{"id":14456,"date":"2017-01-16T10:50:41","date_gmt":"2017-01-16T20:50:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.debito.org\/?p=14456"},"modified":"2017-01-16T10:50:41","modified_gmt":"2017-01-16T20:50:41","slug":"pacific-affairs-journal-book-review-of-embedded-racism-a-timely-and-important-contribution-to-social-and-scholarly-debates-about-racial-discrimination-in-japan","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.debito.org\/?p=14456","title":{"rendered":"Pacific Affairs journal book review of “Embedded Racism”: “a timely and important contribution to social and scholarly debates about racial discrimination in Japan”"},"content":{"rendered":"

Books, eBooks, and more from Dr. ARUDOU, Debito (click on icon):
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Book Review in Pacific Affairs<\/a>\u00a0Journal
\nhttp:\/\/www.pacificaffairs.ubc.ca\/book-reviews\/book-reviews-2\/forthcoming-book-reviews\/<\/a> (page down)<\/p>\n

EMBEDDED RACISM<\/a>: Japan\u2019s Visible Minorities and Racial Discrimination. By Debito Arudou. Lanham: Lexington Books, 2015. xxvi, 349 pp. (Tables, figures.) US$110.00, cloth. ISBN 978-1-4985-1390-6.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Arudou\u2019s book is a timely and important contribution to social and scholarly debates about racial discrimination in Japan. It comes on the heels of both the Japanese government\u2019s 2014 official claim that an anti-racial discrimination law is not necessary (third combined report to the United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination [CERD]), and recent developments in Japan that have politicized the issues of dual nationality and hate speech, and even the Miss Universe Japan pageant.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

Arudou draws on a quarter-century of research involving personal interviews, action research, and cataloguing, to highlight micro-level observations that illuminate the broader macro-level structural workings of the racialized dimensions of what it means to be \u201cJapanese\u201d in Japan. The contribution of this book is not only in its richness of information, but also in Arudou\u2019s focus on a paradoxical blind spot in both the quotidian status quo understandings of and academic discourses on racialized social dynamics in Japan: the invisibility of visible minorities. Borrowing from Critical Race Theory (CRT), and applying its analytical paradigms present in Whiteness Studies to the case of Japan, Arudou argues that \u201cthe same dynamics can be seen in the Japanese example, by substituting \u2018White\u2019 with \u2018Japanese\u2019\u201d (322-323). He introduces the concept of embedded racism to describe the deeply internalized understandings of \u201cJapaneseness\u201d that structurally permeate the psyche and sociolegal elements of Japanese society, resulting in systemic discriminatory treatments of individuals based on visible differences.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

Instead of defining the Self\/Other binary in oft-conceptualized terms of citizenship, he uses an original Wajin\/non-Wajin heuristic. By original Wajin, he refers to visually identifiable \u201cJapanese\u201d who are members of Japan\u2019s dominant and privileged majority, and for non-Wajin he refers to both invisible (e.g., ethnic minorities who can pass as \u201cJapanese\u201d) and visible (Gaijin, foreigners and naturalized Japanese citizens who do not \u201clook Japanese\u201d) minorities who are not members of Japan\u2019s dominant and privileged majority. He uses this heuristic to parse out the nuanced sociolegal-structural logics that differentiate between not only citizens and non-citizens, but also non-citizens who can phenotypically pass as \u201cJapanese\u201d and citizens who cannot, in which the former is often given preferential sociolegal treatment, and the latter is often subject to overt racial discrimination.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

More specifically, the book opens with a theoretical primer on race and the universal processes of racialization and nation-state formation. The author then critiques how studies on Japan often suffer from flawed conceptualizations of foreignness, viewing it as a function of either ethnic differences within the Asian-phenotype community or legal membership status, thereby overlooking overt discrimination against visible minorities that are racial in nature.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

The first chapter contextualizes racial discrimination in Japan and explicates Arudou\u2019s usage of the concept of visible minority and his theory of embedded racism in the context of Japan. The second chapter then addresses the historical roots of extant racialized understandings of \u201cJapaneseness\u201d by tracing national self-image narratives that Arudou argues undergird the dynamics of present-day treatments of foreigners in Japan. The next chapter surveys approximately 470 cases of establishments that have engaged in racialized refusals of entry and services and three civil court lawsuits, to demonstrate that \u201cJapaneseness\u201d is determined by racialized paradigms such as physical appearances (37\u201338).<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

