17 ms·

How Homogeneous Is Japan?

105 points by grzm 6y ago

ThePadawan 6y ago
> If I told you that the U.S. was “93.3% American”, would you conclude that the U.S. is a homogeneous country? Because that’s exactly what everyone who cites the “98% Japanese” statistic is doing for Japan. ...yes? I find both those numbers insanely high, since the proportion of non-citizens here in Switzerland is 25% (country-wide) or 32% ([0], Zurich). And this doesn't exactly make the country a melting pot either. [0] https://www.stadt-zuerich.ch/prd/de/index/statistik/themen/bevoelkerung/nationalitaet-einbuergerung-sprache/anteil-auslaendische-bevoelkerung.html https://www.stadt-zuerich.ch/prd/de/index/statistik/themen/b...
- csomar 6y ago
  That's more of an indicator of the difficulty to gain citizenship. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swiss_nationality_law#Ordinary_naturalisation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swiss_nationality_law#Ordinary...
- terramex 6y ago
  Also, reasoning in cited sentence is wrong. If U.S. is "93% American" then on average 7 out 100 people you meet will not be "American", whereas for Japan only 2 out of 100 will not be "Japanese" - based on those numbers Japan is about "350% more homogeneous" country, not "5%" as suggested. It is a case of Potato Paradox, where small numerical differences between values given as percentages can hide big differences in real world. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Potato_paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Potato_paradox
  - jonathanstrange 6y ago
    That's not a real paradox, which is why Quine called it a "veridical paradox." You're just taking your personal feeling about a difference as the primary criterion for evaluating the subjective significance of the difference, but these feelings differ from person to person.
    - rozab 6y ago
      Reducing... "That's not a real paradox, which is why Quine called it a 'paradox'"? meta
      - 13415 6y ago
        You mean in the same sense as every alleged policeman is a policeman and every false diamond is a diamond?
- xorfish 6y ago
  Yes, but the reason for that is, that Switzerland has a really difficult naturalisation process and is a smaller country. If all humans migrate a similar distance on average, you would expect that a smaller country that is surrounded by other countries to have a higher proportion of immigrants. Notice that for Switzerland, you need to use the term non-citizens and can't use the term immigrant. That is because a good portion of the non-citizens are not immigrants and have lived here for their entire life.
  - cainxinth 6y ago
    Switzerland is also what I call (non-pejoratively) an amalgam country. It’s a got a lot of German and Italian influences. Just like Belgium, which is a mix of French, German, and Dutch cultures.
    - lesderid 6y ago
      AFAIK, Switzerland and Belgium are very different. Belgium is culturally very divided: the two major cultures (Dutch-speaking and French-speaking) are hardly mixed, especially in recent times, with the exception of Brussels. From conversations with a Swiss friend, I gather that the cultures in Switzerland are much more mixed in daily life.
      - cainxinth 6y ago
        I didn't mean to imply Switzerland and Belgium are similar. I was saying that they are countries with national identities that are heavily influenced by their neighbors.
      - ThePadawan 6y ago
        I live in German-speaking and Switzerland and the division between here and French-speaking Switzerland is massive. There's a reason there's a whole "trench" named after it [0]. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R%C3%B6stigraben https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R%C3%B6stigraben
- africanboy 6y ago
  TL;DR: ethnicity is not citizenship Switzerland has never been homogeneous and the recent immigration to Switzerland is very different from regular immigration elsewhere. It is an exception in the west, mostly due to low taxation for rich people or political reasons. for the same reasons in Lichtenstein 33℅ of the population is non-citizen and not surprisingly in Monaco an astonishing 75℅ of the residents are foreign born. If Italian people go to Switzerland they are counted as immigrants, but the Italian ethnicity is native in Switzerland, same goes for German and French people. The same thing is not true for Chinese or Korean people in Japan. Also 1℅ of Japan equals to 15℅ of the Swiss population.
  - Cederfjard 6y ago
    Sorry for the irrelevant comment, but I’ve never seen anyone use ℅ instead of % before. If it’s a typo, how did that happen?
    - ezequiel-garzon 6y ago
      I hadn’t even noticed it, first time I see it too. It looks like it’s meant to stand for “care of”: https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/care_of https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/care_of.
    - BelenusMordred 6y ago
      Very likely a mobile typo. Keyboards often expose a lot of different utf-8 chars when you hold it down and you're always a few mm away from releasing on something completely different. Muscle memory and hard to see choices easily makes it a double.
    - africanboy 6y ago
      I did not realise it until you pointed it out I'm using openboard on my mobile and it is probably mapping the wrong UTF-8 character for that symbol.
627467 6y ago
Racial stats and forms asking about it are an underestimated force that perpetuates systemic racism, increases segregation, discrimination and undermines social cohesiveness. Change my mind.
- JauntyHatAngle 6y ago
  Why? The onus is on you to support your argument. Not on others to disprove yours with no sources.
- africanboy 6y ago
  ethnicity is a very important legacy for every ethnic group, acknowledging the existence of the different ethic groups living in a country means being more aware of the specific needs of everyone instead of crushing minorities under the umbrella of homogeneity. it's the laws that perpetuates systemic racism. For example in Japan Ainu, Ryukyuans and Yamato are different, have different languages, traditions and sometimes even different alphabets.
- vladvasiliu 6y ago
  Here in France there is no such thing as "race" or "color" or "ethnicity" from the State's point of view. The census doesn't ask anything related to race / color / ethnicity. As far as the state is concerned, you're either a French citizen or a foreigner. However, during 2020, there were a few cases of alleged [0] police brutality towards "minorities". This has opened a wider debate over the place of minorities in the French society which, of courses, started to talk about racism. There was a clear attempt by some parties to bring up arguments which seemed directly taken from US events, in particular related to the George Floyd case. Of course, those arguments were met with the "France doesn't see race, so there can't be racism" argument. Now I haven't followed those debates particularly closely, but from my (admittedly superficial) point of view, it's pretty hard to say that something is happening to a particular class of people because of who they are without acknowledging that that is, indeed, a class. In practical terms, how can you acknowledge that "black people are discriminated against if there are no black people"? My point is that it's way more difficult to talk about things you can't measure. This slides into "I feel that", which doesn't really allow to know whether progress is being made. --- [0] I say "alleged" because I haven't followed closely those cases so I don't know what the investigations concluded.
1996 6y ago
Carefully read the comment to realize this "feel good" piece is written for a western audience: > "This article was clearly written more from ignorance than knowledge and is not based on knowledge of the actual culture in Japan."
- kelnos 6y ago
  I saw that comment, and I think it misses the point. The author was not claiming that everyone lives in harmony and no one is prejudiced against those anyone else. The point is that, if you look at official stats and see "98% Japanese", that ignores the fact that many of those people aren't ethnically Japanese, because the stats talk about citizenship, not ethnicity. I think that comment actually proves the author's point, that there are many categories outside ethnically Japanese, and people there disagree on what it means to "be Japanese", lending credence to the idea that Japan is not a homogeneous society.
bjeds 6y ago
Not sure how interesting this is, but since the article mentions Scandinavia and "homogeneous society", that's not really true either. Unlike Japan, Sweden keeps track, not of "race" but country of origin for migrants or children of migrants. For Sweden, 36.5% of men aged 15-44 are either foreign born, or has at least one parent foreign born. This data is from the Statistics Sweden (SCB) for 2019. In this cohort, 62.5% are from, or have a parent from, Africa/Asia (Middle East), 9.3% from Western Europe/USA, 3.5% from the other Nordic countries, an 24.7% are from "Other" countries. I'm not sure about the data for the other Scandinavian countries.
- 5cents 6y ago
  For Norway, 2020, I think about 25% of the population where either foreign born or has at least one parent foreign born [1] https://www.ssb.no/statbank/sq/10046114 https://www.ssb.no/statbank/sq/10046114
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
55555 6y ago
A lot of words in this article in order to make a very weak argument. I assume he started writing before he started researching. From wikipedia: > Chinese people in Japan are the largest foreign minorities in Japan. They comprise 0.64% of Japan's population. So the largest ethnic groups in japan which aren't Japanese all comprise a percentage of the population measured in tenths of a single percent, at the most. Now let's look at The United States: > Non-Hispanic white - 60.1% > Hispanic and Latino (of any race) - 18.5% > Black or African American - 13.4% > Asian - 5.9% > [continued] Ethnicity aside, what about same-generation heritage/place of birth (immigrants)? > There were a record 44.8 million immigrants living in the U.S. in 2018, making up 13.7% of the nation’s population. This represents a more than fourfold increase since 1960, when 9.7 million immigrants lived in the U.S., accounting for 5.4% of the total U.S. population. Japan's population is roughly 2% immigrants. Obviously, for almost all people who aren't racists, having a racially pure ethnostate isn't important. But Japan is pretty close to one, and The United States is a very diverse place. I don't know what the point of this article is. This is the kind of article where halfway through writing it you realize you're actually wrong and you stop writing.
- peteretep 6y ago
