I know that the immigrant countries with birthright citizenship are the outliers here, but when you tell me that the largest minority group in Japan faces discrimination, calls for their death, and exclusion from citizenship despite having lived in Japan for generations, speaking Japanese, taking Japanese names, and only being there in the first place due to Japanese colonialism… I dunno, man, that sounds kinda racist and xenophobic!
And because there exists some small number of racists and xenophobes in every known country with more than a million people, then you would say all those countries are racist also? There have been anti Korean protests in Japan, notable 2000 people in Tokyo in 2011 demanding that FujiTV stop airing so many Korean dramas. If that is racism, then so are Canada’s laws restricting the amount of American TV shows there. A lot of other street protests are organized against Korean schools in Japan, a larger number of which support North Korea, so these are more clearly political protests than racial ones. Races are social constructed, but are Korean and Japanese (Yamato) even separate races or just cultures? They are probably more similar than Scots are to Sicilians.
I mean I don't really find the label "racist" useful to apply to people, much less entire countries. Every culture on earth has the concept of the outsider, and every person's social world is constructed on concentric circles of affinity.
This post reminds me of an account I heard of a black American expat's experience living in France. At first, she was treated like a minor celebrity, but as she lived there longer people treated her worse and worse. Eventually she realized that it was because her French was improving; people stopped immediately recognizing her as an American and started mistaking her for a French citizen of North African descent.
So I don't know what Noah's point is. If he's saying that his typical reader, i.e. someone with money and social capital, shouldn't fear being treated poorly as a tourist or expat in Japan, I absolutely agree. That doesn't mean that it's "nonsense" to say that Japanese culture has elements of racism and xenophobia.
A Filipina domestic worker can absolutely do great in Japan as a guest worker, but if she settles down there, I think it's fair to say that her children and grandchildren will have a harder time than they would have in Canada. Similarly, I think the U.S. is a great place for black Caribbeans to emigrate to, but it's still true that it has problems with racism and especially anti-blackness. If Noah's point is simply that Japan is not the worst offender in terms of treatment of outsiders, I already knew that. I would definitely advise the Filipina domestic worker not to go work in the UAE, even temporarily.
All these countries are in fact racist, but I think it's been decades since people marched in the streets calling "death to black people", so I think it's fair to say there's at least some difference in the magnitude of the racism issue.
It's racist because half the Koreans wouldn't have even been there if Japan hadn't colonized Korea for so long and very nearly (and intentionally) eliminated the Korean language in the process.
It's just as racist as American continually trying to subjugate and erase the culture of all the people groups (Black and Native Americans most notably) that it has colonized and subjugated.
It's easy for any Special Permanent Resident to get citizenship. The entire Special Permanent Resident system exists because they don't want citizenship for political reasons.
Korean groups in Japan were opposed to Japanese citizenship via the mothers side, and remain opposed to Japanese citizenship via being born in Japan. They specifically don't want their kids getting Japanese citizenship to preserve their sense of not-Japanese.
There are limited benefits to becoming naturalized there but the big drawback is that Japan doesn’t allow dual citizenship. USA is the opposite, they like dual citizenship because citizens must pay income tax regardless of country of residence and they make it hard and expensive to renounce citizenship for this same reason. In Japan, citizens only pay tax if they live in Japan as do noncitizens residents, so they are happy if resident Koreans and others pay taxes but don’t vote in national elections.
I've lived in Japan for some years, hold a LT residentship, and I am asked quite regularly if I want to apply for full citizenship by my immigration lawyer ! And not because he's trying to make a paltry processing fee but because he is asked by the immigration office. I would if I did not have to renounce, in theory, to one of the best citizenships around, obviously not the one from my friends of the US of A.... ;-)
you mention Brazilians several times in your article. You should expand on that and explain why these Japanese-descent Brazilians are there in the first place, namely an explicit policy back in 80s-90s (when Japanese industry needed workers not yet because of low birth rates but because of booming economy) to import these "Japanese-blooded" people as guest workers on the (mistaken) assumption that because they looked Japanese that they were also culturally etc. similar. They could've imported labor more cheaply from nearer but went across the world to hunt for these hopefully more racially compatible imports. Can't think off top of head of another similar example. It's like Germany in 70s deciding to get workers from US citizens with German ancestry rather than from Turkey, or something.
interesting. although i would suspect that there at least part of the thinking is shared language. the funny thing with Brazilian-Japanese is vast majority of them didn't speak any Japanese, had very different cultural norms. It was purely set up on basis of ethnicity.
