EMBEDDED
RACISM:
JAPAN'S VISIBLE MINORITIES AND RACIAL DISCRIMINATION By Debito ARUDOU, Ph.D.
(Lexington Books, a division of Rowman & Littlefield,
Hardcover November 2015 / Paperback July 2016)
EXTENDED SUMMARY:
“We accept
that you’re a Japanese citizen.But you don’t LOOK
Japanese.So we
refuse you service.”
Despite domestic constitutional provisions and
international treaty promises, Japan has no law against racial
discrimination.Consequently,
businesses around Japan display “Japanese Only” signs, denying
entry to all “foreigners” on sight. Employers and landlords
routinely refuse jobs and apartments to foreign applicants.Japanese police
racially profile “foreign-looking” bystanders for invasive
questioning on the street. Legislators,
administrators, and pundits portray foreigners as a national
security threat and call for their segregation and expulsion.Public rallies
advocate the disenfranchisement – even killing – of foreign
residents born and living in Japan for generations. Nevertheless, Japan’s
government and media claim there is no discrimination by race in
Japan, therefore no laws are necessary.
How does Japan resolve the cognitive dissonance of
racial discrimination being unconstitutional yet not illegal?Embedded Racism
carefully untangles Japanese society’s complex narrative on race
by analyzing two mutually-supportive levels of national identity
maintenance.Starting
with case studies of hundreds of individual “Japanese Only”
businesses, Embedded
Racism carefully analyses the construction of Japanese
identity through legal structures, statute enforcement, public
policy, and media messages.It reveals how the concept of a “Japanese” has been
racialized to the point where one must look “Japanese” to be
treated as one.
This augurs ill for Japan’s future.With Japan’s low
birthrate, aging society, and decreasing population, one hope
for Japan’s revitalization, after more than two “lost decades”
of economic stagnation, is immigration.However, if people
(including Japanese citizens) face phenotypical barriers to
integration and acceptance, then Japan will not be able to
reverse its demographic decline by creating “new Japanese”.Thus, the systemic
treatment of what the author calls Japan’s “Visible Minorities”
is the “canary in the coal mine” for Japan’s future economic
vitality and solvency.
The product of a
quarter-century of research and fieldwork by a scholar living in
Japan as a naturalized Japanese citizen, Embedded Racism offers an
unprecedented perspective on Japan’s deeply-entrenched,
poorly-understood, and strenuously-unacknowledged discrimination
as it affects people by physical appearance.
"Recommended Reading" -- Dr.
Jeff Kingston, Director of Asian Studies, Temple University
Japan, writing in The
Japan Times, December 19, 2015.
REVIEWS:
Arudou’s book is a
timely and important contribution to social and scholarly
debates about racial discrimination in Japan...
(Pacific Affairs journal) (read full review)
This book, though, is more than a
narrative of instances of discrimination and campaigns for
redress. The author also seeks to explore the roots of the
problem, which he locates in the legal apparatus of
nationality, the workings of the court system, the lack of
serious official mechanisms to combat discrimination, and
stereotypes perpetuated by the mass media.... This book is
an important addition to the literature on problems of
citizenship and minorities in Japan, particularly because it
highlights the distinctive problems of visible minorities,
rather than focusing on the large ‘invisible minorities’
(Zainichi Koreans and Chinese, etc.) who have been the
subject of much existing research.... This is an important,
courageous and challenging book, and it casts a sharp light
on problems which are often ignored or veiled, but which
have profound consequences for the present and future of
Japanese society. (Dr. Tessa
Morris-Suzuki, Australian National University; Japanese
Studies journal) (read full review)
Debito Arudou demonstrates that
racism is pervasive in Japan and that many individuals and
institutions deny this reality. He also shows that racism
augurs ill for a society that will shrink for decades to
come unless it changes how it treats visible minorities.
People who care about the future of Japan need to engage
with this pellucid and provocative account of one of the
country’s most urgent but neglected problems. (Dr.
David T. Johnson, University of Hawaii)
In this important and insightful
book, and based on a long personal experience, Debito Arudou
offers a sophisticated critical analysis of the way visible
minorities are treated in contemporary Japan. As immigration
of work seekers to wealthy countries is on the rise, the
issues treated here have wider relevance not only to the
conduct and future of the Japanese society, but also to many
other societies in the West and beyond. Highly recommended!
(Dr. Rotem Kowner, University of Haifa)
Hats off to Arudou for breaking
once and for all the Silence Barrier that has permitted
Japan’s profound racial discrimination to purr along
undisturbed well into the 21st century. Exposing at long
last the definitional acrobatics of Japanese and foreign
Japan Studies experts—who have argued that since there is
nothing we could call racist attitudes in Japan it follows
that there can be no systemic racial discrimination
either—Arudou lays out voluminous evidence to the contrary
showing how Japan actually operates in its laws, public
policy, media messages, and social ordering. (Dr.
Ivan P. Hall, author of Bamboozled: How America Loses the
Intellectual Game with Japan and its Implications for Our
Future in Asia)
From the immigration
crisis in Europe to the growing tensions around racism
and law enforcement in the United States, discussion of
institutionalized racism, exclusionary rhetoric in the
media, and legal barriers to equality seems essential
now more than ever. In his most recent book […]
cultural critic, activist, and scholar Debito Arudou
attempts to spark just such a discussion. A
critical analysis of Japan’s treatment of visible
minorities (people living in japan who do not display
phenotypical Japanese traits) and the legal, political,
and social mechanisms that perpetuate the exclusion of
such minorities from various aspects of Japanese
society, Embedded Racism is extremely well timed.
