EMBEDDED RACISM:
JAPAN'S VISIBLE MINORITIES AND RACIAL DISCRIMINATION
By Debito ARUDOU, Ph.D.
(Lexington Books, a division of Rowman & Littlefield, Hardcover November 2015 / Paperback July 2016)
EXTENDED SUMMARY:
“We accept that you’re a Japanese citizen. But you don’t LOOK Japanese. So we refuse you service.”
Despite domestic constitutional provisions and international treaty promises, Japan has no law against racial discrimination. Consequently, businesses around Japan display “Japanese Only” signs, denying entry to all “foreigners” on sight. Employers and landlords routinely refuse jobs and apartments to foreign applicants. Japanese police racially profile “foreign-looking” bystanders for invasive questioning on the street. Legislators, administrators, and pundits portray foreigners as a national security threat and call for their segregation and expulsion. Public rallies advocate the disenfranchisement – even killing – of foreign residents born and living in Japan for generations. Nevertheless, Japan’s government and media claim there is no discrimination by race in Japan, therefore no laws are necessary.
How does Japan resolve the cognitive dissonance of racial discrimination being unconstitutional yet not illegal? Embedded Racism carefully untangles Japanese society’s complex narrative on race by analyzing two mutually-supportive levels of national identity maintenance. Starting with case studies of hundreds of individual “Japanese Only” businesses, Embedded Racism carefully analyses the construction of Japanese identity through legal structures, statute enforcement, public policy, and media messages. It reveals how the concept of a “Japanese” has been racialized to the point where one must look “Japanese” to be treated as one.
This augurs ill for Japan’s future. With Japan’s low birthrate, aging society, and decreasing population, one hope for Japan’s revitalization, after more than two “lost decades” of economic stagnation, is immigration. However, if people (including Japanese citizens) face phenotypical barriers to integration and acceptance, then Japan will not be able to reverse its demographic decline by creating “new Japanese”. Thus, the systemic treatment of what the author calls Japan’s “Visible Minorities” is the “canary in the coal mine” for Japan’s future economic vitality and solvency.
Summary of the book in The Japan Times, "Tackle embedded racism before it chokes Japan", November 1, 2015.
"Recommended Reading" -- Dr. Jeff Kingston, Director of Asian Studies, Temple University Japan, writing in The Japan Times, December 19, 2015.
- In an anti-globalist era of Trump and ‘Brexit’ there will be many who argue that Japan is right to severely restrict immigration and preserve as much as possible that is unique about its national character. If those who do not ‘look Japanese’ have to suffer some discrimination, then that is just the price that has to be paid. There are also many who believe that the best antidote to racism is to have a nation state where as few people as possible look out of place. Arudou’s reply to this point of view, which acts simultaneously as a challenge to Japan’s leaders, is that if this national narrative is allowed to prevail, it will not only condemn Japan’s aging population to an ever-worsening demographic crisis, it will also have a ‘suffocating and self-strangulating’ effect on society (p. 303). There are important academic contributions to the study of racism in Japan in this book, but it is as a must-read text on the crisis facing the shrinking Japanese population and its leaders that it really leaves its mark. Embedded Racism is highly recommended reading to anyone—whether they self-identify as Japanese or foreign or both—who is interested in Japan’s future. (Dr. Robert Aspinall, Social Science Journal Japan, July 15, 2017. read more)
- [Embedded Racism] is a brave critique of Japanese society and its failure to look outward in its demographic and economic development. The book will, no doubt, add to a lively discussion already afoot in Japanese studies, critical race studies, and critical mixed race studies of racism in Japan. [...] The strongest part of the book, in my view, is chapter 5, which illustrates how "Japaneseness" is enforced through legal and extralegal means. The examples of visa regimes and even exclusion from sports and other contests through educational institutions show how everyday racism leaks into larger organizational practices, often without challenge. [...] The book is clearly written and seems to be aimed primarily at undergraduate students, as it makes an important contribution for those wishing to understand racism in Japan better, and it compiles interesting documentary legal data about the history of cases of discrimination in Japan. The book would easily suit courses that address global conceptions of race and ethnicity and how these are changing in Japan at both the micro and macro levels because of globalization.
