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Comment by Iv | Hacker News Reader

"As the numbers keep rising, people are asking if it's a reflection of the school system, rather than a problem with the pupils themselves."

Got some first hand experience here. Hard to not be a bit sarcastic. Geeze, I don't know... Is it that the students of Japan are suddenly becoming stubborn (or "weak") or is it that a system that:

- does not fight bullying

- does not fight racism

- does not allow students any free time for any hobby

- does recommend to sleep less in order to study more

- does not allow to repeat a class and solely looks at date of birth to put kids in a class

could, possibly, have some impact on the well-being of kids?

But worry not: Japanese TV knows how parents can solve that! It recommends shouting and forcing sport on your lazy stay-at-home kid!

View on HN

Unfortunately this just turned into an off topic argument about racism. It's clear that you didn't intend to post flamebait, but fire safety depends on effects, not intent.

> does not allow students any free time for any hobby

I don't know about you, but Japanese people who grew up in Japan, in my experience, are the most likely of anyone I've ever known to have active hobbies that they picked up during middle or high school. I don't know of any nationality or ethnic group I'd associate more with having active school-age hobbies.

> does not fight racism

That may be a problem for those who are from visible minorities, but the majority of the children who are refusing to go to school are broadly ethnic Japanese, or Okinawan. Seems like it'd be low on the list.

I'm going to go ahead and disagree with your first point entirely unless you have some stats for it. My personal experience has been that Japanese people 1) are no more likely than others to have active hobbies, and 2) largely do not pick up long-term hobbies until college or later in life because their younger years were overburdened with schoolwork.

I was an exchange student in high school to Japan and I have never seen groups of people more dedicated to both studying and hobbies, especially at the grade-school age.

There are private companies that offer study rooms that HS students rent every weekend. Kendo, soccer, baseball and basketball clubs were really huge at the school I was visiting.

The clubs you listed all involve strenuous physical activity... and are clubs. People can pursue them as hobbies, of course, but I think for most people a hobby is something personal, and perhaps pointless, outside of the sound mind/sound body routine.

EDIT: Kinda surprised at the downvotes! Is it really so controversial to consider a club activity less of a "real" hobby than something self-organized?

I was going to agree with you since hobby, for me, is more of a solitary activity. But then I do know several people at work who would say soccer or basketball is their hobby, something they play regularly and look forward to doing. Although kendo sounds like it would be difficult to keep up outside of school. But I have not lived in Japan to know how popular it is outside of school.

> are broadly ethnic Japanese, or Okinawan

You know that Okinawan is “bad”, right.

Racism? It's Japan. Whatever racism there could be, it's an extremely small, microscopic particle among the whole of the school system.

Even if the incidents are egregious, this is not even among the top twenty reasons that "many" refuse to attend.

As far back as the 1980's it was widely reported that Japanese expectations for children's performance and good behavior drive them to mental illness, from the top down, starting with the demands of parents.

> Racism? It's Japan. Whatever racism there could be, it's an extremely small, microscopic particle among the whole of the school system.

Racism and discrimination aren't just reserved to the color of skin, it's often built around whole ancestries of groups and their traditional social standings [0].

For the same reason, the Nazis killed people that were just as white as themselves, as most scientific racism [1] went way past defining races merely by the color of skin [2] and anti-Slav sentiments are something very present in many Western European countries to this day.

Case in point: The Nazis, and many other white-supremacists, consider themselves to be Aryans, supposedly descendants of the lost continent of Atlantis [3] and apparently the top of their imagined race pyramid.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burakumin

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_racism

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Untermensch#Etymology

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aryan#Nazism_and_white_suprema...

> Racism and discrimination aren't just reserved to the color of skin, it's often built around whole ancestries of groups and their traditional social standings.

Indeed, but this exists everywhere. Why would this factor be unusually influential in Japan?

It doesn't exist "the same" everywhere, Japanese society is still extremely conservative and hierarchical, to a point that increasingly more people opt for just not taking part at all anymore because they see no more point in grinding their lifes away trough overbearing work ethics and overblown societal expectations.

