Living in Japan: Dealing with Racism
Hello loyal readers! 2020 is nearly at an end, and I decided to push out one last blog before the ball drops and we begin 2021. Today, I’m taking a break from the Narrative series to go back to Japan—a suitable topic as I am going to be returning to Japan next year! Up until this point, I’ve talked about Japan from the aspect of a person working in Japan as well as a student studying at a Japanese university. While these were two completely different and unique experiences, I wanted to go more into depth about the ins and outs of different parts of living in Japan as a foreigner, and dealing with things that come up from time to time.
So today, I’ve decided to talk a little bit about racism. Something I think is fitting considering the amount of racial tension that we’ve seen in 2020. It’s not a pleasant topic, but it’s also one that I hope I can shine some light on for people who may be thinking of living in a foreign country, Japan or otherwise.
When I was in college, I received some of the best advice of my entire life from one of my senior professors. He told me, “Try hard not to offend, but try even harder not to be offended.” This is one of those sayings that is easy to forget when you’re in the moment. Especially when you’re in a situation that feels unfair, or even aggressive. But I can’t stress to you how important it is to treat each situation differently, and try to understand where people are coming from, and why you yourself are reacting the way you are.
So let me start this off by giving a bit of my back story. I’m a California native. Born and raised in LA county. I am from a Caucasian family that came to California from the Midwest, and was raised in a pretty conservative household. It probably goes without saying, but being on the receiving end of anything racist was a completely foreign concept to me all the way until college. When I would hear about racist experiences from friends of mine who were of color, I would immediately dismiss them. To me, racism was something that happened in a history book.
After High School, I separated from my friends and family and decided to strike out on my own. I attended the University of Hawaii at Manoa, and it was here that I was really exposed to the race issue. In my first year, my apartment was broken into while we were sleeping, and several items were stolen. My roommates had a pretty bad relationship with our neighbors, a group of local guys who played on the football team and who apparently had more than a few run ins with one of my roommates in particular. Anyway, this roommate (we’ll call him Joe) called the police the next morning to report the burglary. Joe was convinced that it was the neighbors, but when he tried to tell the police officers (also two local guys) why he thought this way and asked what would be done about it, the police officer just shrugged and said, “our boys wouldn’t do that kind of thing.” Obviously there was no investigation, and after doing nothing, the officer left, leaving us with a broken window lock and probably $500 worth of electronics missing.
This was one of those “ah-ha” moments for me. Before this, when a friend of mine would talk about being pulled over by the police for “Driving While Black” or talk about an experience they had at a restaurant or some other place that was really negative, I would try to rationalize it and put the blame somewhere else. But now having been on the receiving end of it, I began to understand (slowly) the reality of racism in modern America.
So fast forward a bit to Japan. Now I’m the immigrant. Now I’m in the total minority. I’m 6’4, blonde, blue eyed, and hit my head on things often. Japan’s population is pretty much the exact opposite of the US. Extremely homogenized and hierarchical. Here, for the first time, I was subject to the stares and whispers. Most of the time it was from kids who don’t know better, but occasionally it’d be from adults, which was annoying. Would I classify those instances as racist? Eh. For the most part, no. A lot of it is curiosity mixed with maybe a bit of uncertainty. This wasn’t as much a thing in Kobe where there is a more significant foreign population, but in Hokuriku it cropped up more often. I remember one time on a train, there was a bunch of school boys sitting in the same row at me who could not stop talking about how big I was. It was hard not to laugh, but eventually I turned to them and said (in Japanese) “I speak Japanese, you know.” and they all erupted in laughter.
Speaking of trains, I must say that I have great respect for everyone who was brave enough to sit next to me on the train. So often there would be a person-sized empty space between me and the next person, and a bunch of standing people. At first I thought I might have terrible BO, but after talking to friends about it, I realized it was a common occurrence.
Encounters with the Police in Japan can be a bit intimidating. The first time this happened, I was riding my bike in circles in the parking lot in front of my friends apartment, waiting for him to come down. It was early spring and still pretty cold, so I had on my heavy jacket and jeans and a beanie, so I probably stood out more than usual. While making little figure-eights in the parking lot, a cop car pulls up next to me and an officer who was probably about my age comes out and asks me to stop, so I did. He comes up to me and, in English, asks what my name is and what I’m doing here, then looks at my bike and asks me straight up if I stole the bike I was riding.
So I answered his questions in English at first, but he was clearly having trouble communicating, so I told him I spoke Japanese and tried to re-answer his questions. Oh my lord, the expression on his face changed so fast you wouldn’t believe it. At first he was all piss and vinegar, but as soon as the first words in Japanese rolled off my tongue he completely relaxed and started smiling and talking to me about absolute nonsense. Asking about how old I was and my birthday, where I learned Japanese, how long I’d lived there. After a few minutes of conversation, he wished me a great day and rode off.
Would I have been pulled over if I wasn’t a blonde haired yeti? Probably not. There was definitely some profiling going on in that little stop, but I tried my best to stay cool. Even now, almost 9 years later, I still remember how kind he became after that initial back-and-forth in English. Turns out the dude and I were basically the exact same age, and being an officer in Takaoka city, I imagine he probably has a pretty boring job.
So if you get pulled over or stopped by an officer in Japan, just start speaking Japanese I guess is the lesson here, LOL. I don’t think that guy was a bad guy. Even if I was only pulled over for being a big ol’ foreigner, I don’t think that he himself woke up that morning, looked at a little Imperial Japanese flag he kept in his closet, shouted banzai to a picture of the emperor three times before donning his uniform and setting out to get them gaijin’s. And to be fair, my bike was stolen from me later that year. Bike theft in Japan is a real problem, so lock your bikes up kids.
I had one other encounter with the police when I lived in Fukui. To officers in a train station stopped me and asked to see my ID, and told me they were looking for fakes. It was a really short experience, and I kind of pushed to hurry it along as I was on my way to work. They basically just looked at my card and nodded a few times before telling me to have a nice day. Annoying, but whatever.
I did have two unabashed experiences, however. The first one was with this middle aged Japanese lady in a bakery. I went in to pick up some bread, and this lady came up behind me and told me to go back to my country. Like that was it. She just told me to go back to America and left. I won’t lie, I was actually kind of in shock. When I tell people about this one, everyone likes to say “what they would have done” if it were them. Like they would’ve yelled the living hell out of her and made a big stink about it, but I was just kind of taken aback and didn’t no what to say.
The second was at the bank. It was a super rainy day and there was a long line of customers that went out the front door and into the rain. I was in line to do a withdrawal along with a few other friends, and some dude behind us starts yelling at us “there’s people waiting outside, if you aren’t customers you should leave” to which all of us responded that we were customers, shutting him up real quick. That was actually the worst one. Clearly the four foreigners in the bank must be out of place. Not customers, oh no. Go fuck yourself old man.
To summarize. I talked a fair bit about my personal experiences here, and although some were worse than others, I want to stress that I had far more good experiences than bad. Most people were more than kind, especially after living there for a while and becoming a regular at bars and restaurants. You’d get used to seeing familiar faces, and curious people would come and start conversations. It was nice, for me anyway. I enjoyed making new friends out there a lot, and although yes, Japan does have a significant problem with racism on an institutional level, it’s no more than the US, and I never lived in fear because of it.
With that out of my system, I hope you all have a happy new year and I hope 2021 treats you all better than 2020 did. Please subscribe to my newsletter and leave a comment below on your experiences!
-CA