In chapter 4, Arudou explains how Japanese nationality laws, family and resident registries, and policing regulations\/practices constitute the legal underpinnings of the racialized \u201cJapanese\u201d identity, and asserts that Japan\u2019s legal definition of a \u201cJapanese citizen\u201d is closely intertwined with \u201cJapanese bloodlines\u201d (11). The following chapter shifts the focus to how \u201cJapaneseness\u201d is enforced through exclusionary education laws, visa (residence status) regimes, and racial profiling in security policing. This chapter is supplemented with chapter 6, which highlights differential judicial treatments of those who are seen as \u201cJapanese,\u201d and those who are not. Chapter 7 details how media representations of \u201cforeigners\u201d and \u201cJapanese\u201d as well as the criminalization of \u201cforeigners\u201d popularize the racialized narratives of \u201cJapaneseness\u201d established by the processes discussed in chapters 4 to 6.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

Chapter 8 shifts gears as Arudou turns his attention to domestic civil society and international criticisms of Japan\u2019s embedded racism, and discusses the government\u2019s passive reactions. Arudou traces the correspondence between the government and the (CERD) before and during its first two CERD report reviews in 2001 and 2010 (but not the most recent CERD review in 2014). Chapter 9 then takes two binaries that can be used to understand how sociolegal distinctions of \u201cJapaneseness\u201d are often made\u2014by nationality (citizen\/non-citizen) and by visual identification (Wajin\/Gaijin)\u2014and superimposes them to form a heuristic matrix of eleven categories of \u201cJapanese\u201d and \u201cforeigner.\u201d The author thus drives his point across that social privilege and power in Japan are drawn along lines that straddle conceptual understandings of and assumptions about both legal and phenotypical memberships. The book concludes with a final chapter on the implications of embedded racism for Japan\u2019s future as an ageing society, and argues that Japan\u2019s demographic predicament could be mitigated if Japan can begin eliminating its racism to create a more inclusive society for all.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

The book does not touch on the voices and local\/community advocacy initiatives among and on behalf of visible minorities, and stops short of systematically testing how the proposed heuristic matrix and its combinations of characteristics empirically lead to differential treatment. However, it does cover a lot of ground, and would be of interest to a wide audience, from the casual reader interested in learning about the racial dynamics in Japan, to researchers with area studies interests in Japan and\/or substantive field interests in international migration, ethnic and race studies, citizenship and human rights, and advocacy politics at both the domestic and international levels. Arudou argues that Japan\u2019s passive stance to addressing racial discrimination is \u201cthe canary in the coal mine\u201d regarding its openness to \u201coutsiders\u201d (xxiii), and by starting this conversation, he addresses \u201cthe elephant in the room\u201d that needs to be reckoned with for Japan to navigate its way through its impending demographic challenges.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

— Ralph Ittonen Hosoki, University of California, Irvine, USA<\/strong><\/p>\n

Ends<\/p>\n

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Opening paragraph: Arudou\u2019s book is a timely and important contribution to social and scholarly debates about racial discrimination in Japan. It comes on the heels of both the Japanese government\u2019s 2014 official claim that an anti-racial discrimination law is not necessary (third combined report to the United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination [CERD]), and recent developments in Japan that have politicized the issues of dual nationality and hate speech, and even the Miss Universe Japan pageant.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[67,18,19,34,33,35,20,5,12,37,4,10,14,16,53],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-14456","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-embedded-racism","category-academia","category-education","category-exclusionism","category-fingerprinting-nj","category-good-news","category-history","category-human-rights","category-immigration-assimilation","category-injustice","category-japanese-government","category-japanese-policeforeign-crime","category-japanese-politics","category-labor-issues","category-unsustainable-japanese-society"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.debito.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14456","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.debito.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.debito.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.debito.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.debito.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=14456"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.debito.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14456\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.debito.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=14456"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.debito.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=14456"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.debito.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=14456"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}