And the Japanese population in Brazil emigrated starting in 1908 as contractors for coffee growers, until the nationalists excluded them starting in 1934. Brazil still has the largest population of Japanese descendants in the world. Similar groups of Japanese workers were contracted by sugarcane growers in Hawaii, which accounts for the high population of Japanese Americans in that state. I guess the Japanese-Brazilians that returned to Japan shocked the locals by their acquired preference for coffee over green tea and soccer over baseball.
nitpick: "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?"
actually can be totally consistent with a monoracial country! For the same reason the US census doesn't ask respondents whether they are human or klingon.
I think this recording race thing is mostly an American (ie, North and South American) phenomenon. I grew up in a Scandinavian country, and I remember being both confused and offended the first time I had to fill in my race on a visa application (why is it called "Caucasian" again?).
Germany is similar, they only record country of origin. So if your grandparents were forcibly resettled in Kazakhstan after the war, you're considered to be Kazakh if you return to Germany.
I also hate the use of the word "Caucasian" to mean "white", especially when Russian white racists use the Russian word for "black" to refer to real Caucasians.
In most of these cases it's not about treating you better or worse - it's about getting statistics, so that they can understand where people are being treated better or worse on the basis of race.
Although, FDR used the US census data to find Japanese Americans for rounding them up for internment even though the data was only supposed to be used for demographic statistics. So if you end up with a racist government they may misuse the collected data.
In Scandinavia people are treated worse based on their ethnicity even though the government doesn't collect statistics on it. And the government still collects lists of people like the Roma. They just say it is for "fighting crime" even though the police list was literally called "list of Travellers" and 25% of the people on the list were children.
One out of three Swedes was born abroad or has at least one parent who was. Most recent immigrants to Sweden aren't European, either, so there are plenty of non-white "visible minorities," too. And Norway and Denmark aren't far behind Sweden, when it comes to diversity.
Like in Australia, Canada, and the United States, economically successful societies attract immigration. Go figure!
Hasn't Sweden had a particularly bad experience since 2015 with mass immigration by asylum seekers from the Middle East and Africa, to the point that it is widely cited by opponents of immigration as a cautionary tale?
But largely because of the failure to accommodate the sudden scale immigration or integrate new arrivals expediently. There was large-scale emigration to Norway and Denmark (and Germany and France), too, at the same time, without the same undesirable after-effects. It's fair to say that Sweden's own dysfunction here is very particular to the country.
What exact variables led to this unique dysfunction are hard to identify. But the comparison with Germany is pretty suggestive: Both countries had a huge (and immediately controversial) influx of non-European migrants in 2015, sparked by the Syrian Civil War. But the trajectory of integration and eventual public acceptance for those migrants diverged sharply between the two countries, seen most dramatically in their respective levels of unemployment: after 5 years in Germany, half of that migrant cohort were employed, whereas in Sweden less than half are employed even after a decade in Sweden (with women, especially, suffer high unemployment at <30% in work).
There was also exponentially lower (immigration-adjacent) crime in Germany. It's striking that such a higher percentage of young men who migrated to Sweden have fallen into the orbit of violent drug gangs to make Sweden now the murder capital of Western Europe. Why? It seems that the "original sin" of 2015 Syrian Migration Crisis in Sweden was a result of the severe administrative delays and local labor rules that delayed new arrivals from even being legally allowed to work for 1-2 years or longer, clustered them into marginal ghettos for housing (increasing segregation and economic isolation), and the lack of formal or organic "onramps" to societal participation that you see exemplified so successfully in the United States. So, in short, a lot of Syrians, Iraqis, Afghans, et al showed up at once, were put into tiny apartments in bad areas, were *legally prohibited* from working *for years,* and then sat around separated from their families twiddling their thumbs and being resented as layabouts. It was a master class in how to invite in a huge number of people ....and then totally alienate and marginalize them! This didn't happen in Germany, and most migrants were well-settled into German life after a brief adjustment period.
As a result, the initial anti-immigrant backlash in Germany died down so that other issues (including for the far-right) now have more political salience. By contrast, an anti-immigration mood helped to seat the current Swedish Conservative government, with the far-right as kingmakers. And that just makes this festering situation even worse, since the government isn't addressing any of the root causes of integration failure and just throw red-meat at voters by being nasty to the plurality of non-white Swedes who are almost all permanent residents or citizens now, so they're not going anywhere.
I believe the situation is worsened by the lack of birthright citizenship in all European countries. They talk of “third-generation immigrants”. And that includes citizens! That concept is inconceivable in the USA.
It creates some pretty absurd situations among families that I know personally who don’t share citizenship with their own underage children!
I see birthright citizenship as a pretty win-win situation for both the host country and the immigrant, since you’re going to inherently have a deeper connection with the place you’re born, especially when you grow up there. So why not take advantage of that organic connection to groom more future native-born citizens in countries where the birth rate is below replacement rate? The alternative is the crap-shoot of trying to attract migrants to come, who aren’t always as enthusiastic about their adoptive home and can find it harder to integrate as adults even under the best of circumstances.
If the fear is that you get “birth tourism,” is that so bad? Again, any kid born American or Canadian, even by accident of birth, is going to feel drawn to that place deeply. If the fear is “chain migration,” again, you have a situation where a family has put their hopes in the future through their children in a new country. Aren’t they then all super-invested in it?
Not sure if I agree about your view on immigrants in Germany...it's certainly not an issue that everyone agrees on, and many people (certainly most on the right) in Germany would argue that the integration of the asylum seekers has failed (at least somewhat)…
...and that's "about the same as the percent of Americans who identified as “white” in 1950", as Noah wrote. A year bracketed by "Operation Wetback" and Eisenhower's Executive Order 9981 (commanding the desegregation of the US Armed Forces). Which indicates that, for instance, societies do not automatically have great race relations even if they have Japanese-level homogeneity.
Being in Japan these days, it feels like the refusal to measure race is only unusual compared with the hyper race conscious countries of the west. I agree that there is a growing minority in Japan that also has racial diversity as a goal for the country but don't see it being a focus
In France it’s illegal to collect data on race, ethnicity and religion. This government enforced silence on demographics has not cooled the issue. If anything, it’s heated it up. It’s lead to internet posters making wild guesses based on things like rising rates of sickle cell anaemia recorded by French hospitals. Personally I think the French government would do better to just collect and publish the data properly. Knowledge is generally better than ignorance and internet guesswork.
People don't just handwave about Scandinavia (and Japan) being culturally/ethnically homogeneous — they do it with Europe as a whole! (To defend the gaping holes in the US welfare state, for instance, or to argue that integrating immigrants is intrinsically easier/harder in Europe.) Which is bullshit! You can point to cultural and national splits in one European country after another!
‣ Belgium: pillarization
‣ Netherlands: pillarization
‣ France: widely recognized north v. south divide
‣ Italy: widely recognized north v. south divide
‣ Spain: Catalonia v. the Basque Country v. Galicia v. the rest of Spain
‣ Germany: (ex-)FRG v. (ex-)GDR
‣ Switzerland: 3 official languages
‣ Kosovo v. Serbia (and Serbia's own internal split between central Serbia and rich, Hungarian-influenced Vojvodina)
‣ Albania: north v. south divide again
‣ Poland: Poland A v. Poland B
‣ UK: 4 countries in a trenchcoat
‣ Bosnia and Herzegovina (and Northern Ireland): school segregation by ethnicity/"nation"
‣ Estonia: about 1 in 4 Estonians are Russian
‣ Latvia: about 1 in 4 Estonians are Russian
‣ across Europe: de facto/de jure segregation of Roma
I agree that Japan is slowly opening up, but to imply that it pursues homogeneity less heavy-handedly than France or Denmark? Well, if we're cherry-picking statistics, the following:
--Japan: 1.5 million foreign workers on a population of 126.8 million (both 2018): 1.18%
--France: 6.5 million foreigners of which about 58% is employed on a population of 67.17 million (all 2018): 5,63%
--Denmark: 380,000 foreign workers on a population of 5,794,000 (also 2018): 6.36%
France and Denmark have 5 to 6 times the amount of foreign workers in comparison with Japan. Also, implying that France is about as homogenous as Japan? Have you ever been to France?
