How Homogeneous Is Japan? | Hacker News Reader

How Homogeneous Is Japan?

noahpinion.substack.com

105 pointsgrzm220 comments

I think this article goes through a lot of micro-exercizes and micro-corrections and semantics to avoid the obvious conclusion that Japan is mostly honogenous, and to a far more degree than the US or a lot of European countries.

Counter-examples don't refute a general observation. They can only refute an absolute statement.

But when it comes to actual numbers and breakdowns (which would put a general observation into perspective or prove it wrong) the article is lacking, aside from the 93% which is already large.

Also homogenous is not just race, it's also about culture, language, and so on, and Japan is homogeneous to a whole other level as a national culture. Those Korean-Japanese are no less Japanese culturally and operate entirely within the Japanese system/life.

Not like some large communities create their own enclaves, ghettos with different languages, cultures, etc, as seen in some countries.

> I think this article goes through a lot of micro-exercizes and micro-corrections and semantics to avoid the obvious conclusion that Japan is mostly honogenous, and to a far more degree than the US or a lot of European countries.

It depends on what one looks at.

The U.S.A., culturally, most famously treats race as if it be an ethnicity. As such, in their perspective what they call “African-American" and “European-American” are very different.

From where I stand, they are all “Anglo-Saxon”, and further subdivisions seem rather minute and trivial. They all live in a similar culture, having grown up with English as a native language, and tend to have very similar Anglo-Saxon cultural sensibilities that are shared with say Australia and the U.K.. that often seem uniquely and recognizably Anglo-Saxon to me.

I do not really think that the color of a man's skin, having grown up in a very similar environment, speaking the same language, practicing the same traditions, and being influenced by the same values, makes him all that different and worthy of a different “ethnicity”.

Many countries actually have a large population of recent immigrants. Did you know that Polish is spoken more in Ireland than Irish as of this moment for instance? These Polish immigrants have grown up speaking a different language, exposed to a different culture, eating different food and practicing different traditions. — they might be as “white” as the Irishman as a stereotype, but there is a greater difference to be had here than between the Anglo-Saxons of different colors.

And, to note, the only Polishman I have ever had a good conversation with was quite dark skinned, but nevertheless Polish was his native language. He lived in the Netherlands but was a recent immigrant from Poland and quite catholic. Apparently both his parents were immigrants as well, but he was born in Poland and spoke Polish as a native language.

I did not know that Polish was spoken more in Ireland than Irish, and I still don’t know it. Also Anglo Saxon is probably the whitest descriptor imaginable. The fact that the differences are minute to you means you probably don’t have the authority to speak on this.

The difference are certainly minute compared to the possible variety of differences in the world.

In Japan, for instance, varies ethnic groups live that either speak languages that are are as far removed form Japanese as Danish is from English, or genetically not related at all.

To not even start about “Han Chinese”, which is an “ethnic classifier” that is so wide, it s more analogous with “Germanic”, “Slavic”, or “Romance” than it is with “Anglo-Saxon”; and contains a larger number of inhabitants than any of them respectively.

“Anglo-Saxon” on a world perspective is really quite close together and comparable to “German” or “Francophone”.

> and I still don’t know it

What do you mean?

EDIT: FYI while Irish is one of the two official languages of the republic of Ireland, it's a minority language, with less than 100k native speakers

It is not merely “one of the official languages”; the Irish constitution grants it status as “the first official language”, and English as “the second official language”, obviously granting primacy to Irish.

The reality, however, is that indeed Polish is spoken more than Irish in modern day Ireland, and the former is in decline and will probably be near extinct in a generation or two.

https://www.irishcentral.com/news/irish-now-the-third-most-s...

I wouldn't call the distinct African-American culture "Anglo-Saxon". It is instead rooted in the historical experience that black people have had. The black identity was already formed during the slavery period and incorporates elements of African, European, and Native American culture.

Similarly, just because people speak English does not make their culture "Anglo-Saxon". There are many different cultural practices that coexist in America whose origins do not originate from North Western Europe.

> I wouldn't call the distinct African-American culture "Anglo-Saxon". It is instead rooted in the historical experience that black people have had.

It is rooted in their experience living in an Anglo-Saxon milieu.

At the end, they speak English, practice Anglo-Saxon religions, practice Anglo-Saxon traditions, eat Anglo-Saxon food, have Anglo-Saxon sensibilities on gender relationships, social hierarchies, criminal justice, parent–child relationships, personal privacy, nudity, and all the other quintessential Anglo-Saxon sensibilities and cultural norms that make it unique in the world.

> and incorporates elements of African, European, and Native American culture.

I would be interested in knowing what elements of African, European, and Native-American culture are incorporated.

It is also common cultural to draw a divide between “North-West Europe”; “Eastern Europe”, “Southern Europe” and the “British Isles” culturally, as these tend to be culturally quite different from one another, but the lines are obviously not that clear. The U.S.A. obviously primarily draws it's cues from the British Isles culturally given it's origin.

> Similarly, just because people speak English does not make their culture "Anglo-Saxon". There are many different cultural practices that coexist in America whose origins do not originate from North Western Europe.

From their perspective it might seem diverse, just as from the perspective of a Dutchman Randstad culture will seem very different from below-the-rhine culture or Eastern-Saxon culture, but an Englishman will look at all three and find them very close together, which they are on a global scale.

