Is Japan a particularly racist/xenophobic country?

Black is low down on the totem pole of Japanese race preferences but Western black, especially young and good-looking, is okay, especially if you're going to be hanging out at trendy places, in which case it might get you laid a lot.

I once talked to a Japanese girl who thought all Blacks(we're all the same you know) only washed their hair once a month. Thank God it was an internet convo.

x-p

No, that's only dirty white trash like me.

http://wizardishungry.com/lol/graham%20008.jpg

He got laid a lot.

I still don't know what to make of this.

All Japanese people look like Pat Morita.

What really matter is the pizza. And Japanese pizza is a fucking horror show. STAY AWAY!

Japanese on the whole have a tendency not to accept foriegners as people first but treat foriegners as foriegners. This goes along with the whole playing a role thing in Japan, where you don't have to treat the cashier as a person but just as a cashier and everyone is cool with that. It's the way Japan works i guess. Everyone knows their place.

Of course this can get very tedious being treated like a fresh off the boat idiot Johnny Foriegner. I have a white friend who has lived in Japan 19 years, 3 Japanese daughters, 1 Japanese wife, and gets paid a lot to pretend to be Johnny foriegner who speaks and understands no Japanese nor nothing about Japan on TV gameshows.

I think it's just meant as a semi-meaningless nice thing to say, like when we say "bless you" when someone sneezes. it's just like saying, "hey, i notice you're white" but it comes out as "hey, you look like tom cruise".

Yeah, but that "certain extent" is pretty wide. As a black man I'm more prone to experience racism in say the Czech Republic than Sweden.

(did any of you guys look at the picture i posted: LOOKS **NOTHING** LIKE TOM CRUISE)

I hope I have the luck to escape it cause that shit is really a turn off.

I didn't feel a lot of xenophobia at all, I found strangers are curious to talk to me and practice their english and help me with my Japanese, I was humbled at least once a day by someone's outrageous gratitude and/or accomodations, and people were very interested/informed in discussing american culture/politics (and I shared their concern). I was treated with an extroadinary amount of respect and politeness, and I tried my best to show my appreciation in return.

But these are just my individual impressions with various Japanese individuals, not the broad secondhand cultural stroke this thread comes off as.

No wonder he got laid.

On the same tip, Jon, I can't tell from the picture, but is your roommate, uh, short?

me with a black girl from the bronx that i met in tokyo. she lives there for a year, making money by selling dj clue mixtapes, pornos with black women who like anal sex, and also doing voiceovers for video games. she liked it, but had no japanese friends, mostly because she thought that even though they would buy hiphop stuff from her, that really they were all scared of her. i think she ended up hating it ultimately, but that was a whole year. i remember the only black people i saw were west african dudes handing out flyers for hostess bars and as bouncers.

I have this problem when I go to Hong Kong. Although I have black hair, brown eyes, my facial structure isn't that of an oriental person (because I'm only 3/4 Chinese) and people in shops tend to assume I'm foriegn.

He's like 5'7"

I just wrote an article for Tokyo mag Metropolis about how the thing to do in Japan is stay foreign. You can read it here

You are unique in that regard.

"young and good-looking, is okay, especially if you're going to be hanging out at trendy places, in which case it might get you laid a lot."

this isnt only in japan. from what i know.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/3e/World_around_1900.jpg

A Japanese illustration of 1914 depicting the nations as animals - with Russia as a bear smoking a pipe, "支那 China" as a pig consulting a barometer, India an elephant, Britain a carp, Germany a boar, etc.

carpishes

this is a rly nice map

trying to identify some of these animals and the reasons for their assignment

ireland is a carp fin xp

In Japanese Culture The Koi Fish Or Carp Is Thought To Be One Of The Most Vital Fishes. This Is Because It Is Always Going From One Place To The Next And Dosent Stop Swimming, Often Moving The Water.

that makes sense given it was made at the height of the british mercantile and military adventures, feels nice to be compared to such an esteemed animal in japanese culture

the persian cat seems to be engaging in a2m with the turkish tiger, which the shi'ite prelates would doubtless find problematic on many levels

touché xp

this map does indeed rule

is france a cat

hatcat

you'd think russia would be depicted as being meaner after kicking their asses

odd that Africa appears to be the only continent represented by actual people

man what was up w/ the world in 1914

http://i.imgur.com/W3e0G.jpg

in 2103 they will look back at us for having made these

http://i.imgur.com/av2Vg.jpg

that map is siiiiiiiiiiiiick!

the first one, i mean.

you'd think russia would be depicted as being meaner after kicking their asses

?

http://i.imgur.com/4T88a.png

?