TL;DR: yes, Japan is opening up. But it's still very far away in diversity in comparison with countries like Denmark and France, thank you very much.
Do westerners mistakenly believe that Japan is more homogenous than it is, because most ethnic-minority people in Japan are of other East Asian ethnicities, not the ethnicities that westerners are most likely to see as problematic (chiefly African and Middle Eastern)?
There are many other marks of heterogeneity besides "race" but that would require multiple articles. Noah sticks to things amenable to measurement, which is my own predilection. Here I drop the "must be quantifiable" mindset.
You don't have to go too far back to find Japanese who only spoke their local dialect and couldn't understand each other. The spread of TV helped erase most of that, but you can still find Osaka-ben (dialect) on TV, and in schools in (duh!) the Kansai region (actually, Kyoto is a bit different). Diets vary by region. Generational gaps are large. A whole generation migrated from the countryside to cities from the 1950s into the late 1960s, boys and girls leaving home and school at age 16 to live in boarding houses and employer dormitories. Those cohorts are now dying out, but their socialization is very different from both earlier and later generations. Rural versus urban, suburban versus city center, all the "normal" demarcations.
And subcultures of every sort! Musicians, artists, academics, surfers, dropouts of many sorts, members of religious cults (the largest of which is large company careerism). LBGTQI+ communities. The deaf. Old elite descended from the Edo-period ruling families. Residents of small business districts who go to different colleges and seek spouses who value the family-centered lifestyle (though the growth of modern retailing has eroded that culture). There are many more.
Note I've lived in Japan off and on over a 50 year time span, as someone who can read and speak Japanese. In the vein of Noah's article, I've been in restaurants in Korea where the wait staff were ethnic Koreans from China who couldn't speak Korean. My recollection was that it was easy for them to immigrate, similar to the Brazilian-Japanese case.
I got back from my first trip to Japan about two hours ago to find this article at the top of my email list - suspicious or propitious. I was in Osaka and Kyoto with my Malaysian wife and youngest boy on a 'food tour' - they're massive fans. As a late boomer Brit I grew up with lots of prejudices and preconceptions about Japan. There were lots of Korean, Chinese, Malaysian and SEA tourists, quite a few Americans and a number of Europeans - no Brits/Aussies - but still the overhelming sense was very Japanese. Nobody in the restaurants we visited spoke English - google translate kinda works - and it was wonderful to be cut off in adifferent culture with no bloody KFCs, and very few McDs or Starbucks. After 30 odd years in Asian I've had ixed reports about being a foreigner in Japan, but my first taste was very positive. Thanks for the article.
You didn’t look very closely, KFC, known locally as “Kentucky” ケンタッキー is the most numerous chicken chain in Japan. It’s even common to get a bucket for Christmas dinner.
I certainly agree about greater homogeneity over time. Today, there are more foreign-born residents than ever before, and I don't think that number is going down due to demographic pressure.
“The Japanese 95% majority isn’t homogenous or worthy of a nation state but Israel being 60% Jewish is a Jewish state that deserves apartheid” classic pilpul chutzpah
I know that the immigrant countries with birthright citizenship are the outliers here, but when you tell me that the largest minority group in Japan faces discrimination, calls for their death, and exclusion from citizenship despite having lived in Japan for generations, speaking Japanese, taking Japanese names, and only being there in the first place due to Japanese colonialism… I dunno, man, that sounds kinda racist and xenophobic!