> At the end, they speak English, practice Anglo-Saxon religions, practice Anglo-Saxon traditions, eat Anglo-Saxon food, have Anglo-Saxon sensibilities on gender relationships, social hierarchies, criminal justice, parent–child relationships, personal privacy, nudity, and all the other quintessential Anglo-Saxon sensibilities and cultural norms that make it unique in the world.

Hard disagree. African-Americans speak a very distinct English language, and while they follow "Anglo-Saxon" religion, many still retain roots to African elements in their rites (ever been to a black funeral in some parts of the South?). Their cultural food is also heavily distinct, although it is partly influenced by Anglo-Saxon food. They don't have the same sensibilities as Anglo-Saxons because of their culture, but more because of religion, just like many Southerners. "Anglo-Saxon sensibilities and cultural norms on.... " is also something that's very distinct across the US and the world - there's a lot of difficulty in breaking down the barriers of race and sexual orientation in the US, while all other Anglo-Saxon countries broke them down way back. Latin countries such as France or Spain have broken down many strict rules many years ago, while they still continue in most of Latin America.

Honestly you sound like someone who has had very little interaction with the African American community, while doing a lot of grandstanding for them from your plantation home. There are just so many things you'll find different right in upon interaction. As a simple question, why are African American names so unique and not Anglo-Saxon names or African names?

> as if it be an ethnicity

I see what you did there, homie; but next time make it efnicity. :)

> And, to note, the only Polishman I have ever had a good conversation with was quite dark skinned, but nevertheless Polish was his native language.

One of the Roma people, possibly.

> I see what you did there, homie; but next time make it efnicity. :)

I do not see what I did there at all. Might you explain?

> One of the Roma people, possibly.

Not at all. Both his parents were immigrants from an African country; I do not know which.

Ah, well that's kind of worth mentioning, I would think; that person was Polish in nationality only, not actually of Polish descent yet somehow dark-skinned. :)

What I mean regarding "as if it be ..." is not standard English grammar. Use of the "be" form of the verb (that is not the subjunctive be) without inflecting for tense or person is featured in African-American Vernacular English.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/African-American_Vernacular_En...

(An example like "I request that everyone be quiet" is standard; that's standard grammar, using the subjunctive mood of "to be").

> What I mean regarding "as if it be ..." is not standard English grammar. Use of the "be" form of the verb (that is not the subjunctive be) without inflecting for tense or person is featured in African-American Vernacular English.

But it is the subjunctive.

“as if” classically demands the subjunctive the mood in it's subordinate clause, if it __be__ used as an irrealis.

I realize well of course that in vernacular English the subjunctive mood has been in decline for the past centuries, so it might not be so commonly used as such any more in spoken English.

https://www.google.com/search?q=%22As+if+it+be%22

Though, I am given some pause by that the sixth citation here is the King James Version; perhaps it has been more in decline than I had thought.

Nevertheless, I am not some bourgeois peasant. If it be good enough for the K.J.V., then it is good enough for me.

It's also a four syllabic rhyme. :)

African-American culture is most certainly not Anglo-Saxon. It’s actual roots in the African diaspora and the Caribbean, and there are entire communities, like the Gullah of the Carolinian coasts, that have preserved their culture and language since the diaspora began. The most noticeable elements of African-American culture have been adopted into Anglo-Saxon culture, they don’t come from it. American culture predominantly descends from Anglo-Saxon culture, but it’s distinct.

Well, I was born in the Caribbean and much of my family is actually culturally Caribbean, and I much disagree with that.

The African-American does not eat Caribbean food; he does not listen to Caribbean music; he does not practice Caribbean traditional festivals, does not dress in Caribbean clothes.

I definitely feel that you draw this association purely because you think of Caribbeans as dark-skinned; it is a very different culture.

The African-American in general eats Anglo-Saxon food; he listens to Anglo-Saxon music; he celebrates Christmas and Easter; and he dresses in Anglo-Saxon clothing.

I know expat Jamaican and Dominican communities in New York that celebrate festivals yearly. I ate jerk chicken with red beans and rice last week, I don’t think that was an Anglo-Saxon invention, nor was chitlins, collard greens or other dishes. And we don’t listen to Anglo-Saxon music, as African American music isn’t descended from anglo-Saxon music at all. The fact that it’s been widely adopted in Anglo-Saxon culture doesn’t mean that they claim it’s origins at all. Gospel music and hymns do not come from Anglo-Saxon culture at all, nor does jazz, rap or blues. Gullah culture isn’t Anglo-Saxon, nor is the creole language and culture practiced around New Orleans and Louisiana. Trying to label African-American culture as Anglo-Saxon erases most of the actual history, which again comes from the African diaspora. Mexican-American culture doesn’t become ‘Anglo-saxon’ just because they now live in America and can speak English.

> I know expat Jamaican and Dominican communities in New York that celebrate festivals yearly.

And I would not call those Anglo-Saxon as they are actual expats of a different ethnicity and recent-generation immigrants?

That you even consider those comparable to Anglo-Saxon African-Americans that are not recent immigrants but have lived in the U.S.A.. from six generations back is baffling to me.

> nor is the creole language and culture practiced around New Orleans and Louisiana.

Nor would I call those Anglo-Saxon.

