Japanese Inability to Perceive Racism (Lack of Awareness) 日式歧視

Japan is a lovely archipelago, a magnet for tourism, but there is a more subtle negative side not obvious to casual visitors.

Almost every time I've interacted with Japanese people, either in Japan or abroad, I've always been charmed by their politeness, work ethic and unfailing desire to make strangers feel welcome.

However, many years ago, I realized that no matter how long foreigners have lived in Japan and how fluent they are in Japanese (extending even to a profound knowledge of history and the minutiae of Japanese culture), they will ALWAYS be considered outsiders. This applies even to Japanese with "foreign" faces.

Although I continue to admire Japan's social cohesion and civic-mindedness, this exclusionary tendency made me very sad and disappointed and led me to give up on studying Japanese. I feel much more at home. much less lonely in Taiwan's Chinese society.

A waitress reacts to a group of 100% fluent white people born and raised in Japan:

The waitress seems to be thinking: "Foreign-looking people speaking perfect Japanese just doesn't make any sense! No, that Japanese lady must be a talented ventriloquist able to imitate several different male and female voices. Yes, that's it! She didn't fool me: I'll speak directly to her instead."

Reactions from Japanese watching this video show that they completely fail to notice even the slightest bit of racism:

Japanese racism (or a milder term: discrimination/social exclusion) applies to similar-looking Chinese and Koreans (some of whom have been living in Japan for over one hundred years: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koreans_in_Japan) and even other Japanese. This is only human: Japanese are subject to the same emotions the rest of us feel: we feel uncomfortable in the presence of odd, poorly-understood "outsiders" (people not from our own social group).

Medama Sensei, a high school teacher in Japan, is doing important work to create awareness that there might be a problem.

Of course, Japanese racism should not be associated with the ugly behavior western people commonly associate with this word. At most, there are rare incidents of open hatred, mostly involving imbalanced people.