SNA (Tokyo) — Japan has a race problem. As I’ve catalogued for a quarter century, there are “Japanese Only” signs and rules on businesses nationwide. Refusing entry and service to all “foreigners” on sight, they exclude people who don’t “look Japanese.”

Now, before frequent readers of my columns think that I’m starting another essay they’ve read before, bear with me. An important update follows.

Refusing people “on sight” matters. There are easily hundreds of thousands of people in Japan who have diverse roots, including historical diaspora, children of international marriages, and naturalized citizens. That means “looking Japanese” doesn’t necessarily correlate with having Japanese nationality—Japanese citizens also get excluded.

So when you treat people differently due to the way they “look,” particularly physical features they were born with and can’t change, that’s a race problem.

Yet Japan still has no law against racial discrimination. There is nothing stopping anyone putting up a sign saying “no foreigners” and excluding anyone who looks “funny” as a foreigner.

The people being singled out here are what I call Visible Minorities. Their existence in Japan has been constantly ignored by Japan’s national narratives, academics, politicians, even our government, which has denied that racism exists at all in Japan. The argument basically runs, “our society is homogeneous, so we have no race relations, therefore no racism.”

That’s fiction. I’ve explored how racism “works” here in my 2015 book Embedded Racism: Japan’s Visible Minorities and Racial Discrimination (Lexington Books), where I outlined in detail how Japan (like every country) decides who’s a member or an outsider. I found that Japan’s laws, law enforcement, jurisprudence, political processes, and media messages all specifically normalize, enforce, and embed the notion that one has to “look Japanese” to be treated as a Japanese—not just socially but also legally. Again, that’s a race problem, with official sponsorship.

Then I went further. I prognosticated that Japan’s “embedded racism” would be Japan’s undoing, because our demographics are unsustainable.

Japan’s population is aging and decreasing. It is already one of the world’s most elderly societies and it’s only getting worse. By 2050, we’ll likely have so many elderly too old to work that they’ll outnumber younger taxpayers still in the workforce. Who will shoulder the tax burden of elderly pensions and care? In short, Japan could be insolvent within a generation or two.

Japan’s policymakers have seen this on the horizon since 2000, but they’ve been spectacularly inept at keeping the workforce youthful. Encouraging people to have more babies has not worked; Japan’s birthrate remains far below population replacement levels. Bold but empty speeches about automation and robots still didn’t address the pension problem because, you know, robots don’t pay taxes.

So what about the obvious solution of bringing in people and making them Japanese, i.e., immigration? No dice. Even Japan’s most prominent demographic scientists have refused to countenance population inflows in their science. Meanwhile xenophobic politicians steadfastly assert that Japan will have no immigration policy—just exploitative revolving-door visas with increasingly arduous options even just for permanent residency. Thus Japan’s bloodline-based and phenotypical requirements for membership are so strict that Japan simply cannot create enough “new Japanese.”

Still, some might say, hand me a hanky for my crocodile tears. So what if Japan fades into economic senescence? It’s their problem, not mine.

Actually, it’s the world’s problem, and here is the important update I was talking about.

In my new Second Edition of Embedded Racism (2022), I’m now arguing that Japan’s long-ignored racial discrimination undermines the rest of the world, especially its liberal democracies, because Japan is in fact a fast-breeder reactor of radioactive racism.

Since the end of World War II, the capitalistic side of the world, particularly the United States, willfully ignored and indulged Japan’s explicit expressions of racial and ethnic superiority. After all, the conservatives of the world would rather Japan be right-of-center and anti-communist. So they funded conservative governments and offered favorable access to international markets, ensuring that Japan got rich and deferential.

For what do the conservatives care if Japan violates its human rights treaties or inflames regional tensions, through historical denialism and the arrogance of racial superiority? As long as Japan keeps hosting the bases, buying the weapons, and acting as America’s unsinkable aircraft carrier in Asia, they have in them a harmless and controllable ally.

Except that it’s not. Here’s where the chickens come home to roost.

One axiom in this field of study is that if you ignore racism, it spreads. Bigots exist in every society, and if they realize they can get away with discriminating against people, they’ll gleefully do it, especially if they have templates to follow.