You seem to cast very different populations, that speak very different languages and have very different cultural practices, in the same bucket, simply because of a shared skin color.

There are indeed populations of any color in the U.S.A. that are decidedly not Anglo-Saxon. I would no more call recent black Jamaican immigrants Anglo-Saxon than I would recent white Italian immigrants, but the vast majority of population of any color in the U.S.A. is decidedly Anglo-Saxon and has been nurtured within an Anglo-Saxon milieu for generations.

I’m telling you that black people in America have a culture that is descended from a lot of sources, and you cannot just simplify it as Anglo-Saxon, again because such a wide swath comes from the African diaspora that ignoring that means ignoring its most noticeable aspects. Gospel, jazz, blues, and rap are not descended from any Anglo-Saxon musical tradition, nor are our dances, or many of our foods.

American culture is largely descended from Anglo-Saxon culture, but that doesn’t transitively mean that all American culture is now Anglo-Saxon. The pockets of non Anglo-Saxon culture are not recent additions to black culture, they’ve been intact and distinct throughout their history. The Gullah people are American, not an expat community.

> I’m telling you that black people in America have a culture that is descended from a lot of sources, and you cannot just simplify it as Anglo-Saxon, again because such a wide swath comes from the African diaspora that ignoring that means ignoring its most noticeable aspects. Gospel, jazz, blues, and rap are not descended from any Anglo-Saxon musical tradition, nor are our dances, or many of our foods.

I looked up the origin of Gospel on Wikipedia; it seems to stem from Gaelic sources and the first composers thereof were white.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gospel_music#History

As for Jazz: “Jazz originated in the late-19th to early-20th century as interpretations of American and European classical music entwined with African and slave folk songs and the influences of West African culture.[32] Its composition and style have changed many times throughout the years with each performer's personal interpretation and improvisation, which is also one of the greatest appeals of the genre.”

Perhaps there are some West-African elements to it, but I find the music to sound very European in terms of structure, also using mostly European instruments.

Jazz at the end of the day is played with the piano, the European drum kit characterized by the cymbal, the guitar, the cello, and the tuba. — whatever West-African elements it has seem to be played up, again for racial reasons.

Tge reason for the common instruments is that early jazz musicians used instruments discardes by marching bands.

I detest this attempt to deny historical people of their creative capacity. You are acting as if the cultures of modern times are simple antecedents of cultures from the fall of the Roman Empire.

To back up your claim of jazz being "European", please source a European that composed with blues scale, jazz chords, and swing before African Americans.

>To back up your claim of jazz being "European", please source a European that composed with blues scale, jazz chords, and swing before African Americans.

Those jazz chords are descended and altered from traditional european harmony though, themselves, not sole descendants some African musical tradition (which didn't use such harmonies).

As were the instruments themselves (trumpets, trombones, saxophones, pianos, etc.)

Jazz was a mix of African-American vocal music and musical idioms (with a US-localized trhough over African origin) with european harmony, marching band music, and other forms.

This is one of the make disappointing comments I’ve read on HN in awhile. You are literally admitting to being ignorant on the issues being discussed (“I looked up”) and justifying incorrect conclusions based on the results of immature, inaccurate research.

Do you realize the depth of the topics you’re making these claims about?

>This is one of the make disappointing comments I’ve read on HN in awhile. You are literally admitting to being ignorant on the issues being discussed (“I looked up”) and justifying incorrect conclusions based on the results of immature, inaccurate research.

Do you have better sources? Because I'm quite well informed in those areas, and I mostly agree with the parent, as do all scholars.

>I ate jerk chicken with red beans and rice last week, I don’t think that was an Anglo-Saxon invention, nor was chitlins, collard greens or other dishes.

No, but those latter aren't carribean or african either. They are african-american, created in the US (and for specific historical circumstances, including food price concerns, and local food availability).

As for "jerk chicken" that's just an imported popular dish. Carribeans do eat it, but you aren't carribean for eating it any more than you're Mexican for eating mexican..

>African-American culture is most certainly not Anglo-Saxon. It’s actual roots in the African diaspora and the Caribbean

Roots lost in time and declining though. In modern times it's Anglo-saxon, or African-American-Anglo-Saxon, but have little to nothing to do with Africa or the Caribbean.

If you put an African or Carribean and a African-American there are little cultural traits they share (cultural as in everyday life, outlook, worldview, etc. - African-Americans might still carry some traces of e.g. African music in the modern music they produce). But even eg. food is totally different.

Many countries actually have a large population of recent immigrants

Did you know that Spanish is spoken more in the US than Spain as of this moment? 45 million Americans compose 20% of all migrants in the world.

There are twice as many undocumented immigrants alone in the United States as there are people in Ireland, total.

https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2020/08/20/key-finding...

And I would not refer to those Spanish speakers as “Anglo-Saxon”.

The so-called “hispanic” population is a true ethnicity within the U.S.A., distinct from the Anglo-Saxons, that is not defined by race, but by a different culture and native language.

A Hispanic man can be white, black, blow, yellow and in practice is a mixture of all, what defines him is not the color of his skin, but the language and sensibilities he was immersed in in his formative years.

I was surprised when I learned that this US ethnicity is a self-defined status. This means that me, a blond blue eyed man (and accessorily French) could define myself as Afro-American in the US.

