stay quiet and orderly, that she didn’t want to deal with “cultural differences”.
Here, more often than not, you are dealing with scared and uncomfortable people who don’t know how to deal with you.
A convenient cover premise when the population is extraordinarily homogeneous: most of the foreigners are going to be another ethnicity and or race.
Also, Yu Darvish got plenty of shit in his country before he became an elite pitcher in NPB - his father is Iranian. It wasn't just being a foreigner, Yu was full blooded Japanese, born there and everything.
I suspect "full blooded Japanese" means Yamato on both sides to them.
- It is not "overwhelmingly." I would guess a very small number of landlords consider anything other than the tenet's potential to make rent every month and how long they will stay.
- Even in the aforementioned cases, it is not racial and has more to do with perception of foreigners (that we can't sort garbage, that we don't speak Japanese, and so on). I imagine this hypothetically "racist" landlord would probably also deny an American that was ethnically Japanese.
But most cases of a foreigner getting denied a lease are just simple economics. Landlords in Japan are, on the whole, very risk adverse. They want tenets with stable jobs and guarantors. Often, foreigners don't have those things. Just like foreigners, Japanese have to provide proof of a stable job and have a guarantor when renting. Landlords also want tenets that are likely to stay put so they don't have to go through the hassle of filling the apartment. If you're on a 1 year working holiday visa, that puts a natural limit on how long you can stay.
Landlords often have a choice of tenets and I think they generally behave in their own economic self-interest. Ask a typical Japanese landlord to choose between a foreigner employed at Sony with his manager as a guarantor and a Japanese student that graduates in 1 year guaranteed by his parents. My money is they pick the foreigner.
FWIW, my landlord switched from requiring a guarantor to going through an insurance that acts as one. So that moves the risk assessment to the insurance company, which may or may not have less bias. I hear this kind of setup is getting more common.
Anyways, having been on the recipient end of "landlords deny foreigner", I can attest that it's overwhelmingly economics driven, and not racism.
It’s called xenophobia, of which their various forms of racism are just articulations thereof.
The Japanese do not generally hate, fear or disdain outsiders (though surely this exists, and has been the case historically) so much as they just think of themselves as different.
'Xenophobia' and 'racism' imply a degree of antagonism, derision, hatred etc., which isn't necessarily the case.
I'm English Canadian, I've lived around the world, I now live in Montreal Quebec where I'm an 'ethnic minority' among French Quebecers. There are many new immigrants to Quebec, and almost none of them want to speak French. They all want to speak English. I can assure you that 'Quebec' culture is quite different from the rest of North America, and if this situation continues, 'The Quebecois' will disappear and North America will be 'less diverse'. It's a paradox because the Quebecois are politically 'far left of centre' generally by North American standards, and are instinctively 'anti racist', 'pro migrant' in the political/intellectual sense, but they're also proud of their identity and culture, and the demographic issue looms large and real here as a real and tangible existential issue.
Terms like racism and xenophobia are useful, but are often poorly applied and cause misunderstanding.
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.