― mookieproof, Monday, January 7, 2013 7:05 PM (27 seconds ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I crucially misremembered my world history ;_;

http://i.imgur.com/6nTvW.jpg

http://i.imgur.com/qwKFk.jpg

http://omfg.sakura.ne.jp/sblo_files/japancool/image/World_map1900_0b.jpg

Russia looks the most ominous in all these maps, because the animal or cartoon representing it has to cover more space due to Russia's land area being so much bigger than the others. In terms of power, it lagged far behind England, France, Germany, or Austro-Hungary. It was only a bit more fearsome than Ottoman Turkey.

but otoh it's an octopus

there are a buuunch of these! i ran into that one with GB as a leaping highlander once years ago and could never find it again, amid all the other ones

The octopus is a rather intelligent, but shy and retiring creature irl.

it's always intersting to see which countries are depicted as female

http://i.imgur.com/Nhs7e.png

http://i.imgur.com/IXYYw.png

Damn that's a tiny rabbit.

Love how America is barely there and Aus is non existent, nm the fact we sent the bulk of our viable male population to Europe to be slaughtered. No guys, its FINE.

http://i.imgur.com/eeJhe.jpg

http://i.imgur.com/eFym1.jpg

This piece is a persuasive rebuttal to the idea that the Japanese are particularly xenophobic:

http://noahpinionblog.blogspot.com/2012/11/are-foreigners-perpetual-outsiders-in.html

W.David Marx writes rather well on Japan.

http://neomarxisme.com/wdmwordpress/?page_id=600

This particular article on possible right-wing tendencies in Otaku culture is interesting.

http://neojaponisme.com/2012/05/30/are-japanese-moe-otaku-right-wing/

Sanseito gains big in upper house.

isn't Japans' population declining? dont they need immigrants?

i'm not about to look up their platform but far right parties tend to have a serious forced breeding kink, in which case, nah

and anyway since when has logic ever stood in the way of psycho racist shit

Best part is Kamiya floated a tourist ban in one of his campaign speeches...

(Tourism is the #2 sector in Japan's fragile economy.)

...yet we're not even 100 years beyond Nanking, Marco Polo Bridge, Bataan Death March & several dozen other nationalist historical "incidents".

it was unnerving to see that election was according to the tv news apparently going to swing on the gaikokujin mondai, and that politicians would be asked about "the foreigner," which was a category that could include the wealthy foreign real estate investors in minato ward, who we are told are driving up prices in luxury tower mansions, as well as the students at language schools pulling overtime in family mart, as well as tourists of all sorts (the misbehaving chinese tourist that dominated the news for so many years has been replaced by the misbehaving tourist of any race or ethnic origin, which is progressive), as well as welfare scammers in kawaguchi, as well as japanese-born koreans. but in the end i think it probably doesn't reflect any great political or ideological shift, or at least not a xenophobic groundswell. it's a xenophobic country, yes. there's no party of multiculturalism. so sanseito doesn't really matter. that's my argument.

i mention kawaguchi. kawaguchi came up a lot in the news and on social media in the days before the election. online activists, some of whom turned out to be turkish men in germany, i understand, made the case that the place was becoming a no-go zone. the sanseito voter is excited about kurdish loafers being disciplined and, hopefully, deported. i heard a vigilante squad was being organized. but so my first-hand experiences have been disappointing. everytime i go, i notice one or two two elderly men at the station exits, holding signs protesting the misbehavior of foreigners. it's at a glance marginally more ethnically diverse than the average japanese railway suburb, but not comparable to most central wards. it's not nippori or shin-okubo. it's not even kinshicho. it's not shinjuku. there's a place near nishi-kawaguchi station that i wish i could remember the name of where i've gone for lunch on these trips. guys working construction come in on their lunchbreak. this is my stereotype of the kurds: they all work in construction. i hung around the housing projects and public parks, waiting to see something exciting. i've seen a few idle young men of foreign descent but maybe i've grown too used to them, living in east tokyo. unlike the vigilante squads presumably do, i didn't demand to see their zairyu cards, so i took them to be men enjoying a day off work.

