The Racism QuestionIs Japan a racist country, or the Japanese a racist people?
Before tackling that, we have to work out what we mean by the term. I was once in a seminar where the question of whether black people could be racist came up, and the instructor scotched it by defining racism as a form of social control and noting that black people don't control society. Fair enough, but I've always had a few problems with that. Would it mean that President Obama's election opened the door for black racism in the US? Would it mean that if Archie Bunker emigrated to Zimbabwe that he'd cease to be racist? I think he put his finger on a real point there, but only in the act of smearing it over. Racism as the term is generally understood includes both structural elements of a society and personal attitudes of its members.
Now, no society is ever truly monolithic, nor are its citizens uniform, so the questions posed here really can't be answered with a simple "yes" or "no." One of the very few things I liked about '99's
Pearl Harbor was the way it handled the Dorie Miller subplot, especially his scenes with the
Arizona's captain. Nicely showcased the clearly racist USN policy of the day, consigning black sailors automatically to the messboy billet, but distinguishing that from the idea of even higher ranking officers automatically being personally so. There are always myriad wrongs in a society, and even if their toleration perpetuates them, the interpenetration of the personal and the social is hardly "black and white."
A further complicating question with respect to racism is, "against whom?" It wasn't that long ago that being Polish, Italian or Irish-American was pretty darned ethnic. Looking at all the myriad YouTubes out there discussing this question re Japan, the implicit question is usually: "Are the Japanese racist
against gaijin? Frequently this might be more precisely understood as "against Americans," though
gaijin can include anyone from Philipinos to Mongolians to Frenchmen to (theoretically) Martians.
I said earlier that no society is monolithic, and this is certainly true of Japan. Physically it resembles Greece, cut up by islands, bays and mountains, and thus into a number of micro-cultures. Just like Greece it has rarely been truly united in its history, with much of its military history being civil war. Again like Greece, its identity is cut up into a number of competing regional identities. But also like Greece, there is an overarching meta-identity. There is a definite affinity between the words "barbarian" (coming from the perception of non-Greeks making meaningless "bar-bar-bar" noises instead of speech) and
gaijin (外人, literally "outside person"). Japan perceives itself as monolithic and values that perception, though considerable Orwellian "doublethink" is involved. Still, a widely enough held perception becomes a reality of it own, so there is some element of "doublebe" here too.
It all feels a bit quantum . . .
OK. so right off the bat, if we're speaking of
gaijin and using the "means of social control" definition of racism then the Japanese cannot be racist, because by definition
gaijin are not members of their society. They are visitors only, sometimes accorded certain privileges as guests and sometimes under certain restrictions, as are tourists or resident aliens in any country.
But are the Japanese prejudiced? Yes, to a high degree, sometimes favourably and sometimes not. Your classic white
gaijin is seen as very cool in the abstract but a little disconcerting in person. TokyoCooney did a vid about how both of these get you stared at and cautioned against bridling at that. He's right of course, if you object to standing out, head for the airport. But after awhile, even the positive projections grow tiresome. I remember a Brit friend there describing how sick he was of being told that his Japanese was skillful. He said it had gotten to where he had to fight the urge to answer, "As a matter of fact it is, but since all I've said is, 'Excuse me,' how the hell would you know?" The negative stereotypes are also a pain, clearly, but one has to admit that there's enough living up to them that we can't fully escape the guilt.
But that's only the first layer of that onion. I once asked my wife if her mother had had any concerns when she started dating a
gaijin. This was before my falling out with Grandma, by the way. Apparently her answer had been, "He's not black, is he? If not, that's OK." But hey, my own mother would have had a harder time with my dating a black woman than a Japanese. But it does give me a little satisfaction to hear that the kid my son is hanging out with at daycare lately is half black.
Japanese-Americans are another interesting phenomenon. I've been told by more than one Japanese that they find them off-putting because they
look Japanese yet
act gaijin. Some of them at least pick up a weird vibe from this and are left feeling like neither fish nor fowl.