And because there exists some small number of racists and xenophobes in every known country with more than a million people, then you would say all those countries are racist also? There have been anti Korean protests in Japan, notable 2000 people in Tokyo in 2011 demanding that FujiTV stop airing so many Korean dramas. If that is racism, then so are Canada’s laws restricting the amount of American TV shows there. A lot of other street protests are organized against Korean schools in Japan, a larger number of which support North Korea, so these are more clearly political protests than racial ones. Races are social constructed, but are Korean and Japanese (Yamato) even separate races or just cultures? They are probably more similar than Scots are to Sicilians.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Korean_sentiment
I mean I don't really find the label "racist" useful to apply to people, much less entire countries. Every culture on earth has the concept of the outsider, and every person's social world is constructed on concentric circles of affinity.
This post reminds me of an account I heard of a black American expat's experience living in France. At first, she was treated like a minor celebrity, but as she lived there longer people treated her worse and worse. Eventually she realized that it was because her French was improving; people stopped immediately recognizing her as an American and started mistaking her for a French citizen of North African descent.
So I don't know what Noah's point is. If he's saying that his typical reader, i.e. someone with money and social capital, shouldn't fear being treated poorly as a tourist or expat in Japan, I absolutely agree. That doesn't mean that it's "nonsense" to say that Japanese culture has elements of racism and xenophobia.
A Filipina domestic worker can absolutely do great in Japan as a guest worker, but if she settles down there, I think it's fair to say that her children and grandchildren will have a harder time than they would have in Canada. Similarly, I think the U.S. is a great place for black Caribbeans to emigrate to, but it's still true that it has problems with racism and especially anti-blackness. If Noah's point is simply that Japan is not the worst offender in terms of treatment of outsiders, I already knew that. I would definitely advise the Filipina domestic worker not to go work in the UAE, even temporarily.
All these countries are in fact racist, but I think it's been decades since people marched in the streets calling "death to black people", so I think it's fair to say there's at least some difference in the magnitude of the racism issue.
It's racist because half the Koreans wouldn't have even been there if Japan hadn't colonized Korea for so long and very nearly (and intentionally) eliminated the Korean language in the process.
It's just as racist as American continually trying to subjugate and erase the culture of all the people groups (Black and Native Americans most notably) that it has colonized and subjugated.
Sociologist speak eww
Qatar does it the right way—you are free to work in Qatar but you will never be a citizen…never…ever…never!!
It's easy for any Special Permanent Resident to get citizenship. The entire Special Permanent Resident system exists because they don't want citizenship for political reasons.
Korean groups in Japan were opposed to Japanese citizenship via the mothers side, and remain opposed to Japanese citizenship via being born in Japan. They specifically don't want their kids getting Japanese citizenship to preserve their sense of not-Japanese.
There are limited benefits to becoming naturalized there but the big drawback is that Japan doesn’t allow dual citizenship. USA is the opposite, they like dual citizenship because citizens must pay income tax regardless of country of residence and they make it hard and expensive to renounce citizenship for this same reason. In Japan, citizens only pay tax if they live in Japan as do noncitizens residents, so they are happy if resident Koreans and others pay taxes but don’t vote in national elections.
Thank you ! Finally some proper insights.
I've lived in Japan for some years, hold a LT residentship, and I am asked quite regularly if I want to apply for full citizenship by my immigration lawyer ! And not because he's trying to make a paltry processing fee but because he is asked by the immigration office. I would if I did not have to renounce, in theory, to one of the best citizenships around, obviously not the one from my friends of the US of A.... ;-)
you mention Brazilians several times in your article. You should expand on that and explain why these Japanese-descent Brazilians are there in the first place, namely an explicit policy back in 80s-90s (when Japanese industry needed workers not yet because of low birth rates but because of booming economy) to import these "Japanese-blooded" people as guest workers on the (mistaken) assumption that because they looked Japanese that they were also culturally etc. similar. They could've imported labor more cheaply from nearer but went across the world to hunt for these hopefully more racially compatible imports. Can't think off top of head of another similar example. It's like Germany in 70s deciding to get workers from US citizens with German ancestry rather than from Turkey, or something.
