EMBEDDED
RACISM:
JAPAN'S VISIBLE MINORITIES AND RACIAL DISCRIMINATION By Debito ARUDOU, Ph.D.
(Lexington Books, a division of Rowman & Littlefield,
November 2015 / January 2016)
EXTENDED SUMMARY:
“We accept
that you’re a Japanese citizen.But you don’t LOOK
Japanese.So we
refuse you service.”
Despite domestic constitutional provisions and
international treaty promises, Japan has no law against racial
discrimination.Consequently,
businesses around Japan display “Japanese Only” signs, denying
entry to all “foreigners” on sight. Employers and landlords
routinely refuse jobs and apartments to foreign applicants.Japanese police
racially profile “foreign-looking” bystanders for invasive
questioning on the street. Legislators,
administrators, and pundits portray foreigners as a national
security threat and call for their segregation and expulsion.Public rallies
advocate the disenfranchisement – even killing – of foreign
residents born and living in Japan for generations. Nevertheless, Japan’s
government and media claim there is no discrimination by race in
Japan, therefore no laws are necessary.
How does Japan resolve the cognitive dissonance of
racial discrimination being unconstitutional yet not illegal?Embedded Racism
carefully untangles Japanese society’s complex narrative on race
by analyzing two mutually-supportive levels of national identity
maintenance.Starting
with case studies of hundreds of individual “Japanese Only”
businesses, Embedded
Racism carefully analyses the construction of Japanese
identity through legal structures, statute enforcement, public
policy, and media messages.It reveals how the concept of a “Japanese” has been
racialized to the point where one must look “Japanese” to be
treated as one.
This augurs ill for Japan’s future.With Japan’s low
birthrate, aging society, and decreasing population, one hope
for Japan’s revitalization, after more than two “lost decades”
of economic stagnation, is immigration.However, if people
(including Japanese citizens) face phenotypical barriers to
integration and acceptance, then Japan will not be able to
reverse its demographic decline by creating “new Japanese”.Thus, the systemic
treatment of what the author calls Japan’s “Visible Minorities”
is the “canary in the coal mine” for Japan’s future economic
vitality and solvency.
The product of a
quarter-century of research and fieldwork by a scholar living in
Japan as a naturalized Japanese citizen, Embedded Racism offers an
unprecedented perspective on Japan’s deeply-entrenched,
poorly-understood, and strenuously-unacknowledged discrimination
as it affects people by physical appearance.
"Recommended Reading" -- Dr.
Jeff Kingston, Director of Asian Studies, Temple University
Japan, writing in The
Japan Times, December 19, 2015.
EDITORIAL REVIEWS:
Debito Arudou demonstrates
that racism is pervasive in Japan and that many
individuals and institutions deny this reality. He also
shows that racism augurs ill for a society that will
shrink for decades to come unless it changes how it treats
visible minorities. People who care about the future of
Japan need to engage with this pellucid and provocative
account of one of the country’s most urgent but neglected
problems. (David T. Johnson, University of
Hawaii)
In this important and
insightful book, and based on a long personal experience,
Debito Arudou offers a sophisticated critical analysis of
the way visible minorities are treated in contemporary
Japan. As immigration of work seekers to wealthy countries
is on the rise, the issues treated here have wider
relevance not only to the conduct and future of the
Japanese society, but also to many other societies in the
West and beyond. Highly recommended! (Rotem
Kowner, University of Haifa)
Hats off to Arudou for
breaking once and for all the Silence Barrier that has
permitted Japan’s profound racial discrimination to purr
along undisturbed well into the 21st century. Exposing at
long last the definitional acrobatics of Japanese and
foreign Japan Studies experts—who have argued that since
there is nothing we could call racist attitudes in Japan
it follows that there can be no systemic racial
discrimination either—Arudou lays out voluminous evidence
to the contrary showing how Japan actually operates in its
laws, public policy, media messages, and social ordering.