Arguing that racism operating through various
institutions in Japan is akin to experiences of racism
in the United States, Europe, and elsewhere, Arudou’s
carefully constructed work attempts to debunk the
dominant narrative of Japanese exceptionalism, which he
claims provides an escape from accountability to the
rest of the world. Describing how structural
racism behind institutional, legal, social, and media
narratives influences the degree to which “outsiders”
are constructed and consequently excluded from essential
social and legal protections, Embedded racism is an
important contribution to the fields of geography,
cultural, and area studies […] (Japan
Studies Association of Canada (JSAC) Newsletter, Fall 2016)
(read
full review)
FROM THE PREFACE:
This book is the product of nearly thirty years of researching and
living in Japan – from around the time I first visited in 1986 to
the present day. I have always been intrigued by how some
normalized images of Japan did not square with what I was
experiencing in everyday life. Despite being friendly and
hospitable to guests, very progressive in unexpected ways, and
open enough to outside things to co-opt them (even the music for
Japan’s national anthem was written by a foreigner), Japan has a
palpable undercurrent of exclusionism. It is both subtle
(e.g., ideas and proposals dismissed due to their “lack of
precedent”) and overt (e.g., “No Foreigners Allowed” signs – the
subject of my related book “Japanese
Only”: The Otaru Hot Springs Case and Racial
Discrimination in Japan). As I stayed longer, became
fluent in Japanese, and felt acculturated and comfortable in
Japanese society (to the point of taking Japanese citizenship and
giving up my American), I saw the exclusionism more and more – and
wanted to understand it.
As a social scientist, I like figuring out why societies behave in
patterns, i.e., “why people generally do this and not that”.
I eventually arrived at answers that transcended the tautological
“Japanese do this because they are Japanese”, i.e. something
“cultural”. That was important to me. I never liked
“culture” as an explanation, since a) “culture” is hard to define,
and eclipses individual choice and foible, b) it is often a “black
box” that encages researcher curiosity, and c) I assume that
people anywhere are generally rational: they do things
because those things are in their own best interests. I do
not think people are unthinking “prisoners of culture”. In
most cases there is a system – a collection of logics and
incentives – that occasions behavior, in this research one that
encourages people to behave inclusively or exclusively. Even
if those belief systems initially made no sense to me, they made
sense to someone. My quest in this book was to find out how
they made sense, and to quantify how they were underpinned by
rules, customs, mores, and procedures.
Exclusionism in Japan (especially that of the racialized ilk) has
been one big puzzle, taking me decades to deconstruct, and then to
reconstruct as a coherent picture of why a society as kind as
Japan’s can be so cold and unsympathetic towards people perceived
as outsiders. One conclusion I would like readers to
internalize from this book is that Japan should not be treated as
“special” – again, that “Japanese do this because they are
Japanese” thing. Succumbing to that narrative invites
all sorts of exceptionalism that is ungrounded – and it causes
enormous cognitive dissonance when Japan is called upon to observe
(but, as we shall see in this book, officially claims exception
from) the international standards of human rights under the
international treaties it signed. This is not just a matter
of normative principle. As I argue in the last chapter,
Japan’s racialized nation-state membership processes are so
exclusionary that they are undermining the very fabric of Japanese
society: Japan is strangling itself demographically on its
Embedded Racism.
In sum, Japan is no exception, especially to the world’s
racialization processes, and it deserves similar critique for
racism. I believe that Japanese society behaves like any
other – it just does it with an internal logic that is “special”
and “unique” in ways that all societies are special and
unique. This book seeks to unspool the internal logic that
justifies and embeds racism. I hope you find its arguments
compelling.
Table of Contents:
Part One: The Context of Racism in Japan
Chapter One: Racial Discrimination in Japan: Contextualizing the
Issue
Chapter Two: How Racism 'Works' in Japan
Part Two: “Japanese Only”: Examples of Racial Discrimination
Chapter Three: Case Studies of “Japanese Only” Exclusionary
Businesses
Part Three: The Construction of Japan’s Embedded Racism
Chapter Four: Legal Constructions of 'Japaneseness'
Chapter Five: How 'Japaneseness' is Enforced through Laws
Chapter Six: A 'Chinaman’s Chance' in Japanese Court
Chapter Seven: From Foreign Fetishization to Fear in the Japanese
Media
Part Four: Challenges to Japan’s Exclusionary Narratives
Chapter Eight: Maintaining the Binary despite Domestic and
International Pressure
Part Five: Discussion and Conclusions
Chapter Nine: Putting the Concept of 'Embedded Racism' to Work
Chapter Ten: 'So What?' Why Japan’s 'Embedded Racism' Matters:
Japan’s Bleak Future
Appendix One: Sakanaka’s "Big Japan” vs. “Small Japan”
Appendix Two: This Research’s Debt to Critical Race Theory
Glossary, Bibliography, Index
Hardcover, November 2015 (North America, Latin America, Australia,
and Japan), January 2016 (UK, Europe, rest of Asia, South America,
and Africa), 404 pages, $110 list price (discounted to $70.00 from
publisher direct; see below). NEW! Paperback version July
2016, $49.99 (=>discounted to $34.99 with promo code LEX30AUTH16directly
from publisher) in time for Fall Semester textbooks.
Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-4985-1390-6
eBook ISBN: 978-1-4985-1391-3
Paperback ISBN 978-1-4985-1392-0
Subjects: Social Science / Discrimination & Race
Relations, Social Science / Ethnic Studies / General, Social
Science / Minority Studies, Social Science / Sociology / General
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