Japanese Racism

An excellent article from the BBC on Japan. Like any "Gaijin" knows, Japan is in deep denial about it's racism (disguised as nationalism) and the free use of terms to describe foreigners in negative ways (much Like Ang Mo in SEA Asia and Guilo in HK) only highlight this. Again, the double standards show when confronting this issue. A simple post on another blog about a term being racially offensive generates posts and emails tellimg me that i am wrong, that the term is not racist and yet if the role were reversed, a term used to offend an asian in a western country would result in job disciplinary action, formal complaints etc etc. It just goes to show: racists all over the world a crack heads and nutters.


Japan racism 'deep and profound'
By Chris Hogg
BBC News, Tokyo

Japanese commuters, Tokyo
Only about 1% of Japan's population is registered as foreign
An independent investigator for the UN says racism in Japan is deep and profound, and the government does not recognise the depth of the problem.

Doudou Diene, a UN special rapporteur on racism and xenophobia, was speaking at the end of a nine-day tour of the country.

He said Japan should introduce new legislation to combat discrimination.

Mr Diene travelled to several Japanese cities during his visit, meeting minority groups and touring slums.



Japan mulls multicultural dawn

He said that although the government helped to organise his visit, he felt many officials failed to recognise the seriousness of the racism and discrimination minorities suffered.

He was also concerned that politicians used racist or nationalist themes, as he put it, to whip up popular emotions. He singled out the treatment of ethnic Koreans and Chinese and indigenous tribes.

Mr Diene says he plans to recommend that Japan enact a law against discrimination, which he said should be drawn up in consultation with minority groups.

He said he would now wait for the Japanese government to respond to his comments before submitting a report to the United Nations.

Being Black in Korea

Korea is back in focus with an excellent blog (complete with audio) on the subject of racial prejudices in one of Asia's leading economies. The blog can be found here

A fantastic extended piece on how Koreans respond to criticism of their and country can be found on the same blog here
Indeed replace the word "Korean" with "Asian" and you'd have a fairly good description of of how most racist Asian respond to critiques of their behavior and prejudice.

The First Five

The first five articles posted on this blog cover a variety of issues. Singapore comes into special attention with a variety of articles focusing on the challenges faced by non-chinese minorities in the Lion City.

Although Singapore has done much to stop racial violence the academic study in particular shows that even the younger generation of Singaporeans show some racist traits, although thankfully they are not a majority. The two articles also questions the assertion made by many Singaporeans i have encountered that Singapore is a land of equal opportunity. Of particular concern is the lack of anti-discrimination statute law in Singapore.

Hong Kong also is in the spotlight today with an excellent article looking at the racist attitudes towards non-asians, especially those with brown skin colour. Attitudes towards darker skin color are also examined in the Korean context and an excellent article on Asian Racism in general from the International Herald Tribune is also posted.

One key features of asian racism is that it is often thinly disguised under 'nationalistic feeling' or 'patriotism'. Another common feature when dealing with asian racists is that complaints by minorities simply dismissed or disbelieved.

A common tactic of asian racists is to attack your home country or culture and point out it's flaws and on this basis suggest that you have no 'right' to offer observations or criticisms of their culture or own racist policies. I hope these articles can begin to provide an insight into the complex world of asian racism and begin to equip enlightened and tolerant people to question, consider and attack the issues when suitable occasions to do so arise.

Asian racism: from the apologetics to the reality

“James,” a commenter on an older post that contrasted racial attitudes in Korea and China, weighed in with a defense of Korea that’s familiar to most of us living in Asia:

There is no racism in Korea. Korea is NOT a multicultural country. It’s a mono-cultural country.

My first reaction is that Japan is far more “monocultural” than a Korea heavily influenced by China, Mongolia, Japan, and more recently, the US, yet no Korean would accept the claim that there’s no racism in Japan on the grounds that Japan is not a multicultural country.