(Ivan P. Hall, author of Bamboozled: How America Loses
the Intellectual Game with Japan and its Implications for
Our Future in Asia)
FROM THE PREFACE:
This book is the product of nearly thirty years of researching and
living in Japan – from around the time I first visited in 1986 to
the present day. I have always been intrigued by how some
normalized images of Japan did not square with what I was
experiencing in everyday life. Despite being friendly and
hospitable to guests, very progressive in unexpected ways, and
open enough to outside things to co-opt them (even the music for
Japan’s national anthem was written by a foreigner), Japan has a
palpable undercurrent of exclusionism. It is both subtle
(e.g., ideas and proposals dismissed due to their “lack of
precedent”) and overt (e.g., “No Foreigners Allowed” signs – the
subject of my related book “Japanese
Only”: The Otaru Hot Springs Case and Racial
Discrimination in Japan). As I stayed longer, became
fluent in Japanese, and felt acculturated and comfortable in
Japanese society (to the point of taking Japanese citizenship and
giving up my American), I saw the exclusionism more and more – and
wanted to understand it.
As a social scientist, I like figuring out why societies behave in
patterns, i.e., “why people generally do this and not that”.
I eventually arrived at answers that transcended the tautological
“Japanese do this because they are Japanese”, i.e. something
“cultural”. That was important to me. I never liked
“culture” as an explanation, since a) “culture” is hard to define,
and eclipses individual choice and foible, b) it is often a “black
box” that encages researcher curiosity, and c) I assume that
people anywhere are generally rational: they do things
because those things are in their own best interests. I do
not think people are unthinking “prisoners of culture”. In
most cases there is a system – a collection of logics and
incentives – that occasions behavior, in this research one that
encourages people to behave inclusively or exclusively. Even
if those belief systems initially made no sense to me, they made
sense to someone. My quest in this book was to find out how
they made sense, and to quantify how they were underpinned by
rules, customs, mores, and procedures.
Exclusionism in Japan (especially that of the racialized ilk) has
been one big puzzle, taking me decades to deconstruct, and then to
reconstruct as a coherent picture of why a society as kind as
Japan’s can be so cold and unsympathetic towards people perceived
as outsiders. One conclusion I would like readers to
internalize from this book is that Japan should not be treated as
“special” – again, that “Japanese do this because they are
Japanese” thing. Succumbing to that narrative invites
all sorts of exceptionalism that is ungrounded – and it causes
enormous cognitive dissonance when Japan is called upon to observe
(but, as we shall see in this book, officially claims exception
from) the international standards of human rights under the
international treaties it signed. This is not just a matter
of normative principle. As I argue in the last chapter,
Japan’s racialized nation-state membership processes are so
exclusionary that they are undermining the very fabric of Japanese
society: Japan is strangling itself demographically on its
Embedded Racism.
In sum, Japan is no exception, especially to the world’s
racialization processes, and it deserves similar critique for
racism. I believe that Japanese society behaves like any
other – it just does it with an internal logic that is “special”
and “unique” in ways that all societies are special and
unique. This book seeks to unspool the internal logic that
justifies and embeds racism. I hope you find its arguments
compelling.
Table of Contents:
Part One: The Context of Racism in Japan
Chapter One: Racial Discrimination in Japan: Contextualizing the
Issue
Chapter Two: How Racism 'Works' in Japan
Part Two: “Japanese Only”: Examples of Racial Discrimination
Chapter Three: Case Studies of “Japanese Only” Exclusionary
Businesses
Part Three: The Construction of Japan’s Embedded Racism
Chapter Four: Legal Constructions of 'Japaneseness'
Chapter Five: How 'Japaneseness' is Enforced through Laws
Chapter Six: A 'Chinaman’s Chance' in Japanese Court
Chapter Seven: From Foreign Fetishization to Fear in the Japanese
Media
Part Four: Challenges to Japan’s Exclusionary Narratives
Chapter Eight: Maintaining the Binary despite Domestic and
International Pressure
Part Five: Discussion and Conclusions
Chapter Nine: Putting the Concept of 'Embedded Racism' to Work
Chapter Ten: 'So What?' Why Japan’s 'Embedded Racism' Matters:
Japan’s Bleak Future
Appendix One: Sakanaka’s "Big Japan” vs. “Small Japan”
Appendix Two: This Research’s Debt to Critical Race Theory
Glossary, Bibliography, Index
Hardcover, November 2015 (North America, Latin America, Australia,
and Japan), January 2016 (UK, Europe, rest of Asia, South America,
and Africa), 378 pages
ISBN: 978-1-4985-1390-6
eBook: 978-1-4985-1391-3
Subjects: Social Science / Discrimination & Race
Relations, Social Science / Ethnic Studies / General, Social
Science / Minority Studies, Social Science / Sociology / General Preview and purchase your copy:
