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.