Case in point: Japan has "family rental services" [0] for those people that spend too much time working, thus lacking the time to maintain an actual family. Which is the result of societal expectations along the lines of "A successful businessman also has a successful family". When in reality most struggle to just support themselves, the idea that a single earner can feed a whole household is something that also hasn't applied in Japan for a while anymore.

Hikikomori [1] are another, much earlier recognized manifestation of this, that even has somewhat of an equivalent with Western countries "NEETs". The reasons for those are not singular, they are as multifaceted as most social problems are. Racial and class discrimination plays just as much of a factor as the economic downturn, leaving most young Japanese, like young people in many other countries, without much of any perspective.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rental_family_service

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hikikomori

That all seems relevant to the original question, but it doesn't seem to have much (if anything) to do with racism.

Racism is present in Japan, the comment that spawned this subthread appeared to be dismissing it as something that had absolutely no explanatory power in this phenomenon and further seemed surprised by Japanese racism as a concept.

Here’s the Wikipedia article.[0] Japanese (the nation) citizens of non-Japanese (the ethnic group)[1] suffer discrimination, particularly the indigenous peoples (the Ainu just got formal recognition a decade ago) and people of backgrounds Japan (the nation) has had historical enmity with (Chinese, Korean).

Whether or not we can parse specifically what portion of kids not wanting to go to school is due to this, the fact that 30% of non-Japanese ethnicity respondents of a poll conducted by the Justice Ministry said they had experienced hate speech and 40% said they had faced housing discrimination[2] seems like it would absolutely have an impact on the school experiences of those children.

This is all limited to the types of racism that are pervasive in Japanese society that a broad portion of the student population may have experienced, but Japan’s particularly strong anti-black sentiment is also notable when discussing racism in Japan more broadly.

As to why this might be a particularly strong factor in Japan, as opposed to being some sort of “cosmic background racism” present everywhere, Japanese people’s self-conception of Japan is very tied up in ethnic identity in a somewhat unique way (maybe the prevailing sentiment of Jewish people living in Israel is somewhat similar).[3] Government officials used to talk openly about one culture, one race—when Japan has never really been that and is becoming less so with time. 10% of Tokyo is foreign born, to say nothing of those who were born in Japan of non-Japanese ancestry.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethnic_issues_in_Japan [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yamato_people [2] https://www.japantimes.co.jp/opinion/2018/06/03/commentary/j... [3] https://archive.ph/20070519010856/http://search.japantimes.c...

I talked to a guy who was ethnically Korean, but was nationally and culturally American, and who lived in Japan. Knowing something about the Japanese attitude toward Koreans, I asked him if he experienced any prejudice in Japan. He said no, and that he thought the prejudice was not racial, but rather against the culture.

One datapoint, but I thought it was interesting.

I mention racism as only one item on the list. 1 out of 30 children born in Japan today are of mixed ancestry, so it is not as microscopic as you may think.

I just have anecdotal evidence. The two kids I know here who regularly skipped school did so because of racist bullying. And yes, hearing "that's your fault because you are a minority" is indicative of a mentality that does not want to fix the problems of people who don't "fit in the mold".

"As far back as the 1980's it was widely reported that Japanese expectations for children's performance and good behavior drive them to mental illness"

Yes, "good behavior". "Why can't you be like the others?" "Why are you the cause of trouble?" Repeat that every day to any normal kid and they won't want to go to school.

>Racism? It's Japan.

Perhaps racism isn't the right descriptor.

Japan has a caste system that puts India's to shame. It's smaller in the number of people living in the lower tiers, but the effects are amplified to a high degree.

At least India puts some effort, futile or not, into forcing representation for its untouchables.

In Japan, a member of the untouchable caste is actual, literal, human garbage especially in the western parts of the country.

It is illegal for parents to investigate the background of their children's potential marriage partners in order to determine if they are a member of an untouchable caste.

Investigations still occur regularly.

Anyone who claims that it is not still a problem is either lying, or is a Japan-obsessed foreigner whose impressions of the country are based on a weeklong trip to Tokyo.

I'm willing to bet that many of the children refusing to go to school are those with the "wrong" family name.

7 years living in Japan. Both in city and countryside. Never seen anyone being discriminated on a "caste" system. I won't say it does not exist, but it is certainly not on the scale of things in India.

However I heard of two marriages kind of broken by parents who did not want a foreigner in their ranks though.

Racism does exist and I witnessed several occurrences of it against black people. Whites are generally better received, especially French, like I.

You might want to ask someone with a Korean ancestor about racism in Japan.

What racism is there to fight in Japan? Are you sure you aren't just pulling stock arguments out here?

Well, there's the one when you're not ethnically Japanese, for a start... not sure how common that is, but dealing with racism is certainly a thing when that happens.

Clearly not a problem for the ethnic Japanese refusing to go to school, it seems like it's just been jammed into this ignorant argument from a template.

Goes deeper than just that.

There is being born in the wrong 'caste': https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burakumin

Or the many Koreans who are in 'limbo' (zainichi) after WW2:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koreans_in_Japan

Anecdotally, I visited a friend in Hokkaido for a couple weeks and during my time there (as a white non-Japanese speaking person) I was kicked out of two restaurants upon entry for not being Japanese. Racism exists everywhere.

Yes, racism exists. That was not GP‘s point though. The point was that enough kids in Japan are victims of racism that it gets listed as one of the top reasons why so many pupils don‘t want to go to school anymore. I also highly doubt that there are so many non-Japanese kids in local japanese schools that this is a major problem.

Well there certainly won't be so many non-ethnic / non-Japanese kids in local Japanese schools with that attitude.

Not an expert in Japan's culture, but from what I read about it, there's some racism towards Japanese with Korean ancestors, and apparently this forces some people to hide their heritage.

There was also an article -- even posted on HN, I think! -- that some family names linked to historically lowbrow jobs (the "untouchable", such as undertakers and butchers) still carry some sort of stigma. Not their current occupations of course, but the stigma historically attached to those families.

Burakumin. The Japanese government has been trying to end discrimination against them since the early Meiji era and yet it still persists to this day nearly 150 years later.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burakumin

For a random example of racism in Japan's shools that simply don't accept that other ethnicities exist, here's a story about students required to dye their hair black in order to match everyone else - https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/oct/27/japanese-stude... - in this particular situation the student had naturally brown hair, which most likely means a non-Japanese parent, and was bullied by the authorities because of that.

But it is not racism, it would be if they had to change hair color because of their race, but they would all the same require japanese person to dye their hair.

If it is not based on race it is not racism, this case it is based on hair color so its "hair color"-ism I guess.

The mixed Japanese-African girl I know was forced to straighten her hair because her natural hair is "extravagant".

My mother-in-law, who was fully Japanese but had naturally, slightly curly hair, was accused by her school of getting a perm, in violation of school rules, until her parents provided photographs proving it had always been curly.

It's not exactly a secret.

Japan is super racist. They outright will often refuse services to foreigners/non-ethnic Japanese.

Here's a quick few results:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethnic_issues_in_Japan#Ethnic_...

https://www.scmp.com/week-asia/politics/article/2123539/no-c...

https://asia.nikkei.com/Editor-s-Picks/Japan-Update/No-forei...

Not only that, but it’s all more or less entirely legal. There’s very little in the way of civil rights protections like there are in the US, and what does exist is subject to the large, conservative leaning power of the judiciary.

EDITED

Getting downvoted for asking an honest question and trying to understand something..

I wish I could delete my account because I have an impulse control disorder and sometimes I accidentally antagonize the hivemind and then feel bad all day, but I can't, because Hacker News doesn't give me the power to do that, so I keep logging in for some reason. Neat!

Could someone please ban me? Delete my comments? Please?

> Why does Japan stand out? Because they are industrialized?

Sure. They should be compared to countries with similar levels of wealth per capita, since that wealth, in theory, should enable them to rise above what you describe in Nigeria.

But that said, what you quoted the Fulani man saying is frequently expressed in Europe or the Anglosphere today, but with the target being a non-Christian religion.

Right, but why would Japanese children be refusing to go to school because of racism toward non-Japanese?

In the two cases I know, because they are black Japanese (one parent Japanese, one African) and that it just breaks the mind of both students and teachers that you can be Japanese without being 100% ethnic Japanese.

But again, that has to be such a tiny minority that OP's list sounds made up.

I'm OP.

It is a minority. And Japan is very racist towards them. Turns out there are 3 kids in that situation in my family.

We already witnessed three classes having racist bullying and both teachers and school direction refusing to do anything.

I do believe that this mentality of blaming the victims that do not "fit in the mold" is indicative of a very negative culture.

I just don't think Japan is going to change any time soon. They've been very nationalistic for the last 400 years, if not longer, I only have a little knowledge of their more recent past. In this scenario, blaming the victim is being realistic. If you're not Japanese, don't expect to be accepted the way native Japanese are. Even among the pure Japanese they have castes, so foreigners are even lower on the list.

If I came out and said "Blackearl: Your country sucks and you should move out of it", I don't think you'd think it was very helpful advice.

I think coming out to the internet, sharing some personal anecdotes about racism and personal issues, and maybe publishing problems you've experienced personally can help. Not only for teaching others about the issues you yourself face, but also for helping keep ones emotions in check and meditating upon your own issues.

Obviously, this discussion thread exists to criticize Japan and bring forth issues. But in order to be more helpful to everyone involved, its more beneficial to be more specific about what can, and can't, be done to fix certain issues.

With regards to your specific point: giving up because of cultural norms is defeatist and doesn't seem helpful in any case. Now I'm not Japanese, nor have I ever been to that country. But it sounds like Japan is a functioning democracy, so publishing opinions and raising issues is definitely the way to move forward in that kind of political system. The people must be aware of a problem (and agree that it is a problem) before you can ever hope for the politics to change.

Well Japan used to execute any foreigner washing up on its shores, and to consider US its mortal enemy, so there is some proof it can change. Actually Japan society can move incredibly fast, but it does so in hiccups, when its delay is becoming an unbearable embarrassment.

Or if you're "Japanese" but with Korean heritage... I've heard stories of people who had Korean ancestry and they had a deep terror of anyone ever finding out.

They're referred to as Zainichi.

After WW2, there was over 1 million Koreans living in Japan. Some went back, some decided to wait due to the war starting.

Then the country they were going back to no longer existed, so they stayed. Many don't even have citizenship.

https://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/02/news/japanborn-koreans-li...

Many became yakuza because it's one of the few groups they could join. Hisayuki Machii (Jeong Geon-Yeong) was a legendary Korean yakuza leader

Yup I've heard the same, Yakuza leadership (also rank and file) has a lot of Zainichi.

I also remember hearing about how Pachinko parlours are usually owned by Yakuza/Zainichi and they funnel profits into North Korea.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burakumin

Or Zainichi Koreans, who are born and raised in Japan (there are a LOT).

oh, I just thought of a good example of Hacker news favorite investor: Masayoshi Son.

Notice his last name is Korean? But he was born and raised in Japan.

And here's what he has to say: https://asia.nikkei.com/NAR/Articles/SoftBank-s-Son-stands-u...

Even in his early childhood, he was attacked verbally and physically by Japanese classmates. In kindergarten, he was jeered at for being Korean. Once, another child cut his head open with a stone.

Sure, they are ferociously xenophobic, but if everybody is Japanese, and they are racist against non-Japanese, then it's not exactly a significant problem for Japanese students.

I'm somewhat reminded of the little podunk Maine town I grew up in; people were racist as all hell, but there was nobody to be racist to, because the entire county was white-trash WASPs and French-Canadians, and those two groups were so mixed together that nobody could sling a slur without hitting themselves with it.

"The Ainu have historically suffered from economic and social discrimination throughout Japan that continues to this day. The Japanese Government as well as people since contact with the Ainu, have in large part regarded them as a dirty, backwards and a primitive people."

Reminds you of anything or anyone?

That's the interesting thing. As a white man, I thought "Oh, they are actually kind to foreigners!" and then I helped raise a black kid in Japan.

I remember a guy who helped us install in the village when we moved to the countryside. He had lived in the US for a while and told us "That's nice to have foreigners! I love foreigners! Especially white ones!"

Yeah, as a white guy, you dont get to experience much racism, doesnt mean it is not there.

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