kawaguchi seemed a lot like anywhere else in the eastern suburbs in adachi or saitama, by which i mean that it generally looks as if it hasn't changed in the past forty years. it's poor mostly and then there are the beginnings of commuter suburbs built in the last decade or so, clusters of flat houses. there are a lot of old people. everyone about my age and younger spotted on the street is likely to be chinese (or vietnamese, depending on the station). the eastern suburbs developed much later than the western suburbs. it's floodplain mostly, not highlands, like in the west. the land is cheaper. it's easier to buy something there, if you don't care where in tokyo you live. there's more space in the housing projects. there are more jobs, i think. you can commute into tokyo, anyway. but i think nobody cares that much about the chinese of kawaguchi. there wouldn't be enough passion to organize a vigilante squad for them. they tend to be middle-class, japanese-speaking strivers, who want to buy a house and a car, and send their kids to private schools. they are a statistical nuisance for the online activist, i think, driving up the foreign-born percentage of the area, or whatever. but the perceived criminality of the suburban chinese immigrant is limited to tax fraud. the vietnamese steal pigs and bicycles, the tv news reports, but they blend into the crowd and don't intimidate (the police are bad in my neighborhood for stopping them biking back from nippori, hold up any east asian face, hear if they speak with an accent, then check the bike registration).

if the only future you imagine is one where we kick out the kurds, i don't think you've got enough imagination. it's not a good sign of what is to come, if we're at this point. but it's been at that point for a long time. before the average sanseito fan was born, there were folks nervous about brazilians. where did that get us? did we ever get to the bottom of anti-japanese pachinko bosses diverting profits to their homeland to build a nuclear bomb?

i know it must be cathartic to get worked up online about "japan first." if you are under the age of sixty-five in this country, you came of age during or in the aftermath of a political unraveling and an economic ice age. you would probably be correct in some sense to name "globalists" as an enemy. let me explain away the fact that the "jewish capital" kamiya sohei referenced were simply international corporations and their servants in the japan business federation and the liberal democratic party! and there is some connection between the casualization of labor and the arrival foreign labor. mass tourism is demeaning. it's depressing to hear about labor shortages when you've seen yourself that most jobs won't pay much beyond a bargain basement livable wage. and there isn't a credible political alternative.

the story is fun because it sounds as if something is happening. but young men getting angry on the internet never get their way, at least in this country, so far as i've seen. in truth the immigrants will stop coming but not because anybody adjusted the quota. it's already hard enough to get them over here, mostly because the country is poor. the minato tower mansion price war will continue. the economy can't be reorganized. we'll still have the tourists for a while. nobody will do much to change the basic situation. japan will grow poorer and older and less important. there you go.

the shaxian snacks store i saw in nishi-kawaguchi had a democratic party for the people poster in the window. that's the future.

the old women that gather on garbage day to complain about how the koreans and chinese disrupt their organization (someone has been putting out garbage the night before and on the wrong days) will keep voting for the communist party, which has figured out how to signal xenophobia without crude racial slurs or references to jewish capital.

Interesting missives. What happened to that "Japanese Bernie" that wanted to print a lot of money? Saw a few mentions on social media a few years ago, assumed overeager western leftists getting the story twisted to some extent?

is that yamamoto taro? he's not quite a bernie figure but he did want to print money and he is a left-wing populist. he's a great speaker and good at social media hits but seemed from what i saw very weak in the televised panels. it seems like his moment has passed. unlike when he started reiwa shinsengumi, there is a more clear apparent center-left opposition challenge (or even a more apparent party to cast a protest vote for in sanseito? since some of the reiwa shinsengumi people were that sort of not really ideological protest voter, i think).

(check your LINE)

the shaxian snacks store i saw in nishi-kawaguchi had a democratic party for the people poster in the window. that's the future.

― XxxxxxxXxxxxxxxxXxxxx (dylannn), Monday, July 28, 2025 12:35 AM (ten hours ago)

<3

as always dyl, i love your long and short takes on the plight of taro & hanako-san.

the urawa red diamonds were here in SF yesterday according to my local ears-to-the-street channels ^_____^