I believe Spain has a program to bring in Latin American workers, though of course these immigrants aren’t racially homogenous.
interesting. although i would suspect that there at least part of the thinking is shared language. the funny thing with Brazilian-Japanese is vast majority of them didn't speak any Japanese, had very different cultural norms. It was purely set up on basis of ethnicity.
And the Japanese population in Brazil emigrated starting in 1908 as contractors for coffee growers, until the nationalists excluded them starting in 1934. Brazil still has the largest population of Japanese descendants in the world. Similar groups of Japanese workers were contracted by sugarcane growers in Hawaii, which accounts for the high population of Japanese Americans in that state. I guess the Japanese-Brazilians that returned to Japan shocked the locals by their acquired preference for coffee over green tea and soccer over baseball.
nitpick: "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?"
actually can be totally consistent with a monoracial country! For the same reason the US census doesn't ask respondents whether they are human or klingon.
I think this recording race thing is mostly an American (ie, North and South American) phenomenon. I grew up in a Scandinavian country, and I remember being both confused and offended the first time I had to fill in my race on a visa application (why is it called "Caucasian" again?).
Germany is similar, they only record country of origin. So if your grandparents were forcibly resettled in Kazakhstan after the war, you're considered to be Kazakh if you return to Germany.
I also hate the use of the word "Caucasian" to mean "white", especially when Russian white racists use the Russian word for "black" to refer to real Caucasians.
I live in Vietnam and the government here collects "race" data on the 54 officially recognised minorities.
I'm guessing you'd be less offended if you were Sámi.
Why though? I can't imagine wanting to live in a country where I am treated better or worse based on my ethnicity.
In most of these cases it's not about treating you better or worse - it's about getting statistics, so that they can understand where people are being treated better or worse on the basis of race.
Although, FDR used the US census data to find Japanese Americans for rounding them up for internment even though the data was only supposed to be used for demographic statistics. So if you end up with a racist government they may misuse the collected data.
In Scandinavia people are treated worse based on their ethnicity even though the government doesn't collect statistics on it. And the government still collects lists of people like the Roma. They just say it is for "fighting crime" even though the police list was literally called "list of Travellers" and 25% of the people on the list were children.
https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-25200449
Also, Scandinavia isn't homogeneous.
One out of three Swedes was born abroad or has at least one parent who was. Most recent immigrants to Sweden aren't European, either, so there are plenty of non-white "visible minorities," too. And Norway and Denmark aren't far behind Sweden, when it comes to diversity.
Like in Australia, Canada, and the United States, economically successful societies attract immigration. Go figure!
Hasn't Sweden had a particularly bad experience since 2015 with mass immigration by asylum seekers from the Middle East and Africa, to the point that it is widely cited by opponents of immigration as a cautionary tale?
Yes.
But largely because of the failure to accommodate the sudden scale immigration or integrate new arrivals expediently. There was large-scale emigration to Norway and Denmark (and Germany and France), too, at the same time, without the same undesirable after-effects. It's fair to say that Sweden's own dysfunction here is very particular to the country.
What exact variables led to this unique dysfunction are hard to identify. But the comparison with Germany is pretty suggestive: Both countries had a huge (and immediately controversial) influx of non-European migrants in 2015, sparked by the Syrian Civil War. But the trajectory of integration and eventual public acceptance for those migrants diverged sharply between the two countries, seen most dramatically in their respective levels of unemployment: after 5 years in Germany, half of that migrant cohort were employed, whereas in Sweden less than half are employed even after a decade in Sweden (with women, especially, suffer high unemployment at <30% in work).
There was also exponentially lower (immigration-adjacent) crime in Germany. It's striking that such a higher percentage of young men who migrated to Sweden have fallen into the orbit of violent drug gangs to make Sweden now the murder capital of Western Europe. Why? It seems that the "original sin" of 2015 Syrian Migration Crisis in Sweden was a result of the severe administrative delays and local labor rules that delayed new arrivals from even being legally allowed to work for 1-2 years or longer, clustered them into marginal ghettos for housing (increasing segregation and economic isolation), and the lack of formal or organic "onramps" to societal participation that you see exemplified so successfully in the United States. So, in short, a lot of Syrians, Iraqis, Afghans, et al showed up at once, were put into tiny apartments in bad areas, were *legally prohibited* from working *for years,* and then sat around separated from their families twiddling their thumbs and being resented as layabouts. It was a master class in how to invite in a huge number of people ....and then totally alienate and marginalize them! This didn't happen in Germany, and most migrants were well-settled into German life after a brief adjustment period.
