LogFAQs > #930407208

Alright I live in Japan and it's just different and people massively misunderstand it. First of all you don't see violent, fearing for my life racism like you do in the US. If you want to find fatal hate crimes you basically have to go to pre-WWII Japan. You also aren't going to run into people yelling racial slurs at you in public. In general Japan is way safer than the US and I laugh when I run into old Seattle friends and they tell me shit about how they would fear for their safety because of Japan stereotypes. In Seattle I had shootings outside my apartment multiple times, I got robbed, multiple instances of violence breaking out on public transit, and Seattle is one of the safer big cities in the US.

Alright so what kind of racism does exist in Japan? Well it's primarily a cultural xenophobia actually, even if you were a Japanese-American, or the full on Japanese Brazilians that aren't too rare here, you won't be real Japanese to most people. It's 100% cultural, not ethnic. You had to be raised in Japan to be real Japanese. A half Japanese half-anything else person raised here will be seen as more Japanese by most people than a 100% Japanese person raised elsewhere. And almost all the discrimination you will encounter will be based on that. "We don't rent to foreigners" is the number one most common thing you encounter here. It's 100% based on stereotypes of bad foreigners who don't understand or want to conform to Japanese culture. They really don't care what race you are, they just don't want to try to accommodate you. Any other no-foreigners establishment is also likely the same. I find most places here will become much friendlier to me once they realize I speak Japanese well.

Now the final thing to mention is there is a small group of ultra-far right people that are loud and hated by most Japanese (counter-protestors always outnumber them). These people are legit racist. They hate me for being not Japanese, they want me out of the country, they drive vans around blaring propaganda asking people to assist in removing all foreigners from Japan. They want Imperial Japan back. Basically neo-nazis. However they're mainly old, viewed negatively by the vast majority of Japan, and linked to organized crime more often than not. They're not really a serious threat, but if you understand Japanese the shit you see and hear from them can be frightening because they use violent language that is normally relatively rare.

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