So when looking at it that way, even if we don't allow the Japanese off the charge on a technicality, this falls far short of Apartheid. But lets be a little less Eurocentric for a moment.
My first Japanese girlfriend lived in the US, and worked as JAL ground staff at SFO. One day, she was called down to C&I because the Korean interpreter was unable to talk to a KAL passenger whose Korean passport wasn't accompanied by an appropriate visa. Turned out this guy was a
Zainichi, or Korean Resident of Japan. Third generation, he spoke essentially no Korean and was acculturated Japanese. Under this status he could not get a Japanese passport and hadn't realized that that meant he needed a visa to enter the US. Now, she knew about
Zainichi; indeed, when she heard that several of my first students were named "Arai" she kind of suspiciously asked if they were really Japanese, as that's a fairly common
Zainichi "pass-name." But she'd never met one this intimately before, and in killing the long wait with him learned that his grandparents had been brought to Japan against their will as wartime forced labourers. She was really shaken by this meeting.
To be fair, I should point out that
Zainichi (在日, literally "existing in the sun," i.e. Japan) who legally renounce their Korean nationality do avoid some of the restrictions. Many Japanese thus bat back the charge of exclusion on their part with one of recalcitrance among the
Zainichi. It's a bit like the Irish question, with the English resenting the Irish for having rejected the offer to become second class Englishmen and the Irish countering with charges of cultural genocide. Not all Japanese are comfortable with this, and a few years ago there was a
Zainichi activist going to town halls and asking to register to vote, making the officials turn him down on camera, and this was picked up by Japan's national media. But again, the structural and the personal intermesh in convoluted ways. One of the services of
omiai arranged marriage companies is to do background checks to discern whether applicants have undisclosed
Zainichi heritage . . . or
burakumin (the traditional "untouchable" class of leatherworkers), Ainu or other such pockets of "not quite" that exist in Japanese society.
And this brings us to Japan's record as a colonial overlord. It has long been their contention that the Greater East Asian Co-prosperity Sphere was established in a spirit of liberating their fellow Asians from their European masters, and that the China War was also motivated by bringing order to a country politically fractured and grown decadent.
Now, colonialism is a fundamentally repressive system, in that it removes the right of self-government from a subject people. "White Man's Burden," "Lesser Breeds without the Law," these are fundamentally racist attitudes. Did Japan's
Hakkou Ichiu 八紘一宇vision of a divine Japanese mission to rule the Western Pacific, perhaps one day the world, differ fundamentally from the US's "Manifest Destiny?"
An Observer's Brain topic with many ramifications there, but I'll approach it from the point of view of a Kenyan professor I once knew. He had been a member of Jomo Kenyatta's organization and was jailed by the British for newspaper publishing in its support. But, as he put it, "I'm not defending colonialism, but if you had to endure it, it was better to be a subject of the British; they did at least have a sense of mission and were more paternalistic than exploitative."
Such motivations can't be dismissed out of hand. To this day Taiwan somewhat embraces its experience as a Japanese colony, but it was unique in being administered under a civilian colonial office and has modern political needs to distance its history from that of the PRC. At least one of the Japanese officers in charge of the "Indian National Army" (recruited from PoWs formally of the British Army of India) seems to have seriously cherished their national aspirations. But in the more typical, military administered regions like Korea, Manchukuo, etc the occupation is remembered as far less benevolent. I'm not saying that I can't imagine a Philipino nationalist saying he'd rather have the Japanese in his country than the US . . . but offhand I can't remember hearing of one.
As an aside, it will be interesting to see if China's increasingly assertive presence in the region will cause some of these formerly occupied nations to downplay that history. Time will tell.
While I was there, the news carried stories of Japanese embassies in several countries, notably Korea, China and others with large Chinese minorities, being picketed on the anniversary of the Marco Polo Bridge Incident. My wife made a comment which I couldn't quite follow, so when I asked her if she could say it in English she came up with, "It's because they are low people." I elected not to pursue that beyond, "Well, they do have some reasons."
