Racism in Japan: A Long and Proud Tradition

Ah, c'mon, Momus, Pizza is good.

Back to the question, can we agree that statements branding entire nations of people 'racist' are themselves racist? How about statements that you hate a whole race of intellectuals? My remarks against the west were, on the other hand, anti-imperialist and a tad foodist.

Racism in Japan ain't much of a long and proud tradition: the most overtly racist opinions voiced in Japanese culture tend to be derived from Western thought during certain periods where ideas from Europe and the US were being taken up most assiduously by the Japanese. They tend to be a hangover from what you could call Western cultural imperialism - racial theories from the late/nineteenth/early twentieth century, for example, which saw white people as superior, black people as inferior, and asians therefore as somewhere in the middle. Kipling's problem with the Japanese was that 'one really never knew whether they were natives or sahibs': the Japanese didn't know either, and they essentially demoted themselves to the position of a second-class race for a great many years (just as their intellectuals had considered the Japanese a second-class people when compared to the classical Confucianist Chinese up until the early nineteenth century). Or the use of rangaku ('Dutch learning') in the seventeenth to eighteenth centuries, valued for its greater understanding of, say, anatomy or agricultural method, and the fairly abysmal understanding of human cultures that came with it taken as equally valid.

Ian Buruma's written some interesting things on Japanese attitudes to Jews: since most of the Japanese writers who repeated Western (pre-nineteen-thirties) ideas about Judaism and the 'Jewish race' had never met a Jew, they had little opportunity to compare their received ideas with reality.

Japanese racism against Koreans and Chinese, meanwhile, only became a cultural factor in the last eighteenth century, while being balanced against pan-Asianism among both intellectuals and government, and reached its heights very late, in maybe the thirties - the Yon-sama boom is not going to make it go away, but is at least a good sign. And attitudes towards the Ainu and Okinawans seem to be changing from the previous position of 'adapt to 'Japaneseness' or be ignored', thankfully.

Japan suffers from the image of itself as a homogenous society: Nihonjinron, writing about 'Japaneseness', tends to make a sweeping generalisation about What The Japanese Are Like (including spurious connections to a false tradition, eg claiming that the bonuses-by-time-spent-in-company 'lifetime employment' system which is rather dying out now is part of the great familial structure of all Japanese relations rather than something invented during the '50s boom to keep workers with company-specific training from being lured away by better pay), invent a false binary, and attribute that to the rest of the world. I don't know whether that sort of national chauvinism counts as racism, but. It exists.

This is not an intellectual theory, this is a social and practical reality. A Japanese friend of mine, living in London, told a friend of hers about a 'gaijin' she had met the other day, who happened to be a Brit. Nothing special you may say - but that is no different from a Frenchman, say, living in Tokyo, and referring to a Japanese as a 'foreigner' in the same way they might of a Swede or a German, and even that is assuming they used such an arbitrary generalising word as 'foreigner' for 'those-who-aren't-us'. And I for one have no truck with over-sympathetic intellectualising over why that may be, ie: oh, their values are different and their one-ness is what makes them so special blahdiblah.

Equally, I for one have had several first-hand experiences of how difficult it is to break the barriers of Japanese stubborn-ness as to 'them and us', though I will admit that it can have its advantages at times, if you are willing to play the foreign fool.

Photos of places which refuse non-Japanese in Japan. This type of discrimination is legal in Japan.

Personally, I don't consciously experience racism in Japan because I'm either mistaken for being Japanese or I receive positive discrimination for being a Western foreigner. But I am quite conscious of the privilege I enjoy when mistaken for being Japanese: I don't experience half the hassle that hakujins (whites) encounter, and I'm sure I must have it ten times better than gaijins with dark skin.

On a tangent, I don't think Momus ever replied to my criticism of his "morality of high-density living" praise -- that he wouldn't say that living in crowded urban areas is great if he had to take insanely packed cattle cars (known as rapid commuter trains) every goddamn weekday during rush-hour(s) in Tokyo.

Nick Currie's article in praise of Japan's (positive orientalism?) was re-published on a different arm of Metropolis Magazine. The usual discussion on JapanToday forums is often tiresome, but I think the first 25 or so posts in response to Currie's article were OTFM:

http://www.japantoday.com/e/?content=comment&id=712&display=all

The Japan Today article irritates because, for one thing, the "Europe says integrate and lose original culture; Japan respects the Otherness of the Other" claim is utter bollocks. Many Japanese may enjoy the otherness of the other, but if you wish to be a Japanese citizen you have to integrate, an integration, to use Momus' phrasing, "verging on compulsory assimilation". I'm pretty sure there's no way you can hold dual citizenship in Japan (a friend of mine is currently trying to find ways around it). A lot of third-generation Korean-Japanese, resident in Japan as their families have been, haven't got Japanese citizenship or the rights that come with it, because that means giving up on being Korean.

