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> if you believe that people are perfectly fungible and that an Indonesian man will become accepted as Japanese This is never going to happen going from the fi
by gklitz 3y ago
> if you believe that people are perfectly fungible and that an Indonesian man will become accepted as Japanese
This is never going to happen going from the firsthand accounts I have heard from non-ethnically Japanese people who are by all accounts Japanese. As in born and raised in Japan, Japanese as first language, Japanese culture, norms etc.
Japanese society is simply too racist or xenophobic at its core. If you don’t look ethnically Japanese you’ll never be accepted as Japanese. And that’s even if you are white and even if your partly ethnically Japanese. If you have dark skin you at in for an even tougher time, and any hint of it going back several generations will label you as “the outsider”.
It might not seem like it from the outside because the racism isn’t as outspoken in media as in the US, but imagine spending your entire childhood living with everyone you ever come across acting like you don’t belong to the only country and nationality you have ever known simply because your fathers father was Scottish, it’s rough and a hell on its own.
- A_D_E_P_T 3y agoThere are, quite literally, third and fourth-generation Korean-Japanese people who are still not considered fully Japanese. The most famous example is probably: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yoshihiro_Akiyama https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yoshihiro_Akiyama This guy is a fourth-generation Korean-Japanese athlete, but was still never considered Japanese by the Japanese fanbase, he was frequently booed and heckled, and he went on to compete under the S.Korean flag. And this guy's father and grandfather were born in Japan, and he looks ethnically indistinguishable from the Japanese. It's pure fantasy that second-generation Indonesians or Filipinos are going to integrate into Japanese society. It's going to be extremely painful, if it's attempted.
- vehicles2b 3y agoFor people who are looking for a book to read and also interested in learning about the immigrant life in Japan, I can highly recommend the historical fiction novel “Pachinko” by Min Jin Lee. It follows the story of multiple generations of a Korean family that moves to Japan sometime after the Japanese annexation of Korea. It describes in detail the struggles mentioned in the above comment across multiple generations of Japanese who don’t have a home in either Korea or Japan. (Another example of such are immigrants from Pyongyang, and returning after the Korean War would mean going back to North Korea.)
- ChatGTP 3y agoThey won't have a choice at some stage. The population is declining so rapidly, and they're struggling so hard economically they are, whether they like it or not,importing more and more immigrants and the truth is, they can be as racist as they like but it only worked when they had the clout to get away with it. It's less and less viable for them to continue on this trajectory. People might never be "accepted" but the face of Japan itself will likely be different in the future simply because they've failed to embrace change properly. Visit Japan now and there are more and more Americans, Australian, Indian and Chinese working, buying property and setting up businesses there. I'm not really celebrating any of this, I just don't see how an old and tired population can continue to put so much energy into xenophobia when literally one of the only things between them and China are the US military having a base on Okinawa.
- thriftwy 3y agoChina will very soon have exactly the same "old and tired" problems. What are they going to do, beat each other with clutches while being accompanied by their drip lines? And why?
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- ChatGTP 3y agoI guess you're a Peter Zeihan fan? I still think China will have a much larger army and navy than Japan. They have 10x the population and probably a similar decline in their populating expected.
- thriftwy 3y agoWhy would they want to beat up Japan? What's in it for China?