As a result, the initial anti-immigrant backlash in Germany died down so that other issues (including for the far-right) now have more political salience. By contrast, an anti-immigration mood helped to seat the current Swedish Conservative government, with the far-right as kingmakers. And that just makes this festering situation even worse, since the government isn't addressing any of the root causes of integration failure and just throw red-meat at voters by being nasty to the plurality of non-white Swedes who are almost all permanent residents or citizens now, so they're not going anywhere.
I believe the situation is worsened by the lack of birthright citizenship in all European countries. They talk of “third-generation immigrants”. And that includes citizens! That concept is inconceivable in the USA.
It creates some pretty absurd situations among families that I know personally who don’t share citizenship with their own underage children!
I see birthright citizenship as a pretty win-win situation for both the host country and the immigrant, since you’re going to inherently have a deeper connection with the place you’re born, especially when you grow up there. So why not take advantage of that organic connection to groom more future native-born citizens in countries where the birth rate is below replacement rate? The alternative is the crap-shoot of trying to attract migrants to come, who aren’t always as enthusiastic about their adoptive home and can find it harder to integrate as adults even under the best of circumstances.
If the fear is that you get “birth tourism,” is that so bad? Again, any kid born American or Canadian, even by accident of birth, is going to feel drawn to that place deeply. If the fear is “chain migration,” again, you have a situation where a family has put their hopes in the future through their children in a new country. Aren’t they then all super-invested in it?
Not sure if I agree about your view on immigrants in Germany...it's certainly not an issue that everyone agrees on, and many people (certainly most on the right) in Germany would argue that the integration of the asylum seekers has failed (at least somewhat)…
Wait it’s 90% ethnic Japanese and...
...and that's "about the same as the percent of Americans who identified as “white” in 1950", as Noah wrote. A year bracketed by "Operation Wetback" and Eisenhower's Executive Order 9981 (commanding the desegregation of the US Armed Forces). Which indicates that, for instance, societies do not automatically have great race relations even if they have Japanese-level homogeneity.
Being in Japan these days, it feels like the refusal to measure race is only unusual compared with the hyper race conscious countries of the west. I agree that there is a growing minority in Japan that also has racial diversity as a goal for the country but don't see it being a focus
In France it’s illegal to collect data on race, ethnicity and religion. This government enforced silence on demographics has not cooled the issue. If anything, it’s heated it up. It’s lead to internet posters making wild guesses based on things like rising rates of sickle cell anaemia recorded by French hospitals. Personally I think the French government would do better to just collect and publish the data properly. Knowledge is generally better than ignorance and internet guesswork.
People don't just handwave about Scandinavia (and Japan) being culturally/ethnically homogeneous — they do it with Europe as a whole! (To defend the gaping holes in the US welfare state, for instance, or to argue that integrating immigrants is intrinsically easier/harder in Europe.) Which is bullshit! You can point to cultural and national splits in one European country after another!
‣ Belgium: pillarization
‣ Netherlands: pillarization
‣ France: widely recognized north v. south divide
‣ Italy: widely recognized north v. south divide
‣ Spain: Catalonia v. the Basque Country v. Galicia v. the rest of Spain
‣ Germany: (ex-)FRG v. (ex-)GDR
‣ Switzerland: 3 official languages
‣ Kosovo v. Serbia (and Serbia's own internal split between central Serbia and rich, Hungarian-influenced Vojvodina)
‣ Albania: north v. south divide again
‣ Poland: Poland A v. Poland B
‣ UK: 4 countries in a trenchcoat
‣ Bosnia and Herzegovina (and Northern Ireland): school segregation by ethnicity/"nation"
‣ Estonia: about 1 in 4 Estonians are Russian
‣ Latvia: about 1 in 4 Estonians are Russian
‣ across Europe: de facto/de jure segregation of Roma
I agree that Japan is slowly opening up, but to imply that it pursues homogeneity less heavy-handedly than France or Denmark? Well, if we're cherry-picking statistics, the following:
--Japan: 1.5 million foreign workers on a population of 126.8 million (both 2018): 1.18%
--France: 6.5 million foreigners of which about 58% is employed on a population of 67.17 million (all 2018): 5,63%
--Denmark: 380,000 foreign workers on a population of 5,794,000 (also 2018): 6.36%
France and Denmark have 5 to 6 times the amount of foreign workers in comparison with Japan. Also, implying that France is about as homogenous as Japan? Have you ever been to France?