(Dr. Rebecca Chiyoko King-O’Riain, Sociology of Race and Ethnicity, an imprint of the American Sociological Association, August 14, 2017. read more) - Arudou’s book is a timely and important contribution to social and scholarly debates about racial discrimination in Japan... (Pacific Affairs journal) (read full review)
- This book, though, is more than a narrative of instances of discrimination and campaigns for redress. The author also seeks to explore the roots of the problem, which he locates in the legal apparatus of nationality, the workings of the court system, the lack of serious official mechanisms to combat discrimination, and stereotypes perpetuated by the mass media.... This book is an important addition to the literature on problems of citizenship and minorities in Japan, particularly because it highlights the distinctive problems of visible minorities, rather than focusing on the large ‘invisible minorities’ (Zainichi Koreans and Chinese, etc.) who have been the subject of much existing research.... This is an important, courageous and challenging book, and it casts a sharp light on problems which are often ignored or veiled, but which have profound consequences for the present and future of Japanese society. (Dr. Tessa Morris-Suzuki, Australian National University; Japanese Studies journal) (read full review)
- Debito Arudou demonstrates that racism is pervasive in Japan and that many individuals and institutions deny this reality. He also shows that racism augurs ill for a society that will shrink for decades to come unless it changes how it treats visible minorities. People who care about the future of Japan need to engage with this pellucid and provocative account of one of the country’s most urgent but neglected problems. (Dr. David T. Johnson, University of Hawaii)
- In this important and insightful book, and based on a long personal experience, Debito Arudou offers a sophisticated critical analysis of the way visible minorities are treated in contemporary Japan. As immigration of work seekers to wealthy countries is on the rise, the issues treated here have wider relevance not only to the conduct and future of the Japanese society, but also to many other societies in the West and beyond. Highly recommended! (Dr. Rotem Kowner, University of Haifa)
- Hats off to Arudou for breaking once and for all the Silence Barrier that has permitted Japan’s profound racial discrimination to purr along undisturbed well into the 21st century. Exposing at long last the definitional acrobatics of Japanese and foreign Japan Studies experts—who have argued that since there is nothing we could call racist attitudes in Japan it follows that there can be no systemic racial discrimination either—Arudou lays out voluminous evidence to the contrary showing how Japan actually operates in its laws, public policy, media messages, and social ordering. (Dr. Ivan P. Hall, author of Bamboozled: How America Loses the Intellectual Game with Japan and its Implications for Our Future in Asia)
- From the immigration crisis in Europe to the growing tensions around racism and law enforcement in the United States, discussion of institutionalized racism, exclusionary rhetoric in the media, and legal barriers to equality seems essential now more than ever. In his most recent book […] cultural critic, activist, and scholar Debito Arudou attempts to spark just such a discussion. A critical analysis of Japan’s treatment of visible minorities (people living in japan who do not display phenotypical Japanese traits) and the legal, political, and social mechanisms that perpetuate the exclusion of such minorities from various aspects of Japanese society, Embedded Racism is extremely well timed. Arguing that racism operating through various institutions in Japan is akin to experiences of racism in the United States, Europe, and elsewhere, Arudou’s carefully constructed work attempts to debunk the dominant narrative of Japanese exceptionalism, which he claims provides an escape from accountability to the rest of the world. Describing how structural racism behind institutional, legal, social, and media narratives influences the degree to which “outsiders” are constructed and consequently excluded from essential social and legal protections, Embedded Racism is an important contribution to the fields of geography, cultural, and area studies... (Japan Studies Association of Canada (JSAC) Newsletter, Fall 2016) (read full review)
This book is the product of nearly thirty years of researching and living in Japan – from around the time I first visited in 1986 to the present day. I have always been intrigued by how some normalized images of Japan did not square with what I was experiencing in everyday life. Despite being friendly and hospitable to guests, very progressive in unexpected ways, and open enough to outside things to co-opt them (even the music for Japan’s national anthem was written by a foreigner), Japan has a palpable undercurrent of exclusionism. It is both subtle (e.g., ideas and proposals dismissed due to their “lack of precedent”) and overt (e.g., “No Foreigners Allowed” signs – the subject of my related book “Japanese Only”: The Otaru Hot Springs Case and Racial Discrimination in Japan). As I stayed longer, became fluent in Japanese, and felt acculturated and comfortable in Japanese society (to the point of taking Japanese citizenship and giving up my American), I saw the exclusionism more and more – and wanted to understand it.