I just did. I was actually discussing some of these cases with the academic who invited me to Hokkaido, Lehan, yesterday. I see the court case against the gaijin-barring onsens as a good example why gaijin should be banned from Japan. The guy who mounted the case is a foreigner who changed his name to a Japanese-sounding name and gets furious when people relate to him as a foreigner. Yet his litigiousness is very un-Japanese. It's also pretty ineffective. The court case resulted, as I understand it, in judges acknowledging that onsens shouldn't discriminate, but saying that they couldn't force local law-makers to enforce any rules. Luckily a few of the 'racist sentos' have relented of their own accord.

I actually bathe in sentos a lot and have never been refused anywhere. Here in Hokkaido Russian sailors are known as trouble-makers, but I'm sure I'll never see a Japanese establishment of any kind with bouncers who spray mace in an unruly customer's face, as I've seen happen in Paris. I also seem to remember my anti-censorship arguments on ILX being countered with the metaphor that ILX is like a pub or club, and has the right to bar entry, demand a certain dress code, etc etc. Not that I agreed with that, mind you, but I find it interesting that people habitually defend exclusionary practises like that at home, but not abroad.

On the high density living thing, I can tell you that the early/late cattle car situation in Tokyo is paradise compared with this small Hokkaido town I'm living in, where dismal public transport infrastructure (no underground, poor bus service) means that everyone is forced to buy a car, the roads are overcrowded, pavements hardly exist, and there's a constant battle, in icy and snowy conditions, between pedestrians and cars for the very limited space on the narrow roads. The density is lower here, which means the town is spread out and everything is drive in. Most unusual for Japan, and most unpleasant... and immoral.

Okay, I'll read those comments after my article now. The gaijin readers of Metropolis are a bunch of mad rabid dogs, though. I don't expect much sense from them.

Maybe you should move.

Non-Japanese is not a skin colour.

I find Japanese cultural particularity extremely admirable. Watching TV this evening, for instance, I didn't see a single non-Japanese face all evening. I saw Japaneseness being 'performed' for a Japanese audience in the form of travelogues and internal tourism puffs -- basically one programme after another in which Japanese couples and families went to visit hot springs, ride skidoos, admire ice sculptures, and, of course, sample Japanese cuisine, exclaiming 'oishi!'

The reason I find this remarkable and admirable is that in the country I was born and brought up in, the TV mostly showed images of another country, the US. What's more, it mostly showed situations of crime and conflict rather than the sensuality and beauty on display in a typical evening's viewing in Japan. If I imagine a Scotland in which Scots were as in love with being Scottish as Japanese are in love with being Japanese, I must say I find it a lovely picture.

And as far as I can tell from his writings, he generally only gets furious when people relate to him as a foreigner when it shows up the prejudice it reveals, and the obvious hypocrisy of it.

Are you suggesting he (a Japanese citizen, right?) should integrate? Behave more 'Japanese', so he'll get on better? Maybe by mounting that court case he's giving them the chance to appreciate his otherness.

(I'm not very fond of Debito, myself, though I do like how he describes himself as 'Tom Cruise-ish'. I bet he just keeps meeting Japanese who tell him he looks like Tom Cruise! so it must be true!)

Gee, how admirable. If you refuse to acknowledge this as racism you have to at least admit that you're advocating a level of nationalism that you wouldn't tolerate from say, the US.

Actually, while Japan in general is very much ignoring American culture at present, a sizeable minority of Japanese are currently very interested in black (and only black) American culture. Hip hop is huge here just now. I'm living in a house belonging to a Japanese couple currently in Okinawa. All the records and videos in their house are about or by black Americans. Okinawa happens to be the place in Japan where they'll find the most 'authentic' black American culture. Perhaps that's why they're there.

the "taishuu" of Russian Sailors could possibly be quite extraordinary to people who are not used to BO......

Well, it's all relative. But, having travelled a lot in Asia, I'm very struck by how it's only in Japan that western culture has been kept at bay. And I think that's because Japan is narcissistic, but also because it's rich and proud. Poor people have to live with other people's taste, but the rich can actually sit down with an architect and an interior designer and get what they want, discover who they really are.