TL;DR: yes, Japan is opening up. But it's still very far away in diversity in comparison with countries like Denmark and France, thank you very much.
Do westerners mistakenly believe that Japan is more homogenous than it is, because most ethnic-minority people in Japan are of other East Asian ethnicities, not the ethnicities that westerners are most likely to see as problematic (chiefly African and Middle Eastern)?
Noah, random Q: do you speak Japanese?
There are many other marks of heterogeneity besides "race" but that would require multiple articles. Noah sticks to things amenable to measurement, which is my own predilection. Here I drop the "must be quantifiable" mindset.
You don't have to go too far back to find Japanese who only spoke their local dialect and couldn't understand each other. The spread of TV helped erase most of that, but you can still find Osaka-ben (dialect) on TV, and in schools in (duh!) the Kansai region (actually, Kyoto is a bit different). Diets vary by region. Generational gaps are large. A whole generation migrated from the countryside to cities from the 1950s into the late 1960s, boys and girls leaving home and school at age 16 to live in boarding houses and employer dormitories. Those cohorts are now dying out, but their socialization is very different from both earlier and later generations. Rural versus urban, suburban versus city center, all the "normal" demarcations.
And subcultures of every sort! Musicians, artists, academics, surfers, dropouts of many sorts, members of religious cults (the largest of which is large company careerism). LBGTQI+ communities. The deaf. Old elite descended from the Edo-period ruling families. Residents of small business districts who go to different colleges and seek spouses who value the family-centered lifestyle (though the growth of modern retailing has eroded that culture). There are many more.
Note I've lived in Japan off and on over a 50 year time span, as someone who can read and speak Japanese. In the vein of Noah's article, I've been in restaurants in Korea where the wait staff were ethnic Koreans from China who couldn't speak Korean. My recollection was that it was easy for them to immigrate, similar to the Brazilian-Japanese case.
I got back from my first trip to Japan about two hours ago to find this article at the top of my email list - suspicious or propitious. I was in Osaka and Kyoto with my Malaysian wife and youngest boy on a 'food tour' - they're massive fans. As a late boomer Brit I grew up with lots of prejudices and preconceptions about Japan. There were lots of Korean, Chinese, Malaysian and SEA tourists, quite a few Americans and a number of Europeans - no Brits/Aussies - but still the overhelming sense was very Japanese. Nobody in the restaurants we visited spoke English - google translate kinda works - and it was wonderful to be cut off in adifferent culture with no bloody KFCs, and very few McDs or Starbucks. After 30 odd years in Asian I've had ixed reports about being a foreigner in Japan, but my first taste was very positive. Thanks for the article.
You didn’t look very closely, KFC, known locally as “Kentucky” ケンタッキー is the most numerous chicken chain in Japan. It’s even common to get a bucket for Christmas dinner.
https://www.foodinjapan.org/japan/japanese-christmas-food/
Although the best chicken is not fast food but karaage 唐揚げ (fried) and sumibi (charcoal grilled) yakitori 炭火焼き鳥.
I certainly agree about greater homogeneity over time. Today, there are more foreign-born residents than ever before, and I don't think that number is going down due to demographic pressure.
Well... learned something today... thanks
“The Japanese 95% majority isn’t homogenous or worthy of a nation state but Israel being 60% Jewish is a Jewish state that deserves apartheid” classic pilpul chutzpah