Meanwhile Japanese nationalists believe that Korea was a backward country modernised and civilised by Japanese imperial rule, and they regard Koreans are stubbornly, wilfully ungrateful for the supposed benefits of colonisation.
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I will say this much: There really are a lot of people in Japan who have “English phobia” and would rather have a root canal without anesthetic than be in a situation where they have to speak English. (The assumption that all foreigners speak English is a bit problematic in itself, and the assumption that foreigners don’t speak Japanese is moreso.) I think that some (not all) of the cold treatment that foreigners receive in Japan is just from people who are not confident in their language skills and don’t want to be embarrassed.
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Maybe, but you know forcing Korean women into sexual slavery and then pretend like it’s NBD doesn’t help much. Koreans are just as capable of being able to make judgements about their relationship to others as anyone else. They’re not just puppets being manipulated by politicians.
Neither does Japan, since they keep downplaying war crimes in Korea.
Further more, anti-Korean sentiment in Japan is not unknown…
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This may be common knowledge, but I only learned it recently: most onsens do not allow you to bathe if you have tattoos. They’re associated with the yakuza. Tattoos are not at all common in Japan for that reason. This negative view will probably change over time, but for now, it’s a cultural difference that’s worth being aware of when visiting Japan.
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So do Japanese, and I think that most people here are well aware of what the country did in the war and feel bad about it. At the same time, very few people who are alive now were involved in that in any way, and younger Japanese in particular don’t feel that it is their fault. I do not believe that the downplaying of the war crimes actually represents the majority opinion of the Japanese people, though it unfortunately is prominent among a very powerful clique within the ruling Liberal Democratic Party.
As for anti-Korean sentiment in Japan and anti-Japanese sentiment in Korea, there are loads of articles on the subject from both countries, and if you read actual Korean and Japanese newspapers, it is easy to see the animosity in how the two countries describe each other. But the Japanese do not do marches in front of embassies or boycotts or post massive ads in the New York Times to shame the other country, while Korea does do all of those things and more, and that is the main reason why Japanese people do not like Koreans. Japanese people actually did like Koreans very much just 10 or so years ago, when Korean pop culture was very popular in Japan. This was before the hardline government in Korea started a campaign of Japan-bashing, which got so bad that the United States tried to intervene and tell Korea to tone it down a bit because it was putting the alliance against a rising China in danger.
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Yeah, he knew that going in, and tried to keep most of them covered, so most of the poor attitudes he experienced were probably race based. Though he said overall everyone was very nice. He also knows enough Japanese to converse and that probably helped some.
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While I was listening, I wouldn’t been surprised to hear references to Chicago along with the “Why don’t you solve all your own community’scountry’s issues before complaining about what we’re doing?” Absolutely from the same tired playbook. Meanwhile, I’m hoping folks are still working to eradicate situations and products like the ones referenced here:
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White people have been known to rank each other too. Irish, Italians and Jewish immigrants were looked down on in USA, and in Europe people have been fighting and stereotyping each others for ages. It’s only natural that you lump together people far away that you rarely meet.
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Yeah, that is true. “White” has often had a hierarchy, but it is definitely less of an issue in America today.
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Yes. Just google the Japanese version of the Pokemon “Jynx”.
YIKES!
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Race is a social construction, and in that sense is not ‘real,’ but it is a social construction that absolutely exists and has an impact on people’s lives, and in that sense is very, very real, and to pretend otherwise is to participate in a willful ignorance that allows racism to fester.
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Incidentally: if you are approached by the police in Japan, make sure to have your passport with visa stamps (or your residency card if residing) on your person at all times, as it is illegal not to and you can be fined for this. The police can search your bag and perform a urine test to check for drugs, but seriously, do NOT have drugs on you or in you in Japan. It is also illegal to have knives that are more than like 2 or 3 inches in length on your person unless you have a legitimate reason (such as you just bought it at a store and are taking it home).
The police cannot force you to go to the station without placing you under arrest, so if they ask you go go somewhere, ask if you are being placed under arrest by saying “watashi, taiho sarete imasuka?” (the “u” in “imasuka” is very short and hardly verbalized, but it’s there; the “te” is not a magic “e” and is pronounced like “tay”). If the answer is no, stand your ground and refuse to go and they will usually give up. Whether you are the suspect of a crime or the victim, you will be asked to handwrite a statement of what happened in Japanese and this will serve as the basis for a lot, so make sure that you know what it means and refuse to sign otherwise.
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I don’t know about the justifications but the fact that I have to ask people if they found it difficult to deal with traveling in Japan due to their race to gauge whether it’s worth considering as a vacation destination in some hypothetical post-pandemic fantasy kind of puts me off the idea of a trip there at least a little. And if other people feel the same way about any place they may have reason to visit, I think that’s fair.
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So… Japanese people harbor no bigotry, and it’s all the fault of other peoples… am I getting that correctly?
And that’s not really how the history works. The past isn’t even dead, as Faulkner said. These issues are very much alive and a part of relations between China, Japan, and Korea. Japan plays a role and is not just being victimized by their neighbors, as you seem to be suggesting. Anti-foreigner bias, especially aimed at other ethnicities in Asia is a real problem in Japan, and brushing it aside because it’s not American style anti-Black racism isn’t a great idea, because much like ignoring prejudice only allows it to fester and rot a society from the inside out.
But whatever.
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Surely it matters who “you” are, or appear to be?
Or are you now going to continue in your explain-away vein by claiming also that there’s no ethnoracial profiling by Japanese police?
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No, I am just explaining what your rights are during an encounter with police.
As I mentioned before, racial profiling is a real thing in Japan, especially for people from South Asia.
ETA: Please see quote from above.
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No, I am saying that the relationship between Japan, South Korea and China is extremely complicated and that, though the history of Japanese occupation in the first half of the 20th century is a big aspect of that, it is not the whole story. The relationship between Russia and Germany is also very complicated, and they were also involved in a war with one another at the same time; however, it would be incorrect to say that the entirety of the complicated relationship between these two countries stems from what happened in the war. And indeed, if Russia were to demand compensation from Germany in this day and age, I very much doubt that many people would take it very seriously.
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Racism is certainly real, but the races are just made up. Note that I replied to a comment that claimed that all Asians are the same race and that the Japanese are wrong in dividing them further. That’s claming that these social constructions have an objectiv basis in facts.
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