His comme this is not wildly used in cases where it gives you an advantage? (such as positive discrimination when entering a university, or for grants,...)

> I was surprised when I learned that this US ethnicity is a self-defined status. This means that me, a blond blue eyed man (and accessorily French) could define myself as Afro-American in the US.

That's not really true. You wouldn't be actually able to define yourself as Afro-American in the US, beyond maybe lying on a form (and even that designation would probably be overridden if it mattered). Pretty-much everyone would consider your self-designation to be annoying BS.

A few full-blooded white people have tried passing as Afro-American (only possible because of the lingering effects of the one-drop rule), but they received a lot of press (and rejection) when the real story came out.

> You wouldn't be actually able to define yourself as Afro-American in the US

Please see https://www.census.gov/topics/population/race/about.html, and especially "An individual’s response to the race question is based upon self-identification. The Census Bureau does not tell individuals which boxes to mark or what heritage to write in."

The "annoying BS" you mention is people's response to that self-identification, not a legal one.

I don’t think everyone else is using the same definition of “define” as you.

I do not define anything, just use the US legal definition. Please see my other comment for the gov link and relevant quote.

We do not have in France any such legal construct (this is even forbidden by law).

It's really remarkable visiting Japan as someone who grew up in Toronto.

Outside of major cities people stopped my very tall and very blonde family on the street and asked to take pictures with us. It was all done incredibly respectfully, but was still quite surprising. I should say this was a over a decade ago.

I've traveled a lot of the world and that just doesn't happen in first other world countries. Nowhere else do you stand out so much. The only other place I've had that happen was in Tanzania.

> than the US or ...

That's just a silly item to include, given that the US is thoroughly heterogeneous.

> a lot of European countries

I.e not to a greater degree than some European countries.

Japan is not more homogeneous than, say, Poland or Denmark.

While I'm not necessarily a fan of this particular article, I feel it relevant to point out that explicitly denying the "homogenous myth" of Japan has political value as a counter to its all-too-common use by conservative nationalist ideologues in Japan to casually brush aside the entirely valid concerns groups who don't check off all the boxes of "being Japanese".

> Those Korean-Japanese are no less Japanese culturally

To this point, however, on a somewhat lighter note, notice that the birth rate of Korean-Japanese shown in the article's graph dips sharply in 1966. This is due to it being the year of the Fire-Horse (https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Hinoe_uma), which AFAIK is a superstition unique to Japan. We're due for another Fire-Horse year in 2026, so it'll be interesting to see what happens then, too.

This article is funny as the author seems very upset about misperceptions, although everything in the post shows that Japan is extremely homogeneous.

Even 93% is an extremely homogenous country and showing a few example of famous Japanese people with diverse backgrounds doesn’t change the fact that they are rare.

Doubling from 1% to 2% in the Japanese census doesn’t mean that Japan isn’t homogenous, it just means it is changing.

Maybe a better concept is that Japan is changing to be less homogenous over time and in many decades it could be as diverse as its neighbors.

The author inadvertently is saying that not putting people into ethnic buckets and overdoing ethnic identity results in a more harmonious society that doesn’t even know it’s diverse because it doesn’t care to track that.

> If I told you that the U.S. was “93.3% American”, would you conclude that the U.S. is a homogeneous country? Because that’s exactly what everyone who cites the “98% Japanese” statistic is doing for Japan.

...yes?

I find both those numbers insanely high, since the proportion of non-citizens here in Switzerland is 25% (country-wide) or 32% ([0], Zurich).

And this doesn't exactly make the country a melting pot either.

[0] https://www.stadt-zuerich.ch/prd/de/index/statistik/themen/b...

That's more of an indicator of the difficulty to gain citizenship. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swiss_nationality_law#Ordinary...

Also, reasoning in cited sentence is wrong.

If U.S. is "93% American" then on average 7 out 100 people you meet will not be "American", whereas for Japan only 2 out of 100 will not be "Japanese" - based on those numbers Japan is about "350% more homogeneous" country, not "5%" as suggested.

It is a case of Potato Paradox, where small numerical differences between values given as percentages can hide big differences in real world.

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

That's not a real paradox, which is why Quine called it a "veridical paradox." You're just taking your personal feeling about a difference as the primary criterion for evaluating the subjective significance of the difference, but these feelings differ from person to person.

Reducing... "That's not a real paradox, which is why Quine called it a 'paradox'"?

meta

You mean in the same sense as every alleged policeman is a policeman and every false diamond is a diamond?

Yes, but the reason for that is, that Switzerland has a really difficult naturalisation process and is a smaller country.

If all humans migrate a similar distance on average, you would expect that a smaller country that is surrounded by other countries to have a higher proportion of immigrants.

Notice that for Switzerland, you need to use the term non-citizens and can't use the term immigrant. That is because a good portion of the non-citizens are not immigrants and have lived here for their entire life.

Switzerland is also what I call (non-pejoratively) an amalgam country. It’s a got a lot of German and Italian influences.

Just like Belgium, which is a mix of French, German, and Dutch cultures.

AFAIK, Switzerland and Belgium are very different.

Belgium is culturally very divided: the two major cultures (Dutch-speaking and French-speaking) are hardly mixed, especially in recent times, with the exception of Brussels.