Personally, I'm not so eager to write off racism/cultural elitism in the US, Japan, or anywhere else. And I'm not sure if I would say that the insular cultural myopia of Japan and the US is totally a bad thing - MOST cultures around the world are like this, wouldn't you say? It seems sort of ridiculous to demand cultures to be tremendously interested in bits of foreign culture that aren't relevant to their daily lives. I would say that Americans are about as interested in foreign cultures as the Japanese are - we pick and choose and fetishize and integrate it into our own context. Japanese kids getting into "authentic black hip hop" isn't tremendously different from all the 20something white girls that I know who go nuts for Japanese import fill-in-the-blank.

I don't think most Americans expect the Japanese to be racist, and I get the sense that that is what motivated the first post in this thread.

This I agree with. I think this is also key to why a lot Americans relate to Japanese culture but not so much other poorer Asian nations.

Okay, yeah, but I'm sure that Strom Thurmond would've said the same thing about segregation in the 50s.

There's a lot of reasons for different types of racism in the US that really don't have all that much to do with the policy of the US government post-WWII. Your cultural imperialism thing seems kinda flimsy - "if you have money and power, you can't be a bastard, but if you're smaller/poorer, then by all means engage in morally dubious behavior..."

a) A syllogism
b) Foolish

That statement itself isn't a syllogism; I used that statement to identify a particular set of specious logic, one definition of syllogism. Quit using strawman args and discussions to distract from criticism of your ideas.

Why do I consider your reasoning flawed and foolish? Please see Dan Perry's postings: You assume that the reason one is afeared to be in a certain area must be because of the race of the occupants of that area when the actual reason one is afeared to be in an area may be independent of race of the area's occupants. You are using faulty inductive logic, applying a particular reasoning (your own racist fear of a neighborhood) to the general (if you're racist and but don't dare to admit it, then everyone else is also racist but afraid to admit it).

you have the choice to enjoy it or hate it.

Err...like you have the CHOICE to enjoy a sound beating when mugged? Just because some people enjoy being whipped and beaten doesn't make it a CHOICE for me to enjoy or hate it. Howsabout I throw down your frail little body and stomp on your genitals in three inch stilletto heels (this is a fetish I have encountered reviewing many videos featuring trampling and cbt -- cock and ball torture)? You can choose to enjoy or hate that, too. Too ridiculous! I think your idea that being crushed in a train is a *choice* one can make between enjoyment and hatred is most QED of your nonsense.

I really must give it a rest. I find no value in engaging in a discussion with Momus with the expectation that it be reasonable.

no, you have the choice to run away from a group of kids whose racial makeup is different than yours because you think you might get mugged.

at least some forms of hypocritism are interesting. Momus, however, is so boring and tired.

Asian cultures like... NORTH KOREA!!! OMG WTF PWNED

If I may, I would like to clarify my position further. I was quite wrong to enjoy, in the past, the sensation of losing myself in the 'human jam' of a Japanese subway train. To say that high density situations are socially virtuous even when people probably only put up with them because they have to is pretty patronising. Clearly everyone in the world, given adequate material means, would spread out into the largest available space, and make it private space if at all possible. Utopia is a sort of high-security fenced sprawl bisected by busy roads in which each car carries one tubby, contented individual burning fossil fuel and emitting uncontrolled greenhouse gases as well as a dollop of carbon monoxide for the few remaining pedestrians to inhale.

Uh, this is kind of OTM isn't it?!?

Ladies, I have something to say about sexism too! I've been concealing this for some time, but it's no secret, many of you know it already. Japan is an incredibly sexist society. We know this because Japanese women are these tiny tiny ornaments, really submissive and completely without power, that Japanese men just kind of keep on their mantelpieces (if they have mantelpieces in Japan, I'm sure they must, though probably at a much lower level than ours) like teeny teeny decorative Christmas tree angels (they love Christmas in Japan) or porcelain figures of Marie Antoinette. Japanese women have probably been bred that down through centuries of repugnant sexism, but now we've got Dolly The Sheep we can clone 'em some big feisty ones.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/olmedia/1195000/images/_1195266_hemphill300.jpg

i was speaking to the drummer from trans am, whose parents lived through the nightmarish upheavals of 1970s argentina. apparently one of their friends was arrested by the militia during a street-to-street search because his bookcase contained a volume with the title 'la revolution de cubisme'. the very word 'revolution' raised nasty suspicions as to his good character.

nothing i've posted to this thread has been remotely relevant, has it?

