The Primary Problem facing Jets in Japan: Racism

Jason L. Erwin - Former JET in Kyoto - Part of a speech to his Board of Education

Japan is one of the most difficult nations for international companies to keep long-term employees in. Most foreigners from developed countries do not want to stay for a long time in Japan. Yet, as Japanese people know, there are many nice things about life in Japan. There are beautiful temples, nice parks, low amounts of street crime, and in general a high standard of life. What is uniquely difficult about Japan?

It is your racism. Racism exists everywhere and explodes into violent confrontation in many parts of the world, but only a few of the developed nations of the world embrace a truly racist ideology as Japan does. In Japan even many educated people believe that they are unique by virtue not only of culture, but something "in the blood", and no gaijin can become entirely accepted on easy, equal, and friendly terms, because a gaijin, even if born and raised in Japan is not by blood Japanese. The gaijin is too often ever a gaijin and not just another person. Japan then is one of the few countries in which it is possible to be a professional foreigner.

Usually being from a distant land makes you a little interesting, but it is rare that foreign birth is considered so strange and alien that you can be paid just to exist and to be a kind of bridge by which one people can try to understand and communicate with other people who are, for them, deeply strange and inaccessible. The gulf of water which has separated the islands of Japan from the rest of the world has grown through history to become a kind of psychological gulf which prevents Japanese people, even on this hyper-connected post-modern globe, from seeing themselves not as uniquely unique, divided by a deep gulf from, but in fact essentially the same as many other people.

Japanese people have feared, ever since at least the Meiji era, the disappearance of their japaneseness in the face of the adoption of western technologies, cultures, and beliefs. The Japanese, however, have also wanted very much the power and comforts that western technology and culture bring. The Meiji and early modern Japanese not only wanted western power, but they feared what would happen if they did not have it. Thus they unhappily adopted western technologies and systems. To avoid the possibility of becoming a colony, and out of pride, Japan became a colonial power.

With its new western derived power Japan attacked the rest of the Asian world and separated itself from the sources of its original culture. Japan came to be in a position that was both anti-western and anti-Asian. It was anti-western in that it created an identity for itself that was based on a unique essence which was diametrically opposed to the perceived essence of the west. It also saw itself, accurately, as the only non-western nation to possess western power. This kind of thinking is perhaps best seen in Junichiro Tanizaki's "In praise of shadows". In that essay Tanizaki takes a generalized idea of the aesthetics and philosophy of the west and builds the idea of a Japan that exists not so much as an independent culture, but an anti-western one.

Japan is what the west is not. Japan is alienated from Asia because it was a westernised nation which used its adoption of western ideas and technologies to exploit its Asian neighbours, imitating the imperialism of European nations like England and Germany. Many Japanese intellectuals came to identify this Japanese essence as expressed in art and culture, but yet not of culture. They could not argue that Japaneseness was of culture because of the rapid modernization of Japanese society and culture in this period. The essence was moved to something in the blood, a spirit carried within the blood of the race. This essence was an unchanging part of Japan separate from history or culture. In this way Japan came to inherit a situation in which its most important feature was not philosophy, culture, art, food, language, etc, but race alone. And this was a race that saw itself in conflict with both the East and West.

It was this ideology which Japan carried into its fascist period and WWII. After WWII the United States failed to take strong measure to break this ideology or to remove from power those who held it. The US feared that without a stable and firmly controlled Japan that communism might be able to gain a real foothold in Japan as it had in China. What occurred became known in Japan as Gyaku Kosu, or reverse course. The great zaibatsu cartels, Nissan, Mitsubishi, Toshiba, and others, were not broken apart to make room for labour unions and smaller enterprises but instead were given capital for investment by the US. The purge of ultra-right elements in government, business, and the military ceased. Members of ultra-nationalist organizations and the yakuza were recruited to investigate communist activities and act as spies.

In 1960 Prime Minister Kishi Nobusuke called on the fascist criminal Kodama Yoshio to organize a paramilitary force of thugs to supplement the police during President Eisenhower's visit to Japan. Kishi himself had been classified as a grade A war criminal and spent 1945-1948 in prison.

　In Japan, despite an active opposition and movement toward real democracy, an alliance of essentially racist and somewhat fascist individuals in control of business, the bureaucracy, the Liberal Democratic Party and the yakuza came to have supreme power in Japanese society. Those in control believed or thought it useful for ordinary people to believe in the idea of Japan's racial essence, and transmitted this belief to most Japanese through the educational system and the media.

This alliance switched over time from violent conquest to peaceful economic development, but they asked much of the Japanese people. The belief in uniqueness was used to drive the people to work ever harder, to regain pride, to simultaneously imitate the west while feeling separate from it, to lead Asia while being above other Asians. Even today with the LDP under challenge and the hegemony of the bureaucratic-business elite being threatened because of numerous examples of corruption and mismanagement, most Japanese people still maintain a racist conception of Japan.

It is impossible for many Japanese people to conceive of Japan in terms other than of race and to fail to see racial identity as a positive and not a negative force. Even nice Japanese often believe this way and over time gaijin come to understand this. Gaijin will almost never be just another person. They cannot transcend their foreignness. And not all Japanese are nice. Everyone experiences negative emotions -- hate, anger, jealousy, contempt. When you have such a strong racial identity as Japan does the gaijin becomes a good target for your negative emotions. I have been spat at, a victim of a hit and run, been driven off the road by a fascist truck, had people start arguments with me, and been insulted and made to feel bad about my non-japaneseness on many occasions.

Many nice Japanese people know they are polite people and see only the comfortable apartments and salaries that many Jets have and do not understand why Jets are sometimes unhappy or grumpy. They are unhappy because they are often in token jobs in a society in which being a hard working Japanese is the most important thing in life. That is why.