I wonder what percentage of these immigrants are ethnically east/southeast Asian, or even ethnically Japanese. I imagine a large portion of the Peruvian and Brazilian immigrants shown in the chart have Japanese ancestry (I believe Japanese ancestry makes immigration from those countries easier -- to the extent that one point there was a black market in being adopted as an adult by Japanese people -- and there is a large, old Japanese emigrant community in both countries).
It's a somewhat crass question. But ethnicity, not just nationality, seems to matter a lot in Japan.
TFA has a figure showing that just over half is China + Korea + Vietnam.
Brazil + Peru are about 11%, it would indeed be interesting to know the breakdown there.
Amused by the line "No party has embraced xenophobia", used here to mean, apparently, that all parties agree on policies which would be sufficient to get you branded as xenophobes in the west. Or rather, to mean that there's no shouting match over the issue.
Can't say about Peru, but the second and third generation Japanese community here in Brazil is massive and stories of some of them going to work/live at Japan are common.
Any anecdata about how open this is to neighbours of non-Japanese descent? For example if there are Japanese schools (are there?) do they admit lots of others, and do such students (or half- or quater-Japanese ones) get treated as insiders? I knew there was a huge community but know very little about it.
Don't know about japanese exclusive schools, Liberdade¹ is the biggest japanese community outside of Japan, but I don't think that there's any restrictions about students or anything like that in the schools of the district, Brazil has an immense amount of diversity, japanese brazilians are mostly treated the same as any other brazilians and are for the most part integrated in our country general culture.
Permanent immigration is still closed off for the vast majority, except for IT workers and the articles quotes companies that hired mostly Chinese/Indian engineers for those positions. Every other career is limited to 5-10 years stay in Japan with restrictions on staying with an employer and difficulties in bringing a spouse and how much that spouse can work once there - it's much more of a temporary thing as described in the article versus paths available to immigrants to the USA.
The employers describe the immigrants in entry level jobs in the same way one hears USA farmers describing migrant farmworkers in comparison to the native population here - harder working and more dependable than natives, the similarity is striking.
> Every other career is limited to 5-10 years stay in Japan with restrictions on staying with an employer and difficulties in bringing a spouse and how much that spouse can work once there - it's much more of a temporary thing as described in the article versus paths available to immigrants to the USA.
I know people in Tokyo with working visas who are architects, waiters, dish washers, cooks, English teachers, academics, programmers, International school teachers, translators, and business people. All have working (not spousal/relative visas) and none of them have a visa tied to an employer. I have never heard of a visa in Japan tied to an employer (and none of my working visas ever were), with exception of the intra-company transfers.
I also think the path to permanent residency is relatively straight forward for all groups. Stay on a working visa 10+ years with no hiccups or long periods of unemployment, then apply. I have known plenty of non-IT workers to get it.
That's weird that the article gets those basic facts wrong because it talks about the abuse of the employer thing and recent reforms for it and the lack of a path for permanent status. I was wondering why some of the people they interviewed wanted to have their spouses move there or invested so much in learning Japanese based on the facts listed in the article. It makes more sense with what you wrote.
Sorry, to clarify: I don't mean to dispute the article. But I think the article is focusing on a specific government trainee program that's been spun up to bring constructions workers for the Olympics.
I just think you were mistaken about the "every other [non-IT] career" part. There is plenty of immigration outside of the discussed trainee program and outside IT, so I just wanted to highlight that. Because otherwise it sounds like Japan has some kind of totally crazy locked down immigration system, but that is really not the case.
I find High Skilled visa to be more useful than a PR. Your parents/Spouse parents can stay with you for longer time ( provided you have a kid less than 7(?) year old)
> But ethnicity, not just nationality, seems to matter a lot in Japan
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.
Every time this pops up, I feel compelled to point out that in the 8 years I've lived in Japan (over a 10 year period), I haven't found this to be true.
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.
Thanks for sharing your thoughts. Never set foot in Japan myself but your overall view falls in line with those of almost every foreigner in Japan I've ever followed. Something I find that's less discussed, probably because I only frequent English speaking sites, is specifically other Asians in Japan and I'm wondering if someone here can shed some light on that. The impression I have from reading random accounts is Koreans and Chinese (perhaps all of Mainland, Taiwan and Hong Kong?) are expected to conduct themselves like any other Japanese and fully integrate, whereas Caucasian gaijin (or any Westernized people as your wife's anecdote seems to imply) are comparatively given more leeway (expected to do things their own way, but as a corollary never thought of as fully Japanese)?