  Author also kinda goes in a circle by saying “just because they’re more Asian doesn’t mean they’re Japanese!!” and then pointing out that Korean Japanese blend right in and nobody’s the wiser, but a half-black Japanese is a Big Freakin’ Deal there. It’s a weird and poorly argued article for sure
- kelnos 6y ago
  > Chinese people in Japan are the largest foreign minorities in Japan. They comprise 0.64% of Japan's population. Does that mean what we think it means, though? Does that include people of Chinese descent who are Japanese citizens (who, as the author points out, are considered "Japanese" for statistical purposes), or (as I suspect) it only includes non-citizen Chinese people?
  - 55555 6y ago
    > Does that include people of Chinese descent who are Japanese citizens. Yes. It does not include non-Japanese passport holding Chinese.
maallooc 6y ago
I migrated to a homogeneous country in Asia and I've never reconsidered my decision. To them I am and will always be a foreigner, but it's bearable to live in a stable society with no racial unrest, low crime rate, overall conservative society with a subtle note of progressiveness, and other good attributes that derive from homogeneousness.
arkitaip 6y ago
"About 2.2% of Japan's total legal resident population are foreign citizens" [0] "Japanese people make up 98.1%, Chinese 0.5%, Korean 0.4%, and other 1% (includes Filipino, Vietnamese, and Brazilian) of people living in Japan, according to the CIA World Handbook" [1] So Japan is exactly as ethnically homogenous as you would think. [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethnic_groups_of_Japan https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethnic_groups_of_Japan [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethnic_issues_in_Japan https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethnic_issues_in_Japan
- paddez 6y ago
  > About 2.2% of Japan's total legal resident population are foreign citizens You've conflated "citizenship" with "ethnicity".
  - andi999 6y ago
    Normally that is a valid point, but for Japan there is an enormous overlap.
    - b3kart 6y ago
      > enormous How enormous? We wouldn’t need words like that if we looked at the right numbers.
      - EE84M3i 6y ago
        https://www.turning-japanese.info/2016/09/totals.html https://www.turning-japanese.info/2016/09/totals.html says: > As of 2015, a total of almost 581,000 people have become legally Japanese since the fall of the shogunate and the rise of constitutional "westernized" Japan. This seems consistent with other sources I found while doing a quick search. This suggests less than 1% of the number of citizens of japan was not born a citizen. Of course, some of those people will have children and those children's ethnicity could be not Japanese ethnically (or partially) but still the number of citizens of Japan that are not ethnically Japanese is quite small, and the number of citizens of Japan that are not ethnically east asian is much smaller still.
CorrectHorseBat 6y ago
>The refusal to gather statistics on ethno-racial diversity is unusual Is this true? I don't understand why any country would want to open the box of pandora that is gathering statistics on ethno-racial diversity. I always thought countries like the USA and China were the exception.
- sheefrex 6y ago
  As far as I'm aware, France and to a lesser degree Germany also don't collect this information. > https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jun/16/france-and-germany-urged-to-rethink-reluctance-to-gather-ethnicity-data https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jun/16/france-and-ger...
  - kebman 6y ago
    AFAIK Sweden does not collect such information either. Norway does, however.
- azernik 6y ago
  Just off the top of my head for countries that also track ethnicity/race in government statistics: Belgium (because the Walloon/Fleming ethnic divide is so central to its politics), Germany (under the euphemism "migration background"), Russia, Israel, Lebanon... Ethnicity is an extremely important identity category, and if you want to manage that diversity you need information.
  - ginko 6y ago
    >Germany (under the euphemism "migration background") That's very different from the US keeping track of race though. After a generation there's no way for the German government to tell the children from naturalized citizens from other German citizens.
    - tpush 6y ago
      > That's very different from the US keeping track of race though. You'll also never see a German statistic even using the word "race" for humans beings.
csomar 6y ago
Landing in Japan, I was surprised to find that people did not look that similar. I mean, this is Asia and all Asians look the same. But Japan had some yellowish, whitish, brownish people that were all, euh, Japanese. In a sense, they were Japanese because they behaved like Japanese. It seems that behavior plays a big role in how people can identify another one as being one of them. Robert Sapolsky has a great series in Youtube about Behavioral Biology. One of the insights he brings is about Arabs: According to him, Arabs adopted very long names so that they can avoid racial conflict. When two persons recites their names and find a family name that's similar, they assume that they are family and this helps them co-operate. Now that's BS (given a long enough last name, you are going to find a similar grand-parent name) but it happens to work. Islam had this too: Your fellow muslim is your "brother". It's time some countries realize that this has been a solved problem: To uproot racism, you need to rally your population behind common denominators and values.
- DC-3 6y ago
  > To uproot racism, you need to rally your population behind common denominators and values. That's all very nice but how do you apply it to the situation where you have a minority group with little to no interest in integrating into the indigenous culture?
  - thaumasiotes 6y ago
    You make them do it anyway. It's interesting to note in this context that unlike most countries, China fully assimilated its Jewish population.
    - peteretep 6y ago
      I think forcibly assimilating minorities and China are a hard sell to mention together in a sentence without also mentioning Uighurs and Tibetans
    - hogFeast 6y ago
      True, I have heard they are assimilating their Muslim population very effectively too. They even have assimilation holiday camps, fun for all the family.
deleted 6y ago
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mysterydip 6y ago
Using a statistic that represents the country as a whole hides the fact that some parts of Japan are more like 99.99%, while others are more like 80%. The experience you have will depend on where you are.
hn3333 6y ago
Genetics is one thing, but Japan definitely did allow foreign culture into their mix. Just look at the movie "The Last Samurai" to see what I mean. I wonder if it's possible to put out a number for that. As for my Country, as Europeans we are heavily influenced by Americans, who we completely seem to accept as our cultural leaders. How do the Japanese feel about them though?
- b3kart 6y ago
  Ah yes, the famous Hollywood documentary “The Last Samurai”. :-)
  - hn3333 6y ago
    :) Well.. it is an anecdotal representation of some bigger cultural change that happened, though, is it not?
- porknubbins 6y ago
  I would argue that Japan very definitely did not “allow” foreign culture in because the country was “opened” under threat of force by Matthew Perry. Unless you mean earlier entries of culture like firearms and Christianity in the 16th century but I’m not sure that entry can be attributed to Japan as a country that far back.
- moreoutput 6y ago
  The last samurai isnt tom cruise it's the dude he meets after being injured by the japanese government, when he begins to appreciate the shogun via his interactions with the last samurai. Comments on the movie tend to give the impression that cruise is playing an asian man rather than an injured western soldier.
- Blikkentrekker 6y ago
  From where I look at it, Japanese culture seems to be quite interested in adopting exotic elements very quickly and likes them for that reason. There is nothing more Japanese than a parfait in the afternoon, a good curry in the evening, and a traditional Christian wedding before attending the Sintou shrine for a final blessing.
IkmoIkmo 6y ago
I really don't know what the point of this article is, it hasn't answer the question it poses. It simply starts with a straw man argument that Japan is only thought of as homogenous because of the 2% foreign-born statistic. Firstly, that 2% statistic is telling, even though he pretends it isn't. It doesn't tell the whole story, but it is one of the best indicators for homogeneity, because the percentage of people born abroad living in your country, says something about the recent (last 2-3 generations) inflow of foreign elements (e.g. language, food, dna, religion etc). If you look at the statistics, Europe and the US are places where these percentages are very high. The US or Germany for example are around 15%. Given Japan is at 2%, that's actually 1 out of 50 in Japan vs 1 out of 6 in say US or Germany, a massive difference. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_and_dependent_territories_by_immigrant_population https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_and_d... Second, even if you look at the population which is born in Japan but has a non-Japanese heritage, the very fact so many blend in and aren't known to have non-Japanese roots says something about the homogeneity as well. The author references Masayoshi Son who is seen to be Japanese and only known to be Korean due to being a billionaire that journalists looked in to, isn't an argument against homogeneity (because, look, Koreans in Japan! Didn't think that did you?) but rather for homogeneity (because look, a 3rd generation Korean like Son isn't normally recognised unless he is a billionaire. Their entire culture has blended in and become Japanese to the point it is homogeneous and only detectable by DNA-test or investigative journalism. That shouts homogeneity to me. Son needed to be famous to be recognised as Korean ,not Japanese. But Obama or Harris didn't need to be famous to be recognised as different from the majority ethnic group in the US. People don't claim that Japan is completely racially pure. The claim is if you take a homogenous/heterogeneous spectrum and plot rich countries on it (e.g. EU, North-America, Australia etc), Japan is relative to such countries, much more on one side than the other. There are two main reasons for this. One is that Japan simply has had much less (permanent) migration for one. And two, even with high-levels of migration, there can still be two different responses: Integration or Assimilation. Star Trek's Borg are fully composed of new peoples, but they are assimilated. Everyone becomes Borg, unrecognisable. Whereas you can also integrate new peoples, your culture changes, you adapt to new elements, the population and the individuals therein can be recognisably differentiated. Japan is no Borg, but on this spectrum it also scores higher on assimilation than integration, vis-a-vis other rich countries like the US or Europe. And in that sense, Japan is among a few uniquely (relatively) homogenous countries.