From conversations with a Swiss friend, I gather that the cultures in Switzerland are much more mixed in daily life.

I didn't mean to imply Switzerland and Belgium are similar.

I was saying that they are countries with national identities that are heavily influenced by their neighbors.

I live in German-speaking and Switzerland and the division between here and French-speaking Switzerland is massive. There's a reason there's a whole "trench" named after it [0].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R%C3%B6stigraben

TL;DR: ethnicity is not citizenship

Switzerland has never been homogeneous and the recent immigration to Switzerland is very different from regular immigration elsewhere.

It is an exception in the west, mostly due to low taxation for rich people or political reasons.

for the same reasons in Lichtenstein 33℅ of the population is non-citizen and not surprisingly in Monaco an astonishing 75℅ of the residents are foreign born.

If Italian people go to Switzerland they are counted as immigrants, but the Italian ethnicity is native in Switzerland, same goes for German and French people.

The same thing is not true for Chinese or Korean people in Japan.

Also 1℅ of Japan equals to 15℅ of the Swiss population.

Sorry for the irrelevant comment, but I’ve never seen anyone use ℅ instead of % before. If it’s a typo, how did that happen?

I hadn’t even noticed it, first time I see it too. It looks like it’s meant to stand for “care of”: https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/care_of.

Very likely a mobile typo. Keyboards often expose a lot of different utf-8 chars when you hold it down and you're always a few mm away from releasing on something completely different. Muscle memory and hard to see choices easily makes it a double.

I did not realise it until you pointed it out

I'm using openboard on my mobile and it is probably mapping the wrong UTF-8 character for that symbol.

"To some on the Right, Japan is a paradise of racial purity..."

Is it now considered a de facto truth that people identifying as "Right" are racists? If not, why bring up the Right in this sentence? When I was growing up, Right overlapped with Conservative, but racists were a discrete group of people.

If Right now means racist, what is the label for someone with the political attributes of Right, but who is not racist?

To be fair, the author mocks the left as well, right after:

"while to some on the Left, it’s a bastion of xenophobia and isolationism"

He is obviously parodying two extremes: the right's "racism is fine" and the left's "everybody else is racist".

I'm not sure how to read that as mocking the left - unless the author is saying that liberals commonly overstate Japan's isolationist ideals and tendencies for xenophobia. Even if that was the author's intent, it's a pretty minor mock compared to being associated with ideals of racial purism.

Key word "some". He is talking about far-right politics

Anyone can be racist. Political opinions need not apply, they might suggest, but that’s not safe route to judge others off of.

If Right now means racist, what is the label for someone with the political attributes of Right, but who is not racist?

"Conservative".

But in the US for instance, there are very few, say, fiscal conservatives. "Fiscal Conservatism" simply doesn't exist the way that we might have been used to seeing it in the 70's or even 80's. Modern administrations on the right consistently outspend modern administrations on the left for example. Which would have been unthinkable 50 years ago, but happens regularly today because on the right there are now different driving priorities.

All of which is fine. There's nothing wrong with any of that so long as those on the right are representing the interests of their supporters. Like it or not, that's what democracy is about. But it leaves many, many people in society with no "political home" so to speak.

Conservatism is a lot more expansive than just "fiscal conservatism." The Republican Party as originally constituted wasn't even fiscally conservative.

Most center-left people and center-right people just don't meaningfully disagree on, e.g., whether we should still have Social Security. Social and political conservatism are the flashpoints.

For examples consider the 1619 Project. It freaks out social and political conservatives because veneration of society's history and institutions is a basic precept. This is not something unique to American Republicans. I once had a Japanese acquaintance go through several hundred years of history to explain to me why Japanese culture is less susceptible to political corruption than Chinese culture. Conservatives internalize the saying that "90% of everything is crap." They believe that our current prosperity is the product of a set of societal choices, and we need to install respect for those choices because if we try something new, there is a 90% probability it will be bad and harmful.

Liberals are, by their nature, don't venerate history, and are optimistic about new ideas. It doesn't matter to them that there are almost no examples of successful countries that cast an intensely critical eye on their own history. They don't think we need to venerate Jefferson, the Constitution, etc., to preserve our democracy. They're optimistic that we can replace reliance on history and tradition with new frameworks and new ideas. And they're confident that those things will turn out well.

If your dividing line is "who venerates history?" Then there are no differences between the lefties and the righties. It's just my observation, but the issues lefties and righties have with each other spring mainly from which aspects of history they venerate?

Do you beleive the most important thing about the Civil War is the Confederacy and their right to self determination even on matters of slavery? Or do you think the most important thing about the Civil War is the defeat of said Confederacy and the abolition of slavery in every land under our dominion, no matter the determination level of its people?

"Both may be, but one must be, wrong."

Is the Trail of Tears important? Or is the defeat of the Nazis important? If it's the defeat of the Nazis, do we tolerate the people hoisting Nazi flags? Lefties and righties differ on these issues.

Believe it or not, we have a mechanism to handle all these contradictions. The US Constitution. Which brings us to the second major issue that lefties and righties make in society.

