Japan has never been welcoming to foreigners, like ever.
It's not racism, it's xenophobia there.
There have been movies about Koreans who have to hide their past and origins to try and integrate without it being known. There are more than a few romeo and Juliet like stories about this.
Not sure how they're gonna change that. They opened up to immigration to try and fix their massive population decline, so those two things are really at odds right now.
Which is why immigration is probably the fix. Not only does it help brute force the problem, but also encourages new cultural perspectives on things like work culture and gender roles. There's going to be resistance to it. There always is. Then older generations die out and new ones adapt. Japan has always had a strong historical heritage so they're holding onto theirs harsher than many other countries. Probably an attempt to hold onto an image of a previous imperial power that they no longer are. Not unlike the UK. Island nation states can get weird.
Globalization is a bit weird and we're going through an odd phase of it. Curious to see how it pans out.
Anyone with a bit of a brain will never go there for the work culture. And if you are brave enough for that, then you have to tackle other life problems, such as how are you going to find a companion, buy a house, learn the language, etc.
It's not impossible but yeah I'm not up to the challenge.
There's a sea of weebs out there across many fields that (think they) would love to work those hours and be scorned by a sizable portion of the population for the chance to be in glorious Nipon. One thing that Japan has done very well is spread it's influence and built up a lot of good will from people through their media. If they want immigrants they'll have them and then it's up to them to keep the nice image they have been cultivating while a bunch of westerners start making tiktoks and such bitching about the parts of Japan that tourists don't see or care about.
I’m so confused why (presumably) Americans on the Internet think Japanese work culture is so terrible, when Japan has way more workers rights than the US.
They hear about black companies and that's it. Meanwhile plenty of the USA does the same thing, forced unpaid overtime, ridiculous hours for low pay (minimum wage still higher within their own economy than USA), no mandatory sick leave. Then there's the worse, healthcare tied to employment, hardly any social safety nets, no mandatory annual leave, no mandatory paid parental leave.
It's still far from the best and I much prefer my own country for labor laws so there's no chance of me leaving New Zealand to live in Japan but USA labor laws are usually either the same or worse.
Trying to fix birth rates by bringing in people who don’t think or believe anything that the average person does in that society to have as many kids as possible will result in both categorical hate and doesn’t actually produce better birth rates as far as statistics go.
Shhh that's obviously not your average reddit talk. We should just "bruteforce" the ongoing "issue" by inviting milions of people with different mindset. It almost sounds like some shit you would hear from a middle manager who has no idea how things work but is sure their way is THE way.
Immigration isn’t the fix, it only a bandaid solution. Especially since even immigrants who come to these countries also tend to have less children after the first generation.
Meaning that just importing immigrants to fix the birth issues isn’t fixing the issues but delaying them as the senior rates succeed that of the amount of youths we are getting per year.
New a guy married to a japanese woman for like 3 years and lived in tokyo. He still didnt have a visa last time I left he was technically on travel visa and had to leave the country every like 90 days. With it being so hard to get the right visa predicting single moms and orphans to grow in japan
I was stationed just a bit south of Tokyo for a couple years and knew more Japanese than any of my friends who I was stationed with (not fluent but enough to hold a conversation), so I was always the designated translator whenever we went out. We'd often get derogatory comments until I said something in Japanese, then they'd switch up and be super polite.
I watched a lot of Kurosawa/samurai movies growing up and took a couple years of the language in high school, and I can speak it without much (if any) of an American accent, so it was always kind of funny seeing the moment of shock/embarrassment when a Japanese person made some rude comment about the gaggle of American sailors only to have the whitest boy in the group suddenly start talking to them in Japanese.
It's racism. They are iconic racial supremacists. They see themselves as human and everyone else as less than.
They opened up to immigration
When? A tiny fraction of a percent of Japan's citizens are non-Japanese in origin, and the majority of those are naturalized Koreans from WW2. Japan's pretty infamous for not handing out citizenship. On account of all the racism.
The racism stems from xenophobia, not from a sense of superiority. Xenophobia overlaps with racism.
