My Experiences With Racism in Japan

It’s been hard sometimes, but I’ve learned important lessons

Photo taken by author

I wrote an article not long ago, shortly after I arrived in Japan, wherein I said that if I had experienced any racism while here, I was not aware of it. I feel it necessary now to follow that up and discuss just how drastically things have changed since then.

As soon as I got to Japan, I was told many anecdotes about how the Japanese are not particularly accepting of foreigners. Since I, like so many Americans, have always held a singular fascination with and admiration for Japanese culture, I was inclined to receive any negative news about the Japanese in the best light.

For example, I repeatedly heard that roughly 90% of Japanese homeowners will not rent to foreigners. Mind you, this is in regards to rentals of a year or more, so it’s not as if they’re refusing to rent to people who are in the country for two weeks that will be rowdy and partying the whole time. This is someone who has attained a visa, is likely working full time in the country, and is presumably living their day-to-day life like anyone else. The only difference then is that they’re not native-born Japanese.

Yet, I shrugged this off and took it as just their way of doing things. I also heard many anecdotes about how the children of foreigners, or even Japanese kids who were partly raised abroad, were bullied mercilessly. As I began to read into it, I learned about the lengths that many Japanese people who had to work in a foreign country would go to in order to make sure their kids could stay behind with a caretaker, so that they could avoid this eventual bullying. Still, this was only in regards to kids.

My view on the subject really started to change when I’d talk to adults who moved to the country, lived there for years, and spoke the language fluently because, to a person, they’d always say the same thing: “No matter what you do, they’ll never accept you as one of their own.” They paint pictures of being kept at arm’s length by associates and colleagues simply because they’re from somewhere else.

Then, as I spent more time in the country, I’d begin to garner my own experiences with racism and xenophobia in Japan. One blatant and upsetting example of this came as…