Their selective interpretation of the Constitution. Again, I have to respectfully disagree with your assessment that these people respect the Constitution. Neither lefties, nor righties, really respect the US Constitution. If they did, we wouldn't have people frothing at the mouth at the sight of the nazis/confederates/whatever-they-ares with their flags. Nor would Colin Kaepernick and other black athletes have people frothing at the mouth when they kneel. Nor would "stop and frisk" have ever even been conceived. Nor would privacy violations be done by the state at such scale in the name of security. Nor would minorities be discriminated against. Etc etc etc and on and on and on.

The issue with lefties and righties is precisely that they don't believe in the Constitutional rights of whatever group it is they don't like. That, more than anything, is what has caused all of the problems in our society lately.

Politics and political people have simply changed considerably over the years. Very little is what it was like 50 years ago. But again, as long as these people represent the beliefs of their supporters, what can you do? That's how it's supposed to work.

You’ve missed my argument. Almost all cultures venerate their history in the sense of socializing the idea that their country is basically good, and founded in ideals that are basically good. That’s very important to conservatives, because they believe 90% of everything is bad. If your society is successful, then you have to teach each generation to respect what came before, because whatever prosperity you enjoy is a product of those things. Moreover, teaching people that their country is basically good gives disparate groups common ground to stand on.

The traditional American approach (my education in Virginia) reflects that. We learned about slavery, the trail of tears, etc., as bad things that happened in the process of living up to fundamentally good ideals.

Calling the US a “slaveocracy” or the Constitution a “racist document” (as the 1619 Project does) is a radical departure from that.

To a conservative, its obvious you can’t build a functional society on the notion that the country and its shared history is fundamentally bad, and by reframing shared traditions ranging from Independence Day to Thanksgiving as “racist.” Maybe that’s wrong and liberals are right. But that’s why stuff like the 1619 Project causes conservatives to flip out.

I think you may have missed my point. Whatever people you disagree with believe, is the business of people you disagree with. There is no need to "flip out" about it. Someone wants to take a knee, that's his decision. Someone wants to fly a nazi flag at his own home, that's his decision.

If a group wants to believe that America is fundamentally "good", that is the decision, and the right, of the people in that group. If a group wants to believe that America is "bad", that is the decision, and the right, of the people in that group.

For instance, I believe the fundamental "goodness" of America is this ability to believe what you please so long as you don't bother anyone else and play well with others. As an example, people are free to dislike black people. That is what is "good" about the US. However, people should not be free to stop and frisk every black kid that comes along due to a bias stemming from that dislike. Why? Because that infringes on the rights of the black kid. Who, in turn, should be free to like or dislike you.

It's a "circle of like" kind of thing. Or a "circle of dislike" if you prefer. It can be whichever! That's the beauty of America.

I explained all that so that maybe you might have a better idea of where my belief that lefties and righties are problematic is coming from. You can believe that America is "good". You can believe that America is "bad". Where I part company with you is if you "flip out" and attack people who believe the opposite. As that is as clear an indication as any that you don't really believe in America as envisioned in the Constitution.

I understand the point of view, but it's one that makes no sense to conservatives. How can you have a democracy and agree to respect each other's votes if you don't have a shared view of the goodness of your basic institutions?

Put differently, I tend to agree with you that this vision of extreme pluralism is closer to how America was intended to function, and I agree that would be preferable. But if you're going to force my kids to school where you're going to teach them A or B, and if people in California and New York are going to have so much federal power over people in Iowa, that makes that sort of radical pluralism hard to achieve.

> To Some

> Is it now considered a de facto truth that people identifying as "Right" are racists?

Racial/ethnic/national/cultural (including religious) chauvinism has been an attribute of Conservatism/Right politics forever (also, class chauvinism, though over time that's become less pronounced, or at least less overt, faster than the others, probably because it's one of the things you can't really get away with out loud in systems of universal suffrage.)

> If Right now means racist, what is the label for someone with the political attributes of Right, but who is not racist?

If the not racist extends to excluding most of the other chauvinisms of the right, “neoliberal” is probably the best label. If it's just specifically the absence of racial/ethnic chauvinism, just “Right”; that racism is a characteristic of the faction as a whole doesn't mean it's essential for each member (the fallacy of division is a popular fallacy, but still a fallacy.)

"Chauvinism" isn't incorrect, but a very loaded framing. Conservatives believe that culture is of overriding importance to the prosperity of a society, and do not embrace cultural relativism.

What makes the United States rich and Bangladesh poor? A liberal would immediately go to explanations involving colonialism, etc. A conservative is much more likely to go to explanations involving bribery, political corruption, etc. Liberals tend to be cultural relativists, so they perceive those cultural explanations as being "chauvinist" or "racist." But there are plenty of Bangladeshis who would give the same explanation. Among other Bangladeshis I know (I'm from the country), especially ones back home, they're much more likely to blame cultural/political institutions rather than colonialism.

'Neoliberal' has embedded assumptions about the ordering of society and role of the state on both domestic and international stages that many antiracist rightists would vociferously oppose (whatever Palladium Mag's smoking, or the boogaloo libertarians, for example - though they often pretend to exist outside of the left/right dichotomy).

As easy as it is to reduce 'the right' into the buckets of proto-fascism, and the Clinton-era uni-party consensus - it makes the category of little use as anything other than an ad-hominem.

The right is, and so far as I can tell, has always been defined in opposition to the politics of the political left, which having a coherent intellectual lineage, and a cohesive network of political philosophers, has been free to define itself. As a result, the right-wing tends to be a hodge-podge of largely unaffiliated political factions whose antipathy to one-another is only constrained by their unified foe.

