SNA (Tokyo) — Nike’s television advertisement depicting a multiethnic Japan stands out as a bright spot to close out the dreadful year of 2020.

Entitled “We Will Continue Moving: Myself and the Future,” the two-minute ad depicts a series of diverse Asian youths pensive about their lives in Japan. Some are running about and kicking soccer balls while musing about their identity and their abilities. A voiceover has them wondering if they’re “normal,” or living up to expectations. One girl, shown in closeup in a school uniform, is clearly a Japanese with African roots. Another boy, after eating a Korean meal with his family, looks up the Zainichi issue late at night on his cellphone. Tennis champ Naomi Osaka’s photo makes a fleeting appearance, with a question about whether she’s American or Japanese. A girl finds Japan’s culture of cuteness doesn’t resonate with her, and wishes she could just ignore it all. Another girl gets glares for going out in public in her Korean school uniform. After more cuts to kids practicing their sports skills, scenes follow of school crowds staring and group-bullying minorities. One lad, drawn attention to by the teacher in class as a new transfer student, feels pressure to be liked by everyone. Another isolated kid feels pressure to tolerate her ostracisation, and then the African-Japanese girl reappears, trying to ignore the other kids who are making a fuss about her kinky hair in a school bathroom. As the music swells, these kids then seek solace in sports, becoming appreciated by their peers for their talents as star athletes—to the point where one girl tapes “KIM” over her Japanese name on the back of her jersey.

The takeaway message in a final montage of voices is the treatment they’re getting is not something they should have to tolerate. They shouldn’t have to wait for a world where they can live “as is,” without concealing themselves.

Now, before I say why this advertisement is important, let’s acknowledge some caveats. One is that this is from Nike Japan, and like all corporations their motivation is to make money. It is a stunt to attract attention and sell products.

Moreover, Nike taking a high road with social justice issues is a bit ironic, given their history of child labor and sweatshops. Above all, human rights and business do not always mix well, and businesspeople are essentially opportunists. So let’s first not delude ourselves to think Nike is primarily motivated by altruism.

The other point worth mentioning is the attention that the ad got: 11 million views so far on YouTube. Naturally, internet trolls, xenophobes, and haters got triggered. Unfortunately, even responsible media (such as the AFP and BBC) gave them oxygen by reporting their overblown calls for a boycott, then fumbled the issue by getting soundbites from unqualified “experts” with no real training in Japan’s history of civil rights, social movements, or race relations issues. These rubes missed the mark by denouncing Nike Japan as a “foreign brand,” or dismissing these kids as “outside voices.”

This is worse than just lazy journalist hackery. This fumble was a missed opportunity to highlight issues that have long been ignored in Japan’s media—the existence of a growing number of visible minorities. So let’s make up for that in this column by acknowledging that Nike Japan’s ad was a big step in the right direction.

First, let’s recap how big 2020 was for minorities in Japan sports: Naomi Osaka not only became the highest-paid female athlete in history, but also advocated loudly and proudly on behalf of the Black Lives Matter movement. She and other visible minority athletes, such as Yu Darvish and Rui Hachimura, also pushed back on the notion that athletes should “shut up and play,” and stay out of social justice issues. Unfortunately, Osaka focused attention on racism in the United States, not racism towards her fellow visible minorities in Japan. But that’s where Nike Japan’s ad comes in.

The ad showed youth disenfranchised for their physical appearance or historical origin standing up for themselves, and speaking out to declare that bullying is not acceptable. It also showed them in regular Japanese settings, speaking native Japanese and dealing with everyday situations.

That matters. After decades of studying Japanese media, I’ve seen how muzzled minorities are in Japan’s public discourse. They’re generally portrayed as quirky temporary guests who amusingly stumble through alleged cultural differences, or as a destabilizing force by committing crimes, spreading disease, or fomenting terrorism. Even when the discourse is benign, the prototypical minority is a “foreigner,” meaning a white English speaker with questionable Japanese abilities—which is statistically wrong on all counts.

Voices directly from minorities themselves are confined to fringe foreign-language presses, or in quirky side columns highlighting cultural differences. Little airtime is given to the children of international marriages or generational minorities in Japan. Even less focuses on how “mundanely normal” their lives are compared with everyone else—because there’s no news value in that. Rarely are they given the opportunity to speak without native-speaker interlocutors and editorial filters to tell their own truths about Japan. And that’s what this Nike Japan ad did better than anything I’ve seen in a while.

The consequences of Japanese media either silencing or “othering” minorities are stark. The dominant self-image of Japan is that of a “homogeneous society,” which of course isn’t true.

But worse, this has public policy ramifications: covering up Japan’s racism. The Japanese government has long argued that there is no racism in Japan because Japan has no races. Any discrimination that might happen is therefore caused by ethnicity, or cultural misunderstandings, or nationality against “foreigners.” They maintain that there is no discrimination against people due to physical appearance (i.e. racial discrimination as defined by the UN Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination that Japan signed in 1995). This is why, they conclude, there’s not even any need for laws against racial discrimination.

Twenty-five years after signing that treaty, and despite its international treaty promises to enact legislation “without delay,” Japan still has no national law against racial discrimination. Indeed, it is the only advanced country without one.

This fiction of “no minorities, only foreigners” willfully allows the minorities born and raised in Japan, even those holding Japanese citizenship, to be treated like foreigners. And since guarantees of human rights in Japan are predicated upon having citizenship, it matters.

The acknowledgement of diversity in ordinary life is why Nike Japan’s ad is a step in the right direction. It may get people thinking and debating on a national level about the existence and lived realities of multiethnic Japanese.

While it’s a shame that it has been left to a commercial enterprise to trigger a long overdue debate that should have come from responsible political leaders, it is nevertheless welcome that Japanese society has been invited to think about issues that have been suppressed.

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