Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2020/03/04/what-do-japanese-people-think.html
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Some Japanese people are xenophobic?!
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White westerner’s don’t have a lock on racism and ignorance. Film at 11.
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Come on people, he said ‘Sorry’ twice! What more do you want?
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Visit rural Japan. This is still a thing for a lot of small hole-in-the-wall shops, especially onsen bathhouses.
Xenophobia is still a thing in rural Japan- though to their credit, much of it is based on fear of non-japanese speaking customers and how to deal with them by frightened owners.
Usually speaking intelligible Japanese removes this problem though not always. I have never had issue in any instance being denied because I spoke Japanese as a foreigner
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I noticed many of them said “it can’t be helped.” Is this a common sentiment in Japan?
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”使用がない” literally, “there’s nothing that can be done”.
common phrase in Japanese, used for all kindsa stuff.
General resignment to things as status quo is common among many Japanese, hard coded into the language in many ways.
Of course this doesn’t apply to everyone in Japan though but there are hundreds of ways of politely saying there’s no way to do something
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Having lived in Japan, my level of surprise on a scale of 1 to 10 is -500. Even in cities: I’ve had friends kicked out of bars for not speaking Japanese.
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Meh, I tend to stay away from places I am not wanted. Anyway, being a New Yorker I can relate to wanting a place that doesn’t serve tourists from flyover country. The whole town has turned into a goddamn Disneyland park. Probably feels great to be able to say: GTFO of my noodle shop, Longshanks! or whatever they call us.
i like how he’s like “sorry”. they treat putting a can in the wrong bin and full blown racism in the same bucket of oh guess i better say sorry and bow?
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Japanese are such cute and polite bigots!
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I’ve never been denied either but I think it might be because I’m too thick to take a hint.
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It seems to me like any place that gets much tourist traffic is going to have this problem. Wisconsin has a long tradition of ambivalence towards tourists from the Chicago area and the Twin Cities.
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Have you ever been an oppressed minority who was actively denied basic services by the dominant ethnicity/culture?
That doesn’t make the Japanese bigots look better. It makes you look worse.
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To be fair, loads of bars and restaurants in Japan are Japanese only. It’s pretty normal. They’ll either be open about it with ‘Japanese Only’ or ‘No Foreigners’ signs, or just have all-Japanese menus and not speak other languages (even if they can, in my experience). It riled me the first time I encountered it, but whatever. I love Japan and I’ll keep going back despite that. I love raw fish and good sake too much not to.
I don’t mind the tourists. They serve a purpose. Who else would happily get taken advantage of with overpriced “sights”, shopping, drinks and food in mid-town. (JK)
The fact is, we’re all hated by locals when we travel.
What I don’t like are people who pretend to be NY’s just because they live there. I could move to Tokyo and would never have the audacity to claim I’m “from there” even after a decade. But NY? People love to claim they’re from NY.
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Goody for our side, and your side too:
I try to forget it. It’s a great place to be from.
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For what its worth the owner of the ramen shop got heavily roasted in Japanese twitter when this first came out a few weeks back. Even some shall we say rather non tolerant netuyos I recognize were roasting this guy based on the fact that neither ethnicity nor nationality have anything to do with the virus.
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Oh, don’t you just know all about all Japanese now, dontcha?
I lived there for 3 years and have a degree in the language and I still don’t pretend to know what every Japanese person is like
I can tell you from personal experience this is not how most Japanese are. Just like not everyone in America is a raging xenophobe.
The people I have met that didn’t want to deal with them were usually along the lines of something bad happened like some frat bro asshole on vacation did something incredibly rude without understanding the culture any and left them with a bad taste in their mouth about foreigners.
I’m not defending the guy running the shop because I think it’s bullshit but it’s usually people who have had unusually bad experiences with foreigners being drunken assholes on trains and things like that from what I’ve personally seen
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Of course, it’s only Westerner’s who are white that are racist. 