So, with all that background, where do I personally come down on the question? I've lived in Japan on a working visa, on a spousal visa and I have a son who self-identifies as Japanese, making me nominally a Japanese dad. Each experience is fundamentally different.
As a resident foreigner in Japan you more or less have the status of guest, one which carries a lot of perks in Japanese culture. If you show that you're trying they will bend over backwards for you, and indeed you have to beware of unconsciously taking advantage of them. The role of guest in any culture entails a duty to not impose on the host, and this is particularly true of Japan. While having felt the frustration of their preconceptions, their weirdly rubbery yet unbreakable rules and the occasional sense of being a walking zoo exhibit, I agree that this experience is purely voluntary and those who don't like it should just go home, instead of behaving badly and reinforcing the negative stereotypes on both sides. The perks
far outweigh any discomfort at this level.
Heh heh . . . it can even be fun. I was on a train way out in Saitama, nearly to Gunma, one time, far enough from the big city that
gaijin weren't that common a sight. I happened to look up and catch the eyes of a high school girl across the aisle staring at me intently. This is actually considered pretty rude in Japan . . . the sound effect for it is
jiiii, which my wife Englished as, "Look at
you!" but I understood. After a moment of each of us holding the other's gaze poker-facedly, I smiled, and she instantly whip-cracked her head 90° so fast I'm amazed it didn't spin off . . . without ever losing the poker-face! It took serious effort not to laugh, because that would only have compounded her embarrassment, but it was one of my magical Japan moments.
Marrying a Japanese makes for a fundamentally different experience, because you are now in-group rather than out-group. Employment in some company not normally full of
gaijin might be a similar experience, I wouldn't know. There's no Japanese-
gaijin marriage about which I know much detail that wasn't rocky, and a high percentage foundered on the those rocks. Not that any marriage isn't an adjustment, surely, but in Japan it means you lose your guest status, and even Lafcadio Hearn apparently was unprepared for all that that entailed.
Now, I was not totally unprepared for that. The circumstances were that my wife and I had been seeing each other pretty seriously, but circumstances meant that I pretty suddenly had to return to the States, and there was thus a kind of "fish or cut bait" atmosphere. Still, since she had never been to the continental US (and hotels in Hawai'i don't count) I waited until we'd been able to come over here for a visit before proposing, figuring that if she just found the place appalling there'd be no future in it.
But my mistake was judging her too much in terms of those Japanese I'd known who had actually lived abroad. Let me backtrack with a quick vocabulary lesson. The verb
chigau (違う) means "is wrong," like "2+2=5
chigau." But it also means "is different," as in "horses and deer
chigau." Let me tell you, Japan and the US
chigau yo. Japanese who have lived abroad come to see that other countries do thing differently, some better maybe, some worse, but in a non-Japanese manner that makes sense on its own terms.
It was my mistake to think that a few weeks in the States was enough for my wife to make that realization. Intellectually, certainly, but I think on some level she still saw the US as some kind of theme park, where people put on weird costumes and acted all
gaijin-y but then went home, took their shoes off in the
genkan, relaxed in the
ofuro (AFTER washing!) and then unfolded their
futon.
The
chigau mindset thus illustrates a strong thread of intolerance in the Japanese world view. Many culture books cite the Japanese saying, 「出る釘は打たれる」(
Deru kugi ha utareru,) "A nail that sticks out gets hammered down." My own case had some unfortunate features, such as my wife and I not being able to live together for the first few years of marriage. Perhaps if we had been able to start building a life together when the psychological power of that transformation was fresh, things might have been different. As it was, when we finally moved in together I discovered that I could no longer take a break from the requirement to conform by just closing my apartment door, while she found that she was living with a guy who--in her terms--had indeed been raised in a barn.
While messy, we did make some headway. I explained that even with the best will in the world I could not
become Japanese, that while I had a duty to conform outdoors we needed to find a middle ground indoors. I refused to accept "just because Japanese would or wouldn't do that" as sufficient reason to change my at home behaviour. I tried to make it clear that if a sensible reason could be given I'd comply, but the "just because" things would have to be divvied up. I would accept some of hers but in turn would expect her to accept some of mine.
You, the viewers at home, are only getting my side, of course. But I found later that my Japanese boss (who had had a failed marriage to an American) was worried that I'd been giving in too much. Unfortunately, in true Japanese spirit she didn't butt in.
Whether the road we were on would have led to a
modus vivendi or a later breakup I don't know, but when our son came along everything changed. Not only did we move back in with her mother, making me now a 20% minority rather than 50%, but having him in the picture made disagreements that in the past would have had a certain comicality about them into cleavages of fundamental identity over which compromise was unthinkable.
I don't want to talk about this period much. I got to where I couldn't eat and lost considerable weight. Thinking about this always reminds me of
Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence when Lawrence says, "I see . . . so I'm to die . . . to preserve your
sense of order?" Shortly thereafter he goes apesh(i)t and smashes a funerary altar, a moment I have to admit I find highly cathartic.
So, up to this point, I was still free to leave, and my wife was shocked when I did so. A Japanese would likely have been tied down by society too much to have done so, while my
gaijin fluidity had me spraying through their fingers like squeezed Play-Doh. Of course, leaving my son was a wrenching experience . . . but what would Solomon have done if the women had whipped out a pair of shears? The decider came when it was clear that our pre-marriage pact to raise out son in both countries would not be honoured, and indeed he was being wrapped in ever tighter
gaijin-proof hermetic seals.
While staying with a buddy (also married to a Japanese) during a cooling off period, over beers I said to him, "It's not that I mind him growing up with a Japanese world view, I just want him to appreciate that it's not the only world view."
Without missing a beat, he responded, "But that negates the Japanese world view." He had a point, and to the extent that that is what they value, my wife and mother-in-law were completely right to try and isolate me from him. I would and will to the extent I can from this distance, subversively try to make him question the idea that "different" means "wrong."
Heh heh . . . my wife and her mom are actually kind of old fashioned even for Japanese. Biggest laugh that night was, "Oh, man, you married Japanese Amish!"
So, racist? It's a bit like the question of whether traditional Japan was "feudal," which tends to run back to what your particular view of European feudalism's most salient features were. Are the Japanese "racist" in the sense of the complex of social structures and individual attitudes that the American experience associates with that term? No.
But do they have a unique complex of their own, compounding prejudice and intolerance in such a way as to mimic some of US racism's worst features and foster a sense of nativist exclusivity? Yes.
In my first Japanese life, carrying a working visa, this was their problem, not mine. It is not an unimportant one, though, given their declining population and all the social problems that entails. Many other countries address this through immigration, something Japan is loth to allow. The US had the frontier as a "school of Americanism" and a long (if bumby) tradition of accepting newbies. Japan only has childhood as a "school for Japaneseness," and its record of Japanizing its colonies isn't a happy one.
My second Japanese life on a spousal visa was transitional, but in my present life as a Japanese (absentee) dad these questions curse the grey morning hours. My first Japanese girlfriend and I had discussed marriage, but ultimately she decided that she didn't want to live in the States, but also didn't want to raise a "half" in Japan because of what they can go through. I'm glad that my son doesn't really leap out from a group of Japanese kids, but he is
chotto chigau. There is a current in Japaneseness that will have a problem with that. How will he deal with it, something neither I nor his mother can probably fully comprehend, and without the ejection seat his dad had?
These things do change over time, even in a place like Japan. Perhaps he'll even have a part in that. Time will tell on that too.
「ファッキング・ハーフ」
ぐれ分かる、ばかやろ!