That said, the notion that a society must be multicultural, that is, it must have more than one main racial group, for racism to exist is not new, but it is archaic in the age of globalization. Even if a country has no minorities living within its borders, cultural exchanges and the media have seen to it that most people will develop opinions — read: stereotypes — about races and ethnicities they have never met. How else can we explain Chinese saying to me, “Blacks are all naturally great athletes” or “Jews are all really rich and crafty”? Absent the exchanges inherent in globalization, where are the Chinese blacks, where are the Chinese Jews, for these stereotypes to emerge?

Opinions about other racial and ethnic groups can be positive or negative, and, naturally, the more negative the opinion, the greater the potential for racism. Of course, in a homogenous country like Korea or Japan, this potential racism will rarely materialize into racist acts, and if we were to judge racism according to race-motivated crimes, discrimininatory laws, and the like, the West would appear to be infinitely more racist than the countries of East Asia. (This aspect of the debate leads to another common tactic used by its Asian participants, namely, their tendency to invoke Rodney King or the KKK to distract from criticism of their own countries.)

However, racism must also be measured in terms of racist attitudes, and here, East Asia catches up to, and in some cases, overtakes the West. Racist attitudes are not only a matter of holding negative views of those unlike ourselves, but also include esteeming our own “race” above others. When a Korean, for example, is taught the uniqueness and superiority of their “race” as part of their education, it fosters the development of a value system that treats race as part of the yardstick by which to measure individuals. This runs counter to the norm of colorblindness in most Western countries. Moreover, for Americans and Europeans who have internalized the liberal values of the civil rights movement, to hear an Asian say “I’m proud of my race” can be a cringe-inducing experience, even though these words, in the context of homogeneity, sometimes mean “I’m proud of my country.”

Yet there are times when esteeming one’s race, and more disturbingly, esteeming the “purity” of said race, cannot be taken as mere patriotism. North Korea’s advocacy of Korean racial purity is extreme, so let us consider a more tangible anecdote that’s become rather infamous among some African expatriates living in Tianjin and Beijing. The following story has come to me second-hand, but I have every reason to believe its accuracy.

A few years ago, an African student studying at Beijing Foreign Studies University met and fell in love with a Korean girl who was also studying in Beijing. The girl and boy dated and stayed together for a little while, but soon some of the other Korean students caught word of their romance. The Korean boys, deeming it unseemly for a Korean girl to be with an African, began to intimidate both the girl and the boy to get them to break up. This intimidation culminated with a group of a half-dozen Koreans assaulting the African’s dormitory room, smashing his door down, and proceeding to accuse him of “taking advantage of” the Korean girl, and threatening him with physical violence. The African boy insisted that the girl was with him because she liked him, not because he had tricked her in any way. Ultimately, however, his appeal to reason did not defuse the situation; the boy had to threaten to call the cops to get the Koreans to leave his dormitory. In the end, the racists won, because the couple’s relationship could not endure the intimidation.

This scene should seem hauntingly familiar to anyone who’s studied the history of racist reactions to interracial relationships in the United States during the 20th century. All of the classic elements of racist backlash are there: (1) the “loss” of a female to a black person as a rallying point for males of the female’s race; (2) public intimidation of the mixed couple; (3) assertions that the black man has “seduced” the woman or that the relationship is otherwise illegitimate; and (4) a violent confrontation between a group of males and the black man in question. Everyone involved is lucky that the incident did not end in a lynching, but this was undoubtedly racism at work. Yet how can that be, since “there is no racism in Korea”?

A final (and I daresay unnecessary) disclaimer: East Asian racism, be it Korean, Chinese, or Japanese, is by no means the most alarming racism I’ve seen or encountered, but it deserves to be catalogued alongside white racism, black racism, and other manifestations of the phenomenon. If we are honest to history and to ourselves, we will recognize it as a social problem worthy of being analyzed and critiqued and, eventually, eliminated, for racism, in any form, is a wound in the heart of mankind.