I don't think that definition of the Western ideal of freedom is very accurate. The ideal of freedom has more to do with the basic rights to freedom of speech, religion, association, and so on. The idea is basically that as long as you're not harming others, you should be able to live your life the way that you want to, without undue interference from government or other people. This also means that employers, landlords, etc. have a long list of criteria that they are not supposed to use to discriminate against potential employees, tenants, etc. - including such things as race, sex, sexual orientation, age, religion, nationality and so on. I think it's a "good thing that it's illegal to discriminate on that basis in the US - even though, yes, it will still happen sometimes, at least there is a means of recourse and an establishment of societal disapproval of such behavior.

When you start talking about the "freedom...to be who one inevitably is" - it seems you are in danger of draining freedom of any useful meaning. It's a very Taoist idea of freedom: freedom is fate, strength is weakness, being is nothingness, etc. Perhaps these paradoxical statements contain kernels of deep, metaphysical truth, but it's hard to hold a mundane political discussion using the terms in such an abstract and spiritual way. When we talk about freedom in terms of society, it helps to have a fairly mundane, measurable quality in mind. That measurable quality should correlate with an increase in the number of choices allowed to the individual - not a decrease.

What about the freedom to identify more fully with one's social role, to be who one inevitably is rather than entertain dreams that one can be whatever one likes?

Indeed, what about it?

Not being a Daily Mail reader, I don't often think that I live in a sick society that's atomised, dangerous, dead, unspontaneous, boring, oppressive, and so I don't fetishize or exoticize other cultures to counterweight the kulturpessimismus.

There are lots of bad things about 'the West' where I live, and lots of good things about other cultures. But few of your adjectives really ring true for me.

Where is this coming from? Do you want a medal?

You're the only one who keeps bringing up the racial stereotype of Japanese women, btw, and your hyperbolic rant about it was both non-sequitur and insulting.

Cool... Let me know what's up with the joint.

It's a stupid argument from which we should all adjourn...Is Japan a racist country? Of course it is...Show me a country that doesn't enjoy a bit of Us v. Them whether it be sport, sex or musical credibility...so let's stop discussing the obvious...let's talk about things that really matter...like the fact...FACT I tell you that Japan is overrun with a Paedophilia epidemic...

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hey... i like this

http://metropolis.japantoday.com/tokyo/569/mailbox.asp

Foreign to Me
I feel incredibly disappointed by Momus’ (Nick Currie) article “Staying Foreign” (The Last Word, January 14) for several reasons.

First let me say that Momus is a brilliant songwriter. But his point of view of foreigners retaining their ignorance of the culture they live in is a spit in the face of the many who have lived, adapted and survived in this country.

Momus writes of foreigners, but doesn’t he only mean “white” foreigners? His incredibly racist implications don’t speak for the zainichi Korean born in Japan, who speaks possibly three languages, nor the francophone African, who can’t cash in on the white eikaiwa industry but likes the country regardless. Do these people fit his image?

Momus only represents an Asian fetishist who never has to come to terms with his own ignorance because no matter where he goes an Asian woman will eventually sleep with him. His (mis)use of the term “orientalism” is horrible and only serves to support his unreliable reasoning. Most Asian-Americans at least use “Asian fetishist” in disdain of such a term with racist inclinations already included. I quote: “‘Orientalism’ is only a vice when it denigrates ‘the bad other.’” Really? As an African-American, do I really want to be fetishized? When does it not denigrate me?
The mention of Yasser Arafat remains the most gleaming error. Using Arafat’s example, Momus would mislead us to believe anyone who dreams but never achieves should be more glorified, and that is a lie. Identity is not only struggle or failure but also achievement and resolution.—michelemg (Tokyo)

http://18hz.deid.net/sugarape/res/fountain.jpg

"Do you like foreigners?"
That was a question Annie (my neighbor) had to ask her fifth grade class because she was teaching a lesson on other cultures.

Annie had not written the lesson, the other teacher had. Naturally, Annie was stunned that the teacher had included such a question.

But the worst part is that more than half the class answered NO.

It's not so much the fact that they (we) will have to carry one, but the stated reasons for it. If the prevention of crime and terrorism are the real reason for this, then why don't Japanese citizens also have to carry something similar?

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/asia-pacific/4671687.stm

Japan racism 'deep and profound' says U.N.

In other news, the sky is blue.