JoeAltmaier 6y ago
OP missing the point. Its about culture, not all the details they're trying to hang on it (dna, nationality). You don't need to explain to a Japanese who's Japanese. They can tell within 2 seconds of meeting them. Its all about culture.
- DoofusOfDeath 6y ago
  As someone who doesn't know much about Japanese culture, I find this really interesting. Can you elaborate a bit on which details would provide that info?
  - fredrikholm 6y ago
    Not Japanese, but studied the language and has spent a lot of time with native Japanese people. The easiest, least contextual example would be behavior in public spaces. _Everyone_ is taking great lengths not to disturb others, ranging from not taking phone calls in public to eating over thrash cans in order to minimize dropping food directly on the pavement. It's the constant consideration and respect for others (at the expense of your own individuality and liberty) that becomes glaringly obvious when one fails to meet the (giant) list of norms and implicit rules. If you haven't grown up with them, they are very hard to replicate without making mistakes, which is something native Japanese (generally) don't do.
mm983 6y ago
"Tokyo public schools will stop forcing students to dye their hair black, official promises" (2019) https://japantoday.com/category/national/tokyo-public-schools-will-stop-forcing-students-to-dye-their-hair-black-official-promises https://japantoday.com/category/national/tokyo-public-school... "According to a new survey published by Tokyo news outlet The Asahi Shimbun, 57% of public high schools in the city require students to prove that their hair color is natural." https://www.businessinsider.com/japanese-students-hair-color-2017-5 https://www.businessinsider.com/japanese-students-hair-color...
- Blikkentrekker 6y ago
  I find this to be a rather interesting thing myself. The Japanese logic of forcing the students without black hair to dye it black is that it would be unfair to not do so, as they would otherwise have a choice that other students would not, as they can obviously not be allowed to not dye it black. In many other countries, one is allowed one's natural hair color, but not dye it at all. In some others, one is allowed to only dye it into naturally occurring colors; one might argue that for Japan anything other than black veers close to this philosophy since 99% of Japan has black hair. In yet other countries, schools are not allowed by law to prohibit students from dying their hair in whatever color they might want. — I live in such a country so naturally from my perspective the obsession with hair color seems quaint. But one is I suppose to appreciate that in Japan at one point only street thugs would dye their hair blond so it became a certain dog whistle. It is not too dissimilar from many North-West European schools in the early 2000s banning any and all clothing of the brand Londsdale, until some courts overruled that, as the brand became a dog whistle for Nazis, as when carefully covered the lettering leads “NDSA” which is one letter short of “NDSAP”.
prestigious 6y ago
There may be more diversity in Japan than given credit but there is more similarities between a Korean and a Japanese than there are between someone from Syria and a French person. Pretty naive to gloss over that fact.
- Ozzie_osman 6y ago
  Actually out of curiosity, I'd love to hear a Japanese or Korean persons take on this claim. Im from the Middle East so Syria and France seem pretty different for me, but maybe if you're from the country/region being compared it's a lot easier to see the differences.
  - imbnwa 6y ago
    There's a Japanese take on that claim in the article
  - pkkim 6y ago
    My background: citizen of USA, son of two immigrants from Korea. Hopefully someone who actually lives in South Korea or Japan can step in here too. Subjectively, it seems to me like Japan and South Korea are somewhat culturally similar, but they are not the same, and the differences are important to people there. Furthermore, 20th century history has created a lot of hatred on both sides. These wounds are starting to heal with time and _I think_ the younger generation in Korea tends to care less about the issue. Many people in both countries go to the other country for tourism, and each country's cultural exports are popular in the other country. For an analogy (though not a close analogy, because the political situation is different): Israel and Syria are pretty similar though, right? Both speak Semitic languages, they have similar food, similar weather, similar religions, and often you can't tell them apart just by looking at them. So they should be friends. :)
- Ceezy 6y ago
  There is a border in common between Korea and Japan. I don't remember seeing one between Syria and France. Not to sure what's your point....
prepend 6y ago
This article is funny as the author seems very upset about misperceptions, although everything in the post shows that Japan is extremely homogeneous. Even 93% is an extremely homogenous country and showing a few example of famous Japanese people with diverse backgrounds doesn’t change the fact that they are rare. Doubling from 1% to 2% in the Japanese census doesn’t mean that Japan isn’t homogenous, it just means it is changing. Maybe a better concept is that Japan is changing to be less homogenous over time and in many decades it could be as diverse as its neighbors.
- mc32 6y ago
  The author inadvertently is saying that not putting people into ethnic buckets and overdoing ethnic identity results in a more harmonious society that doesn’t even know it’s diverse because it doesn’t care to track that.
Ceezy 6y ago
Japan is NOT homogeneous. The author doesn't mention that before the Yamato, people already existed within Japan's border. Their descendants are very much alive and form various ethnic groups(Ainu). On the main island you would see less of these kind of diversity but Hokkaido or Okinawa are just another world.
- mc32 6y ago
  The Ainu are a tiny tiny minority. Even moreso since (Yamato) Japan colonized the island. Okinawans are pretty much culturally Japanese with a different flavor like Kanto is different from Kansai.
  - Ceezy 6y ago
    Okinawa has its own language. And was assimilated by Japan in the 19 century. Kansai is not a recently added province. Then just look at the policies. How many were built to assimilate Kansai, how many were built to assimilate Okinawa. So difference are bigger that you may think. But i'm trying tell anybody if they are Japanese or not. Japanese people cannot say from one hand that they very different from Chinese people and say Okinawa people are very close to Japanese people. That just doesn't make sense.
  - leons_yarn 6y ago
    > Okinawans are pretty much culturally Japanese Try saying that in a bar in Okinawa and see how well it goes over. > a different flavor like Kanto is different from Kansai. It’s not uncommon to hear people from Tokyo describe people from Osaka as “not being Japanese.”
    - mc32 6y ago
      I’m not saying they are Yamato (trough genetically they have lots of Yamato), what I’m saying is that culturally the differ from mainlanders a bit, but not a great degree. Okinawa has been a part of Japan for over four centuries, so they’re pretty much integrated and there isn’t much daylight.
- 6y ago
11thEarlOfMar 6y ago
"To some on the Right, Japan is a paradise of racial purity..." Is it now considered a de facto truth that people identifying as "Right" are racists? If not, why bring up the Right in this sentence? When I was growing up, Right overlapped with Conservative, but racists were a discrete group of people. If Right now means racist, what is the label for someone with the political attributes of Right, but who is not racist?
- zarkov99 6y ago
  To be fair, the author mocks the left as well, right after: "while to some on the Left, it’s a bastion of xenophobia and isolationism" He is obviously parodying two extremes: the right's "racism is fine" and the left's "everybody else is racist".
  - CivBase 6y ago
    I'm not sure how to read that as mocking the left - unless the author is saying that liberals commonly overstate Japan's isolationist ideals and tendencies for xenophobia. Even if that was the author's intent, it's a pretty minor mock compared to being associated with ideals of racial purism.
- castratikron 6y ago
  Key word "some". He is talking about far-right politics
- aiisjustanif 6y ago
  Anyone can be racist. Political opinions need not apply, they might suggest, but that’s not safe route to judge others off of.
- bilbo0s 6y ago
  If Right now means racist, what is the label for someone with the political attributes of Right, but who is not racist? "Conservative". But in the US for instance, there are very few, say, fiscal conservatives. "Fiscal Conservatism" simply doesn't exist the way that we might have been used to seeing it in the 70's or even 80's. Modern administrations on the right consistently outspend modern administrations on the left for example. Which would have been unthinkable 50 years ago, but happens regularly today because on the right there are now different driving priorities. All of which is fine. There's nothing wrong with any of that so long as those on the right are representing the interests of their supporters. Like it or not, that's what democracy is about. But it leaves many, many people in society with no "political home" so to speak.
coldtea 6y ago
I think this article goes through a lot of micro-exercizes and micro-corrections and semantics to avoid the obvious conclusion that Japan is mostly honogenous, and to a far more degree than the US or a lot of European countries. Counter-examples don't refute a general observation. They can only refute an absolute statement. But when it comes to actual numbers and breakdowns (which would put a general observation into perspective or prove it wrong) the article is lacking, aside from the 93% which is already large. Also homogenous is not just race, it's also about culture, language, and so on, and Japan is homogeneous to a whole other level as a national culture. Those Korean-Japanese are no less Japanese culturally and operate entirely within the Japanese system/life. Not like some large communities create their own enclaves, ghettos with different languages, cultures, etc, as seen in some countries.
- Blikkentrekker 6y ago