As a social scientist, I like figuring out why societies behave in patterns, i.e., “why people generally do this and not that”. I eventually arrived at answers that transcended the tautological “Japanese do this because they are Japanese”, i.e. something “cultural”. That was important to me. I never liked “culture” as an explanation, since a) “culture” is hard to define, and eclipses individual choice and foible, b) it is often a “black box” that encages researcher curiosity, and c) I assume that people anywhere are generally rational: they do things because those things are in their own best interests. I do not think people are unthinking “prisoners of culture”. In most cases there is a system – a collection of logics and incentives – that occasions behavior, in this research one that encourages people to behave inclusively or exclusively. Even if those belief systems initially made no sense to me, they made sense to someone. My quest in this book was to find out how they made sense, and to quantify how they were underpinned by rules, customs, mores, and procedures.
Exclusionism in Japan (especially that of the racialized ilk) has been one big puzzle, taking me decades to deconstruct, and then to reconstruct as a coherent picture of why a society as kind as Japan’s can be so cold and unsympathetic towards people perceived as outsiders. One conclusion I would like readers to internalize from this book is that Japan should not be treated as “special” – again, that “Japanese do this because they are Japanese” thing. Succumbing to that narrative invites all sorts of exceptionalism that is ungrounded – and it causes enormous cognitive dissonance when Japan is called upon to observe (but, as we shall see in this book, officially claims exception from) the international standards of human rights under the international treaties it signed. This is not just a matter of normative principle. As I argue in the last chapter, Japan’s racialized nation-state membership processes are so exclusionary that they are undermining the very fabric of Japanese society: Japan is strangling itself demographically on its Embedded Racism.
In sum, Japan is no exception, especially to the world’s racialization processes, and it deserves similar critique for racism. I believe that Japanese society behaves like any other – it just does it with an internal logic that is “special” and “unique” in ways that all societies are special and unique. This book seeks to unspool the internal logic that justifies and embeds racism. I hope you find its arguments compelling.
Table of Contents:
Part One: The Context of Racism in Japan
Chapter One: Racial Discrimination in Japan: Contextualizing the Issue
Chapter Two: How Racism 'Works' in Japan
Part Two: “Japanese Only”: Examples of Racial Discrimination
Chapter Three: Case Studies of “Japanese Only” Exclusionary Businesses
Part Three: The Construction of Japan’s Embedded Racism
Chapter Four: Legal Constructions of 'Japaneseness'
Chapter Five: How 'Japaneseness' is Enforced through Laws
Chapter Six: A 'Chinaman’s Chance' in Japanese Court
Chapter Seven: From Foreign Fetishization to Fear in the Japanese Media
Part Four: Challenges to Japan’s Exclusionary Narratives
Chapter Eight: Maintaining the Binary despite Domestic and International Pressure
Part Five: Discussion and Conclusions
Chapter Nine: Putting the Concept of 'Embedded Racism' to Work
Chapter Ten: 'So What?' Why Japan’s 'Embedded Racism' Matters: Japan’s Bleak Future
Appendix One: Sakanaka’s "Big Japan” vs. “Small Japan”
Appendix Two: This Research’s Debt to Critical Race Theory
Glossary, Bibliography, Index
Hardcover, November 2015 (North America, Latin America, Australia, and Japan), January 2016 (UK, Europe, rest of Asia, South America, and Africa), 404 pages, $110 list price (discounted to $70.00 from publisher direct; see below).
NEW! Paperback version July 2016, $49.99 (=>discounted to $34.99 with promo code LEX30AUTH16 directly from publisher) in time for Fall Semester textbooks.
Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-4985-1390-6
eBook ISBN: 978-1-4985-1391-3
Paperback ISBN 978-1-4985-1392-0
Subjects: Social Science / Discrimination & Race Relations, Social Science / Ethnic Studies / General, Social Science / Minority Studies, Social Science / Sociology / General
Preview and purchase your copy:
- Professors: Obtain an inspection copy and/or ebook from publisher at https://rowman.com/Page/Professors.
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