> As a result, the right-wing tends to be a hodge-podge of largely unaffiliated political factions whose antipathy to one-another is only constrained by their unified foe.

That is the best description I've ever heard for the US political right.

It has also been an attribute of “left” politics since forever, by which I mean that one one might call “left” an “right” both had some very noticeable politicians that championed it.

But it is always effective sport to compare the moderate, reasonable parts of one's own “camp” with the fundamentalists and extremists of the other.

It's really quite simple: you see, masculinists are reasonable people who wish to simply discuss some of the hardships males face, but feminists are all gender Nazis that are utterly unreasonable, for look at these examples I drummed up! just so vice versā, of course.

Today, it’s more like a centrist.

The average, vocal, “conservative” that you’ll find in US media or politics is a reactionary whose bona fides consist of a few narrowly focused issues that pander to a few core constituencies including now, racists and nativists. They often don’t share conservative ideals beyond that.

Growing up, my family were blue collar Catholics. They were fairly conservative from a personal lifestyle perspective, but didn’t care about most of the “Conservative” issues of today. Today middle class Hispanics are probably the closest analog.

> The average, vocal, “conservative” that you’ll find in US media or politics is a reactionary whose bona fides consist of a few narrowly focused issues that pander to a few core constituencies including now, racists and nativists. They often don’t share conservative ideals beyond that.

I don't watch much TV (especially "news" channels) so I might just be out of the loop here, but how has US conservative media been pandering to racists?

“America First” and “Guns and God” are dog whistles for those types of people.

You don’t hear anything about conservative principles. Just demagoguery and wielding of power.

"America First" is just the principle that the US government should prioritize US interests over the interests of other nations and people. It's about nationality, not race.

Anti-gun-control and pro-Christianity are just popular subjects for conservatives. Again, not about race. In fact, those are principles that you just claimed they don't talk about.

How are those "dog whistles for those types of people"?

Isn't that like saying "defund the police" and "black lives matter" are dog whistles for communists?

> If Right now means racist, what is the label for someone with the political attributes of Right, but who is not racist?

There isn't one. Many liberals consider conservative beliefs to be inherently racist. Opposition to the ACA, for example, was decried as "racist": https://www.forbes.com/sites/peterubel/2013/11/21/is-opposit....

A lot of this worldview isn't unwarranted. Conservative opposition to the federal government is perceived very differently among say Black people, who relied on the federal government to protect their Civil Rights. A conservative might point out, "many homogenous countries have weak federal governments--it's a general principle that's valid irrespective of racism." And at the same time, the view of a Black Democrat on that point is totally valid too.

> A conservative might point out...

I wonder who is this platonic Conservative you're describing in these comments; the ghost of William F. Buckley?

Your rank-and-file conservative doesn’t articulate it in those terms, obviously. But my family in Oregon doesn’t like the federal government ruling them from 3,000 miles away for concrete reasons. (In their case it’s long-standing family bitterness at the government seizing their homestead to build the pacific coast highway.) Those same social and political phenomena are present the world over, and are the reason federal systems exist all over the world.

Yes, it’s a William F. Buckley type that might make the comparison to Switzerland to explain how federalism is a neutral principle. But that doesn’t mean that what the folks in Oregon feel is merely pretext for racism. Just because someone can’t articulate their attitudes in terms of political theory (in this case, the resentment people have for being governed from afar and the governmental structures created to mitigate that) doesn’t mean that those attitudes can’t be explained in terms of that political theory. The Buckley type is just articulating and explaining concrete social phenomena on the ground.

That's all fine. But I don't think social science research supports the idea that rank-and-file (or self-identified, if you prefer) conservatives in the US are actually motivated by a devotion to, say, Federalism (as opposed to, say, hegemonic masculinity, white nativism, etc).

> The Buckley type is just articulating and explaining concrete social phenomena on the ground.

"Explaining", or "dressing up"? You're speaking in good faith, but personally I don't think that's the case for most of the rank-and-file, or the people who represent them.

> conservatives in the US are actually motivated by a devotion to, say, Federalism

"Federalism?" No, that's an abstract political construct. But ask them how they feel about folks in Washington D.C. deciding what goes in the school curriculum in Sibley, Iowa.

> That's all fine. But I don't think social science research supports the idea that rank-and-file (or self-identified, if you prefer) conservatives in the US are actually motivated by a devotion to, say, Federalism (as opposed to, say, hegemonic masculinity, white nativism, etc).

There is newer social science research suggesting that tests used to measure for attitudes such as "white nativism" (e.g. racial resentment tests) instead measure for conservative beliefs. Thus, the results don't change if you change the survey questions to ask about white people or other groups instead: https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/renos/files/carneyenos.pdf (p. 17) ("Three important features are prominent in this figure: First, conservatives respondents (white boxes) show more resentment toward all groups than do liberals (gray boxes). Second, for conservatives, the distribution of resentment is nearly identical when asked about a white and Black target group to the distribution when asked about any alternate group, except with a slightly lower median.").