  > I think this article goes through a lot of micro-exercizes and micro-corrections and semantics to avoid the obvious conclusion that Japan is mostly honogenous, and to a far more degree than the US or a lot of European countries. It depends on what one looks at. The U.S.A., culturally, most famously treats race as if it be an ethnicity. As such, in their perspective what they call “African-American" and “European-American” are very different. From where I stand, they are all “Anglo-Saxon”, and further subdivisions seem rather minute and trivial. They all live in a similar culture, having grown up with English as a native language, and tend to have very similar Anglo-Saxon cultural sensibilities that are shared with say Australia and the U.K.. that often seem uniquely and recognizably Anglo-Saxon to me. I do not really think that the color of a man's skin, having grown up in a very similar environment, speaking the same language, practicing the same traditions, and being influenced by the same values, makes him all that different and worthy of a different “ethnicity”. Many countries actually have a large population of recent immigrants. Did you know that Polish is spoken more in Ireland than Irish as of this moment for instance? These Polish immigrants have grown up speaking a different language, exposed to a different culture, eating different food and practicing different traditions. — they might be as “white” as the Irishman as a stereotype, but there is a greater difference to be had here than between the Anglo-Saxons of different colors. And, to note, the only Polishman I have ever had a good conversation with was quite dark skinned, but nevertheless Polish was his native language. He lived in the Netherlands but was a recent immigrant from Poland and quite catholic. Apparently both his parents were immigrants as well, but he was born in Poland and spoke Polish as a native language.
sradman 6y ago
According to the Genetic and anthropometric studies on Japanese people [1], modern Japanese people: > have about 9-13% Jōmon ancestry (which is highest in the Ainu people, who are largely of Jōmon descent) and the majority of their ancestry from the Yayoi people. > [Yayoi] are genetically most similar to Ryukyuans and Koreans as well as other East Asian people but quite distinct from the Ainu. WARNING: the second point can stir anger in those that culturally identify as Japanese or Korean, two groups with a history of animosity. Hopefully the controversy has diminished since the first genetic studies emerged. > If I hear “Japan is a homogeneous society” one more time, I’m going to write a long angry blog post. Oh wait…this is that blog post. I think this anger is misplaced. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetic_and_anthropometric_studies_on_Japanese_people https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetic_and_anthropometric_stu...
Blikkentrekker 6y ago
> If I told you that the U.S. was “93.3% American”, would you conclude that the U.S. is a homogeneous country? Because that’s exactly what everyone who cites the “98% Japanese” statistic is doing for Japan. I find this mentality to be quite common when talking to U.S.A.-men, the conception that “U.S.A.” is not an “ethnicity” but all other countries are. I remember a thread on 4chan a while back that asked for the user's ethnicity that had two kinds of replies: A) a country other than U.S.A.; B) a so-called “race”. That was not the only part that piqued my interest; the other part was there were a great deal of replies that, seemingly correctly assumed that all the replies that listed a race must be from the U.S.A., inciting such vintage 4chan responses as “Race is not an ethnicity, burgerfag. Just say you're from the U.S.A..”. I have definitely noticed this specific quirk of U.S.A.-men, an assumption that other countries are races, and that when I for instance say that I am “Dutch", that comes with the assumption that I am also “white”. > Yep, you read that right. Japan’s government doesn’t go around asking people what race they are. A curious behavior for a country that’s supposedly obsessed with racial purity, no? Such census too seem to be an U.S.A. idiosyncrasy. Most countries do not track this, as far as I know. There are no Dutch statistics on the matter either because it's pure self-report. There are statistics on how much of the Dutch population is a first generation immigrant, and second generation immigrant, which is more objective, but that's it. I have been acquainted with the knowledge that when applying for, say, a university position or even a vocational one, that in the U.S.A. one is frequently asked for one's “race”. This would seem highly suspicious in my milieu.
totetsu 6y ago
After living there many years, my imprisons; people as individuals are very heterogenous, but in groups consensus building and standard protocol is the modus operandi; some of this is just a matter of taste; there is a sore lack of pluralism and all its benefits to thinking, decision making, and experience across society; promotion of perceptions of homogeneous one people one language one county, is part of the nationalistic project to make people believe in Japan as a real thing; there is huge variation in regional cultures and languages; there is a huge decline of religional population and economy and hence diversity; really big cities require a degree of conformity of the population to be manageable; neo liberal capitalist ideals hold the balance power now and have subsumed the nation and its culture; homogeneity is very linked with consumerism; coming from a country where is kind of rude to ask where are you from, it being the first thing out of anyone's mouth when you meet them took me on a philosophical journey over the years; Japan's contemporary language planning policy, if not by design, then by tertiary effect serves to make people more confused and inept at cross cultural communication and emphasise difference rather than similarities; the whole 'let's build robots to replace our aging workforce', is just another way of saying let's not have people born in other countries come line here; Japan has been too Japanese for to long, and the before mentioned level of plurality had led to a lack of imagination on how to solve problems, and perpetuation of ideas detached from reality when it comes to ethnicity, nationality, etc; what happens to all this empty space and developed infrastructure when 100s of millions of Bangladeshis are displaced by sea level rise?; Most of the interesting the interesting parts of Japan and the historical circumstance the led it to be what it is today, have little or no relivance to discussion on other countries about the merits of an ethno state. The Prefectures keep and publish very accurate monthly data about internal immigration and emigration, including nationality, it wouldn't be heard to research this.
6gvONxR4sf7o 6y ago
> Given the data above, it’s obvious that [saying that Japan was a country of “one nation, one civilization, one language, one culture and one race”] was an aspirational statement rather than a factual one — a call for Japanese people to think of their country this way. It was a desire to create homogeneity out of diversity, through cultural and linguistic assimilation and through identification with the Japanese nation. This whole section was nonsensical.
pyrrhotech 6y ago
This author does a great job explaining that Japan is the most homogenous country in the G7. Just because it's not quite as homogenous as popular belief, does not mean that that popular belief is in any way incorrect.
acd 6y ago
I think Japan would benefit socially from having immigrants from south america. Benefit in being more open how people behave socially. South america would benefit from Japanese engineering. I propose they make a mutual swap.
- Blikkentrekker 6y ago
  There is actually a very significant and large cultural symbiosis between Brazil and Japan with quite a bit of travel and interbreeding between them. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brazil%E2%80%93Japan_relations https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brazil%E2%80%93Japan_relations > Now, more than 1.6 million Brazilians are of Japanese descent, making Brazil host to the largest Japanese community outside Japan. At the same time, Japan is host to the third largest Brazilian population, most being of Japanese origin. There are quite a few Japanese citizens now living in Japan that grew up in Brazil, and have one or two Brazilian parents and speak Portugese as well as Japanese.
ta1234567890 6y ago
As always, it depends on the point of view. When you look at a country from the outside (or as a whole), you'll mostly compare it to other countries and thus will focus on what makes that country similar to itself (and different to other countries). When you look at a country by itself, or internally, then you'll start making divisions to see what different groups there are. Homogeneity is mostly a relative measure - the article seems to be trying to make (Japanese) internal homogeneity a universally (between countries) comparable measure.
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meesles 6y ago
I'm not a fan of this article because it focuses on the most 'technical' definition of homogeneity based only on race, immigration, skin-color, etc. It also reads to me like "I know more about Japan than you" elitist talk which is all-to-common in fandoms of various kinds (and Japanophiles in general). When I talk about the diversity of Japan, I like to focus on the different regions of Japan. Much like we recognize distinct traits between people from California, Texas, Minnesota, and New York in the US, Japanese people have distinct characteristics depending on which region they are from: Okinawa, Kansai, Tokyo, or Hokkaido to name a handful. Beyond that each of those regions is geographically different and has their own local customs and cultural quirks which I've always enjoyed learning about. I think such a narrow view of what 'homogeneous' means is only used to serve a specific goal, and not to analyze the topic as a whole and in good-faith. Disclaimer: I grew up in Japan as a foreigner and still have much to learn, but it's my favorite place in the world by far.
zumu 6y ago
> In fact, Masayoshi Son IS a Japanese citizen, and the only reason people think of him as being part of the Korean minority is that he’s famous enough that the media looked up and reported his ancestry. Uh, his last name is Korean which makes it pretty obvious. This type of base level misunderstanding deeply erodes the credibility of the author. I agree that there is more diversity in Japan than many realize, but in my experience living there, it's still significantly more homogeneous than similarly prosperous Western countries.

105 points by grzm 6y ago

> If I told you that the U.S. was “93.3% American”, would you conclude that the U.S. is a homogeneous country? Because that’s exactly what everyone who cites the “98% Japanese” statistic is doing for Japan. ...yes? I find both those numbers insanely high, since the proportion of non-citizens here in Switzerland is 25% (country-wide) or 32% ([0], Zurich). And this doesn't exactly make the country a melting pot either. [0] https://www.stadt-zuerich.ch/prd/de/index/statistik/themen/bevoelkerung/nationalitaet-einbuergerung-sprache/anteil-auslaendische-bevoelkerung.html https://www.stadt-zuerich.ch/prd/de/index/statistik/themen/b...

csomar 6y ago
That's more of an indicator of the difficulty to gain citizenship. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swiss_nationality_law#Ordinary_naturalisation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swiss_nationality_law#Ordinary...
terramex 6y ago
Also, reasoning in cited sentence is wrong. If U.S. is "93% American" then on average 7 out 100 people you meet will not be "American", whereas for Japan only 2 out of 100 will not be "Japanese" - based on those numbers Japan is about "350% more homogeneous" country, not "5%" as suggested. It is a case of Potato Paradox, where small numerical differences between values given as percentages can hide big differences in real world. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Potato_paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Potato_paradox
- jonathanstrange 6y ago
  That's not a real paradox, which is why Quine called it a "veridical paradox." You're just taking your personal feeling about a difference as the primary criterion for evaluating the subjective significance of the difference, but these feelings differ from person to person.
  - rozab 6y ago
    Reducing... "That's not a real paradox, which is why Quine called it a 'paradox'"? meta
    - 13415 6y ago
      You mean in the same sense as every alleged policeman is a policeman and every false diamond is a diamond?
xorfish 6y ago
Yes, but the reason for that is, that Switzerland has a really difficult naturalisation process and is a smaller country. If all humans migrate a similar distance on average, you would expect that a smaller country that is surrounded by other countries to have a higher proportion of immigrants. Notice that for Switzerland, you need to use the term non-citizens and can't use the term immigrant. That is because a good portion of the non-citizens are not immigrants and have lived here for their entire life.
- cainxinth 6y ago
  Switzerland is also what I call (non-pejoratively) an amalgam country. It’s a got a lot of German and Italian influences. Just like Belgium, which is a mix of French, German, and Dutch cultures.
  - lesderid 6y ago
    AFAIK, Switzerland and Belgium are very different. Belgium is culturally very divided: the two major cultures (Dutch-speaking and French-speaking) are hardly mixed, especially in recent times, with the exception of Brussels. From conversations with a Swiss friend, I gather that the cultures in Switzerland are much more mixed in daily life.
    - cainxinth 6y ago
      I didn't mean to imply Switzerland and Belgium are similar. I was saying that they are countries with national identities that are heavily influenced by their neighbors.
    - ThePadawan 6y ago
      I live in German-speaking and Switzerland and the division between here and French-speaking Switzerland is massive. There's a reason there's a whole "trench" named after it [0]. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R%C3%B6stigraben https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R%C3%B6stigraben
africanboy 6y ago
TL;DR: ethnicity is not citizenship Switzerland has never been homogeneous and the recent immigration to Switzerland is very different from regular immigration elsewhere. It is an exception in the west, mostly due to low taxation for rich people or political reasons. for the same reasons in Lichtenstein 33℅ of the population is non-citizen and not surprisingly in Monaco an astonishing 75℅ of the residents are foreign born. If Italian people go to Switzerland they are counted as immigrants, but the Italian ethnicity is native in Switzerland, same goes for German and French people. The same thing is not true for Chinese or Korean people in Japan. Also 1℅ of Japan equals to 15℅ of the Swiss population.
- Cederfjard 6y ago
  Sorry for the irrelevant comment, but I’ve never seen anyone use ℅ instead of % before. If it’s a typo, how did that happen?
  - ezequiel-garzon 6y ago
    I hadn’t even noticed it, first time I see it too. It looks like it’s meant to stand for “care of”: https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/care_of https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/care_of.
  - BelenusMordred 6y ago
    Very likely a mobile typo. Keyboards often expose a lot of different utf-8 chars when you hold it down and you're always a few mm away from releasing on something completely different. Muscle memory and hard to see choices easily makes it a double.
  - africanboy 6y ago
    I did not realise it until you pointed it out I'm using openboard on my mobile and it is probably mapping the wrong UTF-8 character for that symbol.

627467 6y ago

Racial stats and forms asking about it are an underestimated force that perpetuates systemic racism, increases segregation, discrimination and undermines social cohesiveness. Change my mind.

JauntyHatAngle 6y ago
Why? The onus is on you to support your argument. Not on others to disprove yours with no sources.
africanboy 6y ago
ethnicity is a very important legacy for every ethnic group, acknowledging the existence of the different ethic groups living in a country means being more aware of the specific needs of everyone instead of crushing minorities under the umbrella of homogeneity. it's the laws that perpetuates systemic racism. For example in Japan Ainu, Ryukyuans and Yamato are different, have different languages, traditions and sometimes even different alphabets.
vladvasiliu 6y ago
Here in France there is no such thing as "race" or "color" or "ethnicity" from the State's point of view. The census doesn't ask anything related to race / color / ethnicity. As far as the state is concerned, you're either a French citizen or a foreigner. However, during 2020, there were a few cases of alleged [0] police brutality towards "minorities". This has opened a wider debate over the place of minorities in the French society which, of courses, started to talk about racism. There was a clear attempt by some parties to bring up arguments which seemed directly taken from US events, in particular related to the George Floyd case. Of course, those arguments were met with the "France doesn't see race, so there can't be racism" argument. Now I haven't followed those debates particularly closely, but from my (admittedly superficial) point of view, it's pretty hard to say that something is happening to a particular class of people because of who they are without acknowledging that that is, indeed, a class. In practical terms, how can you acknowledge that "black people are discriminated against if there are no black people"? My point is that it's way more difficult to talk about things you can't measure. This slides into "I feel that", which doesn't really allow to know whether progress is being made. --- [0] I say "alleged" because I haven't followed closely those cases so I don't know what the investigations concluded.

1996 6y ago

Carefully read the comment to realize this "feel good" piece is written for a western audience: > "This article was clearly written more from ignorance than knowledge and is not based on knowledge of the actual culture in Japan."

kelnos 6y ago
I saw that comment, and I think it misses the point. The author was not claiming that everyone lives in harmony and no one is prejudiced against those anyone else. The point is that, if you look at official stats and see "98% Japanese", that ignores the fact that many of those people aren't ethnically Japanese, because the stats talk about citizenship, not ethnicity. I think that comment actually proves the author's point, that there are many categories outside ethnically Japanese, and people there disagree on what it means to "be Japanese", lending credence to the idea that Japan is not a homogeneous society.

bjeds 6y ago

Not sure how interesting this is, but since the article mentions Scandinavia and "homogeneous society", that's not really true either. Unlike Japan, Sweden keeps track, not of "race" but country of origin for migrants or children of migrants. For Sweden, 36.5% of men aged 15-44 are either foreign born, or has at least one parent foreign born. This data is from the Statistics Sweden (SCB) for 2019. In this cohort, 62.5% are from, or have a parent from, Africa/Asia (Middle East), 9.3% from Western Europe/USA, 3.5% from the other Nordic countries, an 24.7% are from "Other" countries. I'm not sure about the data for the other Scandinavian countries.