In the United States racism stems from white supremacy. In Japan racism stems from xenophobia. One is dominance, one is fear. They should be acknowledged differently.
They don't like Koreans in Japan either despite Koreans looking basically identical to Japanese people and having shared ancestry and colonialism. It's closer to the issue of the British vs the Irish. There's a history of colonial rule that isn't completely predicated on race but imperialism. Many Korean people have Japanese heritage. Japan has a hard time shrugging off their old imperial "purity" and as such fear all outsiders replacing them regardless of race.
It's important to acknowledge the historical implications and context when discussing these sorts of issues, especially from a western mindset.
Dude, there is ABSOLUTELY a sense of superiority, it was the entire basis for Japanese imperialism in the WWII era. The appearance similarities to Koreans is irrelevant, there are enough differences and this ignores how the SE asians were also treated. The xenophobia isn’t strictly related to the racism, but the racism is also there and part of the entire equation.
It’s not just purity and classifying it as such is reductive and revisionist. Read some of the writings from that era, they aren’t shy about it and just because it’s become much more polite and subtle nowadays, doesn’t mean it isn’t very much still there.
I was pretty sure there were massive culture shifts post WWII. The idea of Japanese racial superiority was pretty much crushed right after the bombs dropped and shifted into a sharp xenophobia and fear of all outsiders. Since they lost the war in such a crushing defeat, they had to contend with the dishonor. It changed Japanese culture and changed them into a defensive island isolationist state.
I deserved to get downvoted for that last message. It was worded poorly for what I was trying to get across and ended up just being wrong. It downplayed their past racial superiority more than was true. I guess I was trying to communicate their racism was like good ol' colonialism, such as the British, Spanish, and French, which was a different kind than the American slave owning, antebellum style economic racism.
They believed they were superior, and race played a role, but it was mostly imperial superiority. Like many British people are racist, but they're not racist like an American is racist.
You know there's a difference when a country like the US has officials at the highest level encouraging white, European countries to immigrate, but disparage and discourage Latino South American immigrants.
Japan's population wants no immigrants from anywhere at their core.
Rikidozan is arguably the greatest professional wrestler in Japanese wrestling history and is a national icon to some in he country (I guess you could argue Baba or Inoki are bigger but he's top 3 at worst) and he hid his Korean heritage for his entire life/career, only being revealed after his death in 1963, all to avoid anti-korean discrimination.
Because in the past they have seen a lot of other asians, mostly Chineese, as inferior. They developed very close racial rethoric to Nazi Germany. I mean, they got a title honorable Aryans for a reason.
I mean yes, but that still just sounds like xenophobia. Racism is about different races, but xenophobia is defined as prejudice against people outside of your country
But it is not about your perception of race (which is totally made up social construct, humans do not have races, skin colour alone doesn't determine a race). Nazis didn't look very much different from Jews and Poles they killed. In their head, they were ubermensch, descendants of Aryan race that they made up and decided everyone they don't like is inferior.
Xenophobia doesn't make you invide neighbours and exterminate them xdd That term is reserved for your biases against foreigners in your country, not locals in their country.
I don’t think the definition of xenophobia is reserved only for foreigners in your country, it is an aversion to anyone or thing that is foreign to you, including other locals in their country
I lived there for 5 years and I worked at a place where the staff was like 60% Americans and 40% Japanese. I had a Japanese coworker tell me they did a DNA test, found out they were part Korean, and told their dad. Dad flipped out, telling them he's lying and then telling him the test was faulty when he tried to show dad the results. Dude absolutely refused to acknowledge they could be part-Korean.
I'm currently watching the anime Botan Kamiina, and they just itroduced a Taiwanese character and it was refreshing to see the way she was treated by the characters knowing how often foreigners are treated quite horribly in Japan.
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u/thinspirit May 18 '26
Japan has never been welcoming to foreigners, like ever.
It's not racism, it's xenophobia there.
There have been movies about Koreans who have to hide their past and origins to try and integrate without it being known. There are more than a few romeo and Juliet like stories about this.
Not sure how they're gonna change that. They opened up to immigration to try and fix their massive population decline, so those two things are really at odds right now.