Japan's Problem With Race

Japan’s treatment of non-black minorities reflects additional deeply ingrained racist tendencies. In 2013, a group of nationalists led protests expressing their hatred of Koreans and threatened to flatten Tokyo’s Koreatown and replace it with a gas chamber. “Go home and die,” some of the demonstrators yelled. Authorities were aware of the threats, but because Japan does not prohibit hate speech, the discriminatory actions continued unabated.

Although cases of extreme racism exist globally, Japan is notable for its lack of dialogue about racism and the absence of meaningful change to protect people against discrimination. Japan sees itself as a homogenous nation. It has one of the least ethnically diverse populations in the world, and the country’s overwhelming homogeneity means that any Japanese citizens who are not 100 percent ethnically Japanese are seen as foreign in their own homeland.

Change will take time. The ingrained insularity and rejection of foreigners have been a part of Japan’s history dating back to at least 1639, when the ruling Tokugawa shogunate cut Japan off from the rest of the world. Though centuries have passed, the ideas of racial superiority and separatism are still deeply influential in the national mindset.

This history reveals itself in the Japanese language as well, where the term for foreigner, gaijin, translates to “outside person,” which allows no possibility of integration for non-Japanese.

Japan’s geography further deters any hope of inclusion, a version of what is dubbed as the “Galápagos effect.” Originally coined in reference to the differences between Japanese cellphones and those used in the Western world, here the term refers to a nation that has been deeply isolated from foreign influence for a considerable amount of time, so much so that it has branched off evolutionarily (hence the name, a nod to Darwin’s travels). Japan, a collection of islands off the coast of mainland Asia, has developed its own values and a national agenda that tends toward the esoteric.