Japan offers those templates. One thing that Japan has gotten really good at is keeping certain types of people perpetually disenfranchised. For example, women are denied stable jobs and careers. Generational and historical minorities are denied equal opportunities. Even foreign residents are so socialized by the constant narrative that they don’t “belong” that many actually believe they are merely “guests” in Japan, unworthy of equal treatment no matter how long they’ve lived in and contributed to Japanese society.

The disenfranchisement mechanisms are of course embedded within the legal and social mechanisms mentioned above. But what makes everything different now is the prevalence of social media to spread them.

Japan’s particularly nasty online bullying culture (start with 2channel) has also gotten really good at ganging up on people, doxxing, and fomenting public fear through anonymous threats and actions. Decades of free passes has allowed Japan’s hateful proponents of racial superiority to beta-test the means to mobilize themselves and target others. They’ve perfected ways to anonymously and unaccountably police people’s identities, public expression, and livelihoods. You express an unpopular or minority view, then you’d better brace yourself for a quick online backlash that might destroy your career.

These netto uyoku (internet rightists) are generally more motivated, organized, and funded (not to mention nationalistic) than the liberal side of society, so Japan’s conservatives, who have almost always been in power here, are quite happy to pander to this crowd. Their synergy keeps minority views that don’t conform to the national narrative from affecting the ballot box.

In short, embedded racism has made Japan into the world’s template “ethnostate.”

That is to say, to numerous white supremacists worldwide, Japan is the model for a society organized along beliefs of its own ethnic purity. As one of the richest and most-respected countries in the world, Japan, unlike other rich countries, has prospered while keeping minorities and migrants to a minimum.

The Jared Taylors, Richard Spencers, and Anders Breiviks of the world have all enviously noted Japan’s ability to reserve “Japan for the Japanese” and keep out immigrants. They see Japan’s anti-immigration policies not only as the means to avoid the complications of race relations, but also to cleanse their societies of mongrel influences.

But ethnic cleansing requires the death of liberal democracy, as only certain people—the dominant majority—are “entitled” to hold power in a polity. So the mongrels already here spoiling things must be disenfranchised and removed through brute force. This is where the appeal of authoritarianism comes in.

So ethnocentrists have aped the netto uyoku to mobilize and target their minorities and liberal views, leveraging xenophobic fear and hate to gain political power. It started in the United States with online groups like 4chan and 8kun, and it has grown to capture whole media networks that constantly support xenophobic conservatism and denounce diversity.

It has metastasized. The Guardian of March 20, 2021, notes that since the end of 2020 “more than 136 channels in English, German, Japanese, Korean and Italian have sprung up, adding tens of thousands of followers on a daily basis.” In less than three months, that’s an astounding statistic.

Likewise, we’ve seen the rise of far-right groups and authoritarian movements in the United Kingdom, Hungary, Poland, the Philippines, Brazil, Hong Kong, Turkey, and India. In the United States, extremists have captured an entire political party behind Donald Trump.

Did you notice how many of Trump’s slogans, strategies, and border policies echoed what has been going on in Japan for decades? We know they work because of Japan. Even Steve Bannon, Trump’s campaign strategist, expressly admitted that he modeled Trump’s movement on Japan’s former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, whom he called “Trump before Trump.”

The conclusion is that my second edition of Embedded Racism is a clarion call for liberals and progressives to wake up, and get ready to defend democracy from the ethnocentrists. Fight with all your might the fiction that the way to deal with a race problem is to exclude and cleanse races from your society. That’s the Japan template. Don’t let it be yours.

Again, if you leave discrimination alone, it spreads. Leaving Japan alone to practice its embedded racism has finally reached the point of blowback. It’s time for a new set of templates to fight racial discrimination in the world, including and especially Japan’s.

Overseas policymakers should also be ready to make Japan take responsibility for what it’s wrought upon the world. It’s time to pressure the Japanese government to observe its treaty promise to the United Nations more than 25 years ago—passing a law against racial discrimination—and begin the process of enfranchising its minority voices.

That includes doing more than just scolding or issuing strongly worded letters. I suggest putting pressure where Japan’s elites care—limiting access to overseas markets. Or else Japan will remain a fast breeder reactor of racism irradiating the rest of the democratic world.

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