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.
I have a few acquaintances who are from different places in south east Asia. As far as I can tell it's the same for them as for me. I think the main problems happen when you look close enough to ethnic Japanese that you might be Japanese. If you pair that with flawless Japanese language skill, then people will assume you are Japanese. This caused a problem for a friend of mine who was Korean, but spoke Japanese without an accent. Sometimes his acceptance of the culture didn't match the expectations placed on him. But I suppose it's hard to complain -- people treating you exactly as they would treat anybody else.
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.
I'm an Indian of American decent who knows Japanese and this has been my experience as well. My SO looks Japanese, but isn't ethnically Japanese, yet she gets immediately talked to in Japanese whereas I get the guest routine. I don't mind, and a simple answer in Japanese snaps them out of it, but it is tiring. Being brown skinned probably doesn't help.
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.
Interesting. I know I've read accounts by, say, ethnic Koreans claiming that even when raised in Japan the ethnic difference caused native ethnic Japanese to treat them differently.
Maybe I'm unduly influenced by a small number of such anecdotes.
I find it funny that most of Western sentiment about Japan is very boolean: it's either "Japan is a mythical, enchanting land you must visit, great food and lovely people" or "Japan has a rapidly aging population, things are tough, and they are also racist." Why not accept that it's a huge country with 120M people and a multitude of experiences?
I'm a westerner, I lived in Japan for a year. I'd say it's both those things. The racism westerners experience is very different & much better than the 3K's type racism [1] other foreigners are subject to in Japan.
Japan is like any place and has good (eg safety) and bad (eg sexism). if I'm praising Japan on safety that doesn't mean I don't know it's bad parts. It's just I shouldn't have to bring them up if they aren't on topic.
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.
A boolean opinion would be saying whether Japan is "good" or "bad" as a whole. I was commenting specifically on the racism issue. They have amazing technological advancements, but have a major problem as a culture with racism. The racism isn't scattered here and there, it's a societal issue.
> 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.
I think generalizing to a population shouldn't be racist. However, judging a Japanese individual based on expected stereotypes even without the said person showing it should be termed racist
>> Why not accept that it's a huge country with 120M people and a multitude of experiences?
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.
This modern terminology is useful for distilling a vast amount of moral judgement into a single term in order to dismiss an entire class of heterogeneous social structures, some of which are horrible, some of which are fine, into being classified into the set of 'morally evil.'
The whole idea that racism / ethnicism is bad is a very Western stance. In the rest of the world, discrimination based on race and country of origin is pretty normal.
The way that Japanese treat outsiders is so far from the popular Western ideal of what 'racism' means that I'd argue the term barely applies.
'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.
The difference is that in the West we generally do not use ethnicity or race as a criteria to deny people things as official policy. Affirmative action, for example, just makes it more likely for certain people to get picked out of a general qualifying pool, but it doesn't disqualify non-preferred people out of hand.
The problem with not having affirmative action is that disadvantaged groups, even if on a level playing field on paper, have had their wealth actively destroyed while the advantaged groups have accumulated lots of it. The civil rights movement made people equal on paper, but nonwhites still had to deal with the shit hand they were dealt for generations. (And even legally advantaged groups have subgroups that have not done well, like Appalachian whites, but even so they were eligible for things like GI Bill benefits that nonwhites did not.)
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.
Being a foreigner is the issue there, not being a different race or ethnicity. You are just as likely to be denied by a landlord for being a part time worker as well even if you are Japanese.
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.
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.
While I don't doubt there are landlords out there that would deny foreigners an apartment, my experience is that:
- 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.
Takashi Miike is ethnic Korean. Many of his films address issues faced by ethnic Chinese and Koreans in Japan. The Triad Society, Young Thugs and Dead or Alive series, for example. For the most part, they're quite violent.
Though 'xenophobia' is a considerably better term than 'racism', I still don't think the world aptly captures the situation.
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.
It's a somewhat crass question. But ethnicity, not just nationality, seems to matter a lot in Japan.