SNA (Tokyo) — Pandemics can bring out the best in people. Isaac Newton came up with theories on calculus, optics, and gravity while in quarantine. William Shakespeare wrote some of his best plays, and Edvard Munch created iconic paintings in isolation. Even today, we’re seeing heroes in the health care industry, volunteers sewing and distributing basic personal protective equipment, neighbors checking up on each other, and leaders stepping up their organizational skills. When the daily normal becomes a struggle between life and death, we see what people are really made of.

In Japan, we’re seeing much of the “keep calm and carry on” mettle found in a society girded for frequent natural disasters. But that grit hasn’t trickled upward to Japan’s political elite, which has ruled largely without accountability for generations, and at times like these appears particularly out of touch.

More concerned about the economics of cancelling the Tokyo Olympics than about the safety of the general public, Japan’s policymakers haven’t conducted adequate Covid-19 testing, exercised timely or sufficient social distancing, or even tallied accurate infection statistics.

As happened in prior outbreaks, such as SARS and AIDS, leaders have deflected blame onto foreigners. First China, then outsiders in general, starting with the quarantined Diamond Princess cruise ship (which, despite a third of its passengers being Japanese citizens, was even excluded from Japan’s coronavirus patient tallies).

But treating outsiders like contagion has consequences: Society develops antibodies, and Japan’s already-normalized discrimination intensifies.

Consider the case of Mio Sugita, a Liberal Democratic Party Lower House Diet Member from Tottori, who tweeted on April 4 that Japan’s foreign population should not receive financial support from the government. Foreigners should be the responsibility of their respective countries, she argued, despite them being residents who have paid into the system.

Never mind that Japanese overseas aren’t being similarly excluded. And never mind that this violates, for example, the principles behind totalization agreements for overseas workers, ensuring that Japanese and other nationalities straddling tax homes still receive a combined retirement pension. If you pay taxes to a country, you should get the benefits.

Sugita is well-known for her bigoted comments, including anti-LGBT statements in 2018 opposing government policies for same-sex couples because they don’t “productively” bear children. But how can a person like Sugita not only be elected and also remain in office afterwards? It reflects Japan’s pathological attitude towards minorities.

You can see how deep the pathology runs in Kimi Onoda, an Liberal Democratic Party Upper House Diet Member from Okayama, who similarly insinuated on March 30 that government subsidies should be denied to Non-Japanese residents.

What makes this case stunningly ironic is that Onoda herself was born in the United States to an American father. She even held American nationality until 2016 (when she was ratted out and gave it up), meaning she too was technically a foreigner in Japan.

That’s how dehumanizing Japan’s anti-foreign antibodies are—a self-hating haafu would even deny equal treatment to her own dad! What psychological scars from childhood bullies prompted Onoda to deny her roots in adulthood, triggered to pander to the majority, and disenfranchise her fellow minorities?

Granted, Onoda has offered sophistries about the intricacies of Japan’s registration systems, but it’s not complicated at all. It’s simply a reflex: In Japan’s general “culture of saying no,” exclusion is the default setting.

Remember that it took sixty years–yes, sixty years–of activist pressure before Japan allowed foreigners to be officially counted as residents and family members (and to this day, foreigners are not listed as spouses on family registries). Moreover, foreigners are routinely excluded from national population tallies, as if only Japanese citizens count as “real” people.

And it trickles down into the daily normal: Landlords, realtors, and shopkeepers at whim may refuse service to anyone who appears “foreign.” That’s in the best of times.

But these aren’t the best of times. In a pandemic, politicians blithely saying that foreigners don’t deserve equal treatment can justify all sorts of inhumanity.

What’s next, as Japan’s health system currently collapses? Hospitals specifically refusing entry to all foreigners? Triage by nationality? Reserving ventilators for Japanese only? It all logically follows from the vision that people like Sugita and Onoda are advancing.

A pandemic can bring out the best in people. But it also forces society to decide who lives or dies. And in Japan it’s ever clearer, to many in positions of power, that Non-Japanese don’t deserve to live as fellow human beings.

Epilogue: As this article was being prepared, the government announced that, despite initial media reports about only “citizens” (kokumin) qualifying, Non-Japanese residents can apply for government stipends like everyone else. That’s very good news. Now let’s see whether Japan’s already-strained medical system brings out the predictable “Japan’s health care is for Japanese only” sloganeering. After all, it’s the reflex.

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