5cents 6y ago
For Norway, 2020, I think about 25% of the population where either foreign born or has at least one parent foreign born [1] https://www.ssb.no/statbank/sq/10046114 https://www.ssb.no/statbank/sq/10046114
deleted 6y ago
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55555 6y ago

A lot of words in this article in order to make a very weak argument. I assume he started writing before he started researching. From wikipedia: > Chinese people in Japan are the largest foreign minorities in Japan. They comprise 0.64% of Japan's population. So the largest ethnic groups in japan which aren't Japanese all comprise a percentage of the population measured in tenths of a single percent, at the most. Now let's look at The United States: > Non-Hispanic white - 60.1% > Hispanic and Latino (of any race) - 18.5% > Black or African American - 13.4% > Asian - 5.9% > [continued] Ethnicity aside, what about same-generation heritage/place of birth (immigrants)? > There were a record 44.8 million immigrants living in the U.S. in 2018, making up 13.7% of the nation’s population. This represents a more than fourfold increase since 1960, when 9.7 million immigrants lived in the U.S., accounting for 5.4% of the total U.S. population. Japan's population is roughly 2% immigrants. Obviously, for almost all people who aren't racists, having a racially pure ethnostate isn't important. But Japan is pretty close to one, and The United States is a very diverse place. I don't know what the point of this article is. This is the kind of article where halfway through writing it you realize you're actually wrong and you stop writing.

peteretep 6y ago
Author also kinda goes in a circle by saying “just because they’re more Asian doesn’t mean they’re Japanese!!” and then pointing out that Korean Japanese blend right in and nobody’s the wiser, but a half-black Japanese is a Big Freakin’ Deal there. It’s a weird and poorly argued article for sure
kelnos 6y ago
> Chinese people in Japan are the largest foreign minorities in Japan. They comprise 0.64% of Japan's population. Does that mean what we think it means, though? Does that include people of Chinese descent who are Japanese citizens (who, as the author points out, are considered "Japanese" for statistical purposes), or (as I suspect) it only includes non-citizen Chinese people?
- 55555 6y ago
  > Does that include people of Chinese descent who are Japanese citizens. Yes. It does not include non-Japanese passport holding Chinese.

maallooc 6y ago

I migrated to a homogeneous country in Asia and I've never reconsidered my decision. To them I am and will always be a foreigner, but it's bearable to live in a stable society with no racial unrest, low crime rate, overall conservative society with a subtle note of progressiveness, and other good attributes that derive from homogeneousness.

arkitaip 6y ago

"About 2.2% of Japan's total legal resident population are foreign citizens" [0] "Japanese people make up 98.1%, Chinese 0.5%, Korean 0.4%, and other 1% (includes Filipino, Vietnamese, and Brazilian) of people living in Japan, according to the CIA World Handbook" [1] So Japan is exactly as ethnically homogenous as you would think. [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethnic_groups_of_Japan https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethnic_groups_of_Japan [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethnic_issues_in_Japan https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethnic_issues_in_Japan

paddez 6y ago
> About 2.2% of Japan's total legal resident population are foreign citizens You've conflated "citizenship" with "ethnicity".
- andi999 6y ago
  Normally that is a valid point, but for Japan there is an enormous overlap.
  - b3kart 6y ago
    > enormous How enormous? We wouldn’t need words like that if we looked at the right numbers.
    - EE84M3i 6y ago
      https://www.turning-japanese.info/2016/09/totals.html https://www.turning-japanese.info/2016/09/totals.html says: > As of 2015, a total of almost 581,000 people have become legally Japanese since the fall of the shogunate and the rise of constitutional "westernized" Japan. This seems consistent with other sources I found while doing a quick search. This suggests less than 1% of the number of citizens of japan was not born a citizen. Of course, some of those people will have children and those children's ethnicity could be not Japanese ethnically (or partially) but still the number of citizens of Japan that are not ethnically Japanese is quite small, and the number of citizens of Japan that are not ethnically east asian is much smaller still.

CorrectHorseBat 6y ago

>The refusal to gather statistics on ethno-racial diversity is unusual Is this true? I don't understand why any country would want to open the box of pandora that is gathering statistics on ethno-racial diversity. I always thought countries like the USA and China were the exception.

sheefrex 6y ago
As far as I'm aware, France and to a lesser degree Germany also don't collect this information. > https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jun/16/france-and-germany-urged-to-rethink-reluctance-to-gather-ethnicity-data https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jun/16/france-and-ger...
- kebman 6y ago
  AFAIK Sweden does not collect such information either. Norway does, however.
azernik 6y ago
Just off the top of my head for countries that also track ethnicity/race in government statistics: Belgium (because the Walloon/Fleming ethnic divide is so central to its politics), Germany (under the euphemism "migration background"), Russia, Israel, Lebanon... Ethnicity is an extremely important identity category, and if you want to manage that diversity you need information.
- ginko 6y ago
  >Germany (under the euphemism "migration background") That's very different from the US keeping track of race though. After a generation there's no way for the German government to tell the children from naturalized citizens from other German citizens.
  - tpush 6y ago
    > That's very different from the US keeping track of race though. You'll also never see a German statistic even using the word "race" for humans beings.

csomar 6y ago

Landing in Japan, I was surprised to find that people did not look that similar. I mean, this is Asia and all Asians look the same. But Japan had some yellowish, whitish, brownish people that were all, euh, Japanese. In a sense, they were Japanese because they behaved like Japanese. It seems that behavior plays a big role in how people can identify another one as being one of them. Robert Sapolsky has a great series in Youtube about Behavioral Biology. One of the insights he brings is about Arabs: According to him, Arabs adopted very long names so that they can avoid racial conflict. When two persons recites their names and find a family name that's similar, they assume that they are family and this helps them co-operate. Now that's BS (given a long enough last name, you are going to find a similar grand-parent name) but it happens to work. Islam had this too: Your fellow muslim is your "brother". It's time some countries realize that this has been a solved problem: To uproot racism, you need to rally your population behind common denominators and values.

DC-3 6y ago
> To uproot racism, you need to rally your population behind common denominators and values. That's all very nice but how do you apply it to the situation where you have a minority group with little to no interest in integrating into the indigenous culture?
- thaumasiotes 6y ago
  You make them do it anyway. It's interesting to note in this context that unlike most countries, China fully assimilated its Jewish population.
  - peteretep 6y ago
    I think forcibly assimilating minorities and China are a hard sell to mention together in a sentence without also mentioning Uighurs and Tibetans
  - hogFeast 6y ago
    True, I have heard they are assimilating their Muslim population very effectively too. They even have assimilation holiday camps, fun for all the family.

deleted 6y ago

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mysterydip 6y ago

Using a statistic that represents the country as a whole hides the fact that some parts of Japan are more like 99.99%, while others are more like 80%. The experience you have will depend on where you are.

hn3333 6y ago

Genetics is one thing, but Japan definitely did allow foreign culture into their mix. Just look at the movie "The Last Samurai" to see what I mean. I wonder if it's possible to put out a number for that. As for my Country, as Europeans we are heavily influenced by Americans, who we completely seem to accept as our cultural leaders. How do the Japanese feel about them though?

b3kart 6y ago
Ah yes, the famous Hollywood documentary “The Last Samurai”. :-)
- hn3333 6y ago
  :) Well.. it is an anecdotal representation of some bigger cultural change that happened, though, is it not?
porknubbins 6y ago
I would argue that Japan very definitely did not “allow” foreign culture in because the country was “opened” under threat of force by Matthew Perry. Unless you mean earlier entries of culture like firearms and Christianity in the 16th century but I’m not sure that entry can be attributed to Japan as a country that far back.
moreoutput 6y ago
The last samurai isnt tom cruise it's the dude he meets after being injured by the japanese government, when he begins to appreciate the shogun via his interactions with the last samurai. Comments on the movie tend to give the impression that cruise is playing an asian man rather than an injured western soldier.
Blikkentrekker 6y ago
From where I look at it, Japanese culture seems to be quite interested in adopting exotic elements very quickly and likes them for that reason. There is nothing more Japanese than a parfait in the afternoon, a good curry in the evening, and a traditional Christian wedding before attending the Sintou shrine for a final blessing.

IkmoIkmo 6y ago

I really don't know what the point of this article is, it hasn't answer the question it poses. It simply starts with a straw man argument that Japan is only thought of as homogenous because of the 2% foreign-born statistic. Firstly, that 2% statistic is telling, even though he pretends it isn't. It doesn't tell the whole story, but it is one of the best indicators for homogeneity, because the percentage of people born abroad living in your country, says something about the recent (last 2-3 generations) inflow of foreign elements (e.g. language, food, dna, religion etc). If you look at the statistics, Europe and the US are places where these percentages are very high. The US or Germany for example are around 15%. Given Japan is at 2%, that's actually 1 out of 50 in Japan vs 1 out of 6 in say US or Germany, a massive difference. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_and_dependent_territories_by_immigrant_population https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_and_d... Second, even if you look at the population which is born in Japan but has a non-Japanese heritage, the very fact so many blend in and aren't known to have non-Japanese roots says something about the homogeneity as well. The author references Masayoshi Son who is seen to be Japanese and only known to be Korean due to being a billionaire that journalists looked in to, isn't an argument against homogeneity (because, look, Koreans in Japan! Didn't think that did you?) but rather for homogeneity (because look, a 3rd generation Korean like Son isn't normally recognised unless he is a billionaire. Their entire culture has blended in and become Japanese to the point it is homogeneous and only detectable by DNA-test or investigative journalism. That shouts homogeneity to me. Son needed to be famous to be recognised as Korean ,not Japanese. But Obama or Harris didn't need to be famous to be recognised as different from the majority ethnic group in the US. People don't claim that Japan is completely racially pure. The claim is if you take a homogenous/heterogeneous spectrum and plot rich countries on it (e.g. EU, North-America, Australia etc), Japan is relative to such countries, much more on one side than the other. There are two main reasons for this. One is that Japan simply has had much less (permanent) migration for one. And two, even with high-levels of migration, there can still be two different responses: Integration or Assimilation. Star Trek's Borg are fully composed of new peoples, but they are assimilated. Everyone becomes Borg, unrecognisable. Whereas you can also integrate new peoples, your culture changes, you adapt to new elements, the population and the individuals therein can be recognisably differentiated. Japan is no Borg, but on this spectrum it also scores higher on assimilation than integration, vis-a-vis other rich countries like the US or Europe. And in that sense, Japan is among a few uniquely (relatively) homogenous countries.

JoeAltmaier 6y ago

OP missing the point. Its about culture, not all the details they're trying to hang on it (dna, nationality). You don't need to explain to a Japanese who's Japanese. They can tell within 2 seconds of meeting them. Its all about culture.

DoofusOfDeath 6y ago
As someone who doesn't know much about Japanese culture, I find this really interesting. Can you elaborate a bit on which details would provide that info?
- fredrikholm 6y ago
  Not Japanese, but studied the language and has spent a lot of time with native Japanese people. The easiest, least contextual example would be behavior in public spaces. _Everyone_ is taking great lengths not to disturb others, ranging from not taking phone calls in public to eating over thrash cans in order to minimize dropping food directly on the pavement. It's the constant consideration and respect for others (at the expense of your own individuality and liberty) that becomes glaringly obvious when one fails to meet the (giant) list of norms and implicit rules. If you haven't grown up with them, they are very hard to replicate without making mistakes, which is something native Japanese (generally) don't do.

mm983 6y ago

"Tokyo public schools will stop forcing students to dye their hair black, official promises" (2019) https://japantoday.com/category/national/tokyo-public-schools-will-stop-forcing-students-to-dye-their-hair-black-official-promises https://japantoday.com/category/national/tokyo-public-school... "According to a new survey published by Tokyo news outlet The Asahi Shimbun, 57% of public high schools in the city require students to prove that their hair color is natural." https://www.businessinsider.com/japanese-students-hair-color-2017-5 https://www.businessinsider.com/japanese-students-hair-color...

Blikkentrekker 6y ago
I find this to be a rather interesting thing myself. The Japanese logic of forcing the students without black hair to dye it black is that it would be unfair to not do so, as they would otherwise have a choice that other students would not, as they can obviously not be allowed to not dye it black. In many other countries, one is allowed one's natural hair color, but not dye it at all. In some others, one is allowed to only dye it into naturally occurring colors; one might argue that for Japan anything other than black veers close to this philosophy since 99% of Japan has black hair. In yet other countries, schools are not allowed by law to prohibit students from dying their hair in whatever color they might want. — I live in such a country so naturally from my perspective the obsession with hair color seems quaint. But one is I suppose to appreciate that in Japan at one point only street thugs would dye their hair blond so it became a certain dog whistle. It is not too dissimilar from many North-West European schools in the early 2000s banning any and all clothing of the brand Londsdale, until some courts overruled that, as the brand became a dog whistle for Nazis, as when carefully covered the lettering leads “NDSA” which is one letter short of “NDSAP”.

prestigious 6y ago

There may be more diversity in Japan than given credit but there is more similarities between a Korean and a Japanese than there are between someone from Syria and a French person. Pretty naive to gloss over that fact.

Ozzie_osman 6y ago
Actually out of curiosity, I'd love to hear a Japanese or Korean persons take on this claim. Im from the Middle East so Syria and France seem pretty different for me, but maybe if you're from the country/region being compared it's a lot easier to see the differences.
- imbnwa 6y ago
  There's a Japanese take on that claim in the article
- pkkim 6y ago
  My background: citizen of USA, son of two immigrants from Korea. Hopefully someone who actually lives in South Korea or Japan can step in here too. Subjectively, it seems to me like Japan and South Korea are somewhat culturally similar, but they are not the same, and the differences are important to people there. Furthermore, 20th century history has created a lot of hatred on both sides. These wounds are starting to heal with time and _I think_ the younger generation in Korea tends to care less about the issue. Many people in both countries go to the other country for tourism, and each country's cultural exports are popular in the other country. For an analogy (though not a close analogy, because the political situation is different): Israel and Syria are pretty similar though, right? Both speak Semitic languages, they have similar food, similar weather, similar religions, and often you can't tell them apart just by looking at them. So they should be friends. :)
Ceezy 6y ago
There is a border in common between Korea and Japan. I don't remember seeing one between Syria and France. Not to sure what's your point....

prepend 6y ago

This article is funny as the author seems very upset about misperceptions, although everything in the post shows that Japan is extremely homogeneous. Even 93% is an extremely homogenous country and showing a few example of famous Japanese people with diverse backgrounds doesn’t change the fact that they are rare. Doubling from 1% to 2% in the Japanese census doesn’t mean that Japan isn’t homogenous, it just means it is changing. Maybe a better concept is that Japan is changing to be less homogenous over time and in many decades it could be as diverse as its neighbors.

mc32 6y ago
The author inadvertently is saying that not putting people into ethnic buckets and overdoing ethnic identity results in a more harmonious society that doesn’t even know it’s diverse because it doesn’t care to track that.

Ceezy 6y ago

Japan is NOT homogeneous. The author doesn't mention that before the Yamato, people already existed within Japan's border. Their descendants are very much alive and form various ethnic groups(Ainu). On the main island you would see less of these kind of diversity but Hokkaido or Okinawa are just another world.

mc32 6y ago
The Ainu are a tiny tiny minority. Even moreso since (Yamato) Japan colonized the island. Okinawans are pretty much culturally Japanese with a different flavor like Kanto is different from Kansai.
- Ceezy 6y ago
  Okinawa has its own language. And was assimilated by Japan in the 19 century. Kansai is not a recently added province. Then just look at the policies. How many were built to assimilate Kansai, how many were built to assimilate Okinawa. So difference are bigger that you may think. But i'm trying tell anybody if they are Japanese or not. Japanese people cannot say from one hand that they very different from Chinese people and say Okinawa people are very close to Japanese people. That just doesn't make sense.
- leons_yarn 6y ago
  > Okinawans are pretty much culturally Japanese Try saying that in a bar in Okinawa and see how well it goes over. > a different flavor like Kanto is different from Kansai. It’s not uncommon to hear people from Tokyo describe people from Osaka as “not being Japanese.”
  - mc32 6y ago
    I’m not saying they are Yamato (trough genetically they have lots of Yamato), what I’m saying is that culturally the differ from mainlanders a bit, but not a great degree. Okinawa has been a part of Japan for over four centuries, so they’re pretty much integrated and there isn’t much daylight.
6y ago

11thEarlOfMar 6y ago

"To some on the Right, Japan is a paradise of racial purity..." Is it now considered a de facto truth that people identifying as "Right" are racists? If not, why bring up the Right in this sentence? When I was growing up, Right overlapped with Conservative, but racists were a discrete group of people. If Right now means racist, what is the label for someone with the political attributes of Right, but who is not racist?

zarkov99 6y ago
To be fair, the author mocks the left as well, right after: "while to some on the Left, it’s a bastion of xenophobia and isolationism" He is obviously parodying two extremes: the right's "racism is fine" and the left's "everybody else is racist".
- CivBase 6y ago
  I'm not sure how to read that as mocking the left - unless the author is saying that liberals commonly overstate Japan's isolationist ideals and tendencies for xenophobia. Even if that was the author's intent, it's a pretty minor mock compared to being associated with ideals of racial purism.
castratikron 6y ago
Key word "some". He is talking about far-right politics
aiisjustanif 6y ago
Anyone can be racist. Political opinions need not apply, they might suggest, but that’s not safe route to judge others off of.
bilbo0s 6y ago
If Right now means racist, what is the label for someone with the political attributes of Right, but who is not racist? "Conservative". But in the US for instance, there are very few, say, fiscal conservatives. "Fiscal Conservatism" simply doesn't exist the way that we might have been used to seeing it in the 70's or even 80's. Modern administrations on the right consistently outspend modern administrations on the left for example. Which would have been unthinkable 50 years ago, but happens regularly today because on the right there are now different driving priorities. All of which is fine. There's nothing wrong with any of that so long as those on the right are representing the interests of their supporters. Like it or not, that's what democracy is about. But it leaves many, many people in society with no "political home" so to speak.

coldtea 6y ago

I think this article goes through a lot of micro-exercizes and micro-corrections and semantics to avoid the obvious conclusion that Japan is mostly honogenous, and to a far more degree than the US or a lot of European countries. Counter-examples don't refute a general observation. They can only refute an absolute statement. But when it comes to actual numbers and breakdowns (which would put a general observation into perspective or prove it wrong) the article is lacking, aside from the 93% which is already large. Also homogenous is not just race, it's also about culture, language, and so on, and Japan is homogeneous to a whole other level as a national culture. Those Korean-Japanese are no less Japanese culturally and operate entirely within the Japanese system/life. Not like some large communities create their own enclaves, ghettos with different languages, cultures, etc, as seen in some countries.

Blikkentrekker 6y ago
> I think this article goes through a lot of micro-exercizes and micro-corrections and semantics to avoid the obvious conclusion that Japan is mostly honogenous, and to a far more degree than the US or a lot of European countries. It depends on what one looks at. The U.S.A., culturally, most famously treats race as if it be an ethnicity. As such, in their perspective what they call “African-American" and “European-American” are very different. From where I stand, they are all “Anglo-Saxon”, and further subdivisions seem rather minute and trivial. They all live in a similar culture, having grown up with English as a native language, and tend to have very similar Anglo-Saxon cultural sensibilities that are shared with say Australia and the U.K.. that often seem uniquely and recognizably Anglo-Saxon to me. I do not really think that the color of a man's skin, having grown up in a very similar environment, speaking the same language, practicing the same traditions, and being influenced by the same values, makes him all that different and worthy of a different “ethnicity”. Many countries actually have a large population of recent immigrants. Did you know that Polish is spoken more in Ireland than Irish as of this moment for instance? These Polish immigrants have grown up speaking a different language, exposed to a different culture, eating different food and practicing different traditions. — they might be as “white” as the Irishman as a stereotype, but there is a greater difference to be had here than between the Anglo-Saxons of different colors. And, to note, the only Polishman I have ever had a good conversation with was quite dark skinned, but nevertheless Polish was his native language. He lived in the Netherlands but was a recent immigrant from Poland and quite catholic. Apparently both his parents were immigrants as well, but he was born in Poland and spoke Polish as a native language.

sradman 6y ago

According to the Genetic and anthropometric studies on Japanese people [1], modern Japanese people: > have about 9-13% Jōmon ancestry (which is highest in the Ainu people, who are largely of Jōmon descent) and the majority of their ancestry from the Yayoi people. > [Yayoi] are genetically most similar to Ryukyuans and Koreans as well as other East Asian people but quite distinct from the Ainu. WARNING: the second point can stir anger in those that culturally identify as Japanese or Korean, two groups with a history of animosity. Hopefully the controversy has diminished since the first genetic studies emerged. > If I hear “Japan is a homogeneous society” one more time, I’m going to write a long angry blog post. Oh wait…this is that blog post. I think this anger is misplaced. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetic_and_anthropometric_studies_on_Japanese_people https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetic_and_anthropometric_stu...

Blikkentrekker 6y ago

> If I told you that the U.S. was “93.3% American”, would you conclude that the U.S. is a homogeneous country? Because that’s exactly what everyone who cites the “98% Japanese” statistic is doing for Japan. I find this mentality to be quite common when talking to U.S.A.-men, the conception that “U.S.A.” is not an “ethnicity” but all other countries are. I remember a thread on 4chan a while back that asked for the user's ethnicity that had two kinds of replies: A) a country other than U.S.A.; B) a so-called “race”. That was not the only part that piqued my interest; the other part was there were a great deal of replies that, seemingly correctly assumed that all the replies that listed a race must be from the U.S.A., inciting such vintage 4chan responses as “Race is not an ethnicity, burgerfag. Just say you're from the U.S.A..”. I have definitely noticed this specific quirk of U.S.A.-men, an assumption that other countries are races, and that when I for instance say that I am “Dutch", that comes with the assumption that I am also “white”. > Yep, you read that right. Japan’s government doesn’t go around asking people what race they are. A curious behavior for a country that’s supposedly obsessed with racial purity, no? Such census too seem to be an U.S.A. idiosyncrasy. Most countries do not track this, as far as I know. There are no Dutch statistics on the matter either because it's pure self-report. There are statistics on how much of the Dutch population is a first generation immigrant, and second generation immigrant, which is more objective, but that's it. I have been acquainted with the knowledge that when applying for, say, a university position or even a vocational one, that in the U.S.A. one is frequently asked for one's “race”. This would seem highly suspicious in my milieu.

totetsu 6y ago

After living there many years, my imprisons; people as individuals are very heterogenous, but in groups consensus building and standard protocol is the modus operandi; some of this is just a matter of taste; there is a sore lack of pluralism and all its benefits to thinking, decision making, and experience across society; promotion of perceptions of homogeneous one people one language one county, is part of the nationalistic project to make people believe in Japan as a real thing; there is huge variation in regional cultures and languages; there is a huge decline of religional population and economy and hence diversity; really big cities require a degree of conformity of the population to be manageable; neo liberal capitalist ideals hold the balance power now and have subsumed the nation and its culture; homogeneity is very linked with consumerism; coming from a country where is kind of rude to ask where are you from, it being the first thing out of anyone's mouth when you meet them took me on a philosophical journey over the years; Japan's contemporary language planning policy, if not by design, then by tertiary effect serves to make people more confused and inept at cross cultural communication and emphasise difference rather than similarities; the whole 'let's build robots to replace our aging workforce', is just another way of saying let's not have people born in other countries come line here; Japan has been too Japanese for to long, and the before mentioned level of plurality had led to a lack of imagination on how to solve problems, and perpetuation of ideas detached from reality when it comes to ethnicity, nationality, etc; what happens to all this empty space and developed infrastructure when 100s of millions of Bangladeshis are displaced by sea level rise?; Most of the interesting the interesting parts of Japan and the historical circumstance the led it to be what it is today, have little or no relivance to discussion on other countries about the merits of an ethno state. The Prefectures keep and publish very accurate monthly data about internal immigration and emigration, including nationality, it wouldn't be heard to research this.

6gvONxR4sf7o 6y ago

> Given the data above, it’s obvious that [saying that Japan was a country of “one nation, one civilization, one language, one culture and one race”] was an aspirational statement rather than a factual one — a call for Japanese people to think of their country this way. It was a desire to create homogeneity out of diversity, through cultural and linguistic assimilation and through identification with the Japanese nation. This whole section was nonsensical.

pyrrhotech 6y ago

This author does a great job explaining that Japan is the most homogenous country in the G7. Just because it's not quite as homogenous as popular belief, does not mean that that popular belief is in any way incorrect.

acd 6y ago

I think Japan would benefit socially from having immigrants from south america. Benefit in being more open how people behave socially. South america would benefit from Japanese engineering. I propose they make a mutual swap.

Blikkentrekker 6y ago
There is actually a very significant and large cultural symbiosis between Brazil and Japan with quite a bit of travel and interbreeding between them. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brazil%E2%80%93Japan_relations https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brazil%E2%80%93Japan_relations > Now, more than 1.6 million Brazilians are of Japanese descent, making Brazil host to the largest Japanese community outside Japan. At the same time, Japan is host to the third largest Brazilian population, most being of Japanese origin. There are quite a few Japanese citizens now living in Japan that grew up in Brazil, and have one or two Brazilian parents and speak Portugese as well as Japanese.

ta1234567890 6y ago

As always, it depends on the point of view. When you look at a country from the outside (or as a whole), you'll mostly compare it to other countries and thus will focus on what makes that country similar to itself (and different to other countries). When you look at a country by itself, or internally, then you'll start making divisions to see what different groups there are. Homogeneity is mostly a relative measure - the article seems to be trying to make (Japanese) internal homogeneity a universally (between countries) comparable measure.

deleted 6y ago

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meesles 6y ago

I'm not a fan of this article because it focuses on the most 'technical' definition of homogeneity based only on race, immigration, skin-color, etc. It also reads to me like "I know more about Japan than you" elitist talk which is all-to-common in fandoms of various kinds (and Japanophiles in general). When I talk about the diversity of Japan, I like to focus on the different regions of Japan. Much like we recognize distinct traits between people from California, Texas, Minnesota, and New York in the US, Japanese people have distinct characteristics depending on which region they are from: Okinawa, Kansai, Tokyo, or Hokkaido to name a handful. Beyond that each of those regions is geographically different and has their own local customs and cultural quirks which I've always enjoyed learning about. I think such a narrow view of what 'homogeneous' means is only used to serve a specific goal, and not to analyze the topic as a whole and in good-faith. Disclaimer: I grew up in Japan as a foreigner and still have much to learn, but it's my favorite place in the world by far.

zumu 6y ago

> In fact, Masayoshi Son IS a Japanese citizen, and the only reason people think of him as being part of the Korean minority is that he’s famous enough that the media looked up and reported his ancestry. Uh, his last name is Korean which makes it pretty obvious. This type of base level misunderstanding deeply erodes the credibility of the author. I agree that there is more diversity in Japan than many realize, but in my experience living there, it's still significantly more homogeneous than similarly prosperous Western countries.