Questions purporting to measure "racial resentment" often presuppose a larger societal or government role for addressing racial inequality. Opposition to such programs is deemed "racism" but could also just be opposition to government programs generally. Only about half of Black people themselves support government programs to address the economic conditions of Black people: https://press.princeton.edu/ideas/the-roots-of-black-politic... (see Figure 0.5 a-c). 62% of Black people say that race should not even be a "small factor" in college admissions: https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/02/25/most-americ...

To use your examples: what does "hegemonic masculinity" mean in this context? Is your test for "hegemonic masculinity" also going to return positive results for people who just believe in traditional gender roles (including women)?

What does "white nativism" mean in this context? My in laws in exurban Oregon are frustrated that their school is suddenly 30% immigrants who speak a variety of Latin American languages that aren't even Spanish. They want Trump to enforce the border. Are they white nativists?

By your metrics, is Angela Merkel a white nativist? https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2015/12/14... ("Multiculturalism leads to parallel societies and therefore remains a ‘life lie,'").

Is Emanuel Macron? https://researchportal.helsinki.fi/en/publications/france-ha... ("France has never been and never will be a multicultural country")

Or are you just defining "white nativism" to mean "anyone who opposes mass immigration that changes their community's culture?" If my family back in Bangladesh was faced with the same sort of mass immigration (from say Myanmar) as my Trump-voting in laws in Oregon, their reactions would be identical! What a lot of people deem "white nativism" is the pervasive belief among people around the world that they have the right to preserve the culture of their communities.

Oh, come on. The Democratic left also opposes the ACA. I'm sure somebody on Twitter or in The American Prospect managed to write the sentence implying that opposition to the ACA is somehow "racist", but nobody actually believes this, the same way nobody actually believes a lot of crazy things right-wingers have claimed. There has to be room for people to say stupid stuff without the constant risk that the entire debate will be characterized by those stupid things.

I can't count then number of articles I've read since January 6 characterizing conservatism generally as basically racism.

Which is fine. Progressives are hurtling toward an Ibram Kendi definition of "racism" and under that definition, pretty much all of conservatism is "racist" in the sense that it's not anti-racist. You're probably not going to correct the structural economic differences between Black and white people without some sort of big-government intervention, large-scale redistribution, etc. (The Black-white income gap has not changed in decades, while e.g. Latino incomes have converged to white incomes within a few generations.) You can redefine pretty much every conservative policy a racist in that framing: gun rights--Black people disproportionately suffer from gun violence, etc. Kendi specifically uses the capital gains preference as an example of a "racist" policy. And based on his axioms, he's not wrong. As I've said before, while I don't share Kendi's premises, I don't really disagree with his reasoning within the framework he's constructed.

Now, I think only a minority of rank-and-file Democrats actually view "racism" that expansively. But (1) these people are disproportionately represented in policy-making circles, media, and academia; and (2) Democrats have no institutional reason to push back on that since they control the media and academia.

So I expect these definitions to continue to gain purchase. When Don Lemon called all Trump voters racists, at least Chris Cuomo pushed back: https://twitter.com/tomselliott/status/1349672644455575554?s.... I don't think that will be the case in 10 years. I'll be pleasantly surprised if it is.

If you had simply said that liberals frequently accuse conservative ideas as being racist, I'd have nodded (and not commented). But you said that liberals widely consider opposition to the ACA racist. They do not. Again: you will find someone that said that; we can play that game all night. We have to stop allowing discussions among reasonable people to be hostage to the stupidest things other people have said.

I said, “many liberals consider conservative beliefs to be inherently racist.”

I don’t know if the opposition to the ACA specifically is widely perceived as racist, but the racial dimension was constantly injected into articles on the ACA repeal. (As if Republicans would want to repeal a big new entitlement only because the President who enacted it was Black?) More generally, it’s injected into pretty much every policy debate in the press outlets (Politico, Vox, etc.—which I consider pretty good news sources). Apparently run-off elections are racist. (Somebody should tell almost every country with an elected President.)

I try to filter out stuff I read on tweets, because I think you’re correct that Twitter is highly unrepresentative, but it turns out that those blue check marks on Twitter are also writing on a lot off the outlets that cover policy issues.

As I said, it’s a self-consistent world view, so it’s gaining purchase. It does, however, make policy debate almost impossible. It’s used to attack basic American tenants. Opposing DC statehood, for example, is deemed racist. Forget the deep American tradition of skepticism about the capital, or the increasingly Hunger Games-esque ascension of DC. I strongly suspect most Republicans are more mad about the white bureaucrats working in the federal government getting two Senators on top of running the unelected fourth branch, than anything to do with the (shrinking) Black population. But it’s an effective rhetorical tactic for sure. The Senate is racist. Opposition to public unions is racist. Support for limited government, guns, individualism, free speech, etc. (These are just the real conversations I’ve had with real people.)

I strongly suspect that conservatives aren’t just going to give up on the idea of limited government, or opposing centralized bureaucracy in DC. They’ll just grow a thicker skin with respect to accusations of racism, which is probably a bad thing for everyone.

You keep citing things that aren't the ACA that someone at Vox or Politico reported someone said was racist. But I'm stuck on the ACA. It's the example you provided. In reality, no normal person on my side of the aisle thinks that opposition to the ACA is racist, nor do I think you can find credible mainstream Democratic sources saying that. Clearly, there are people who believe everything is racist, but you set a higher bar for that, and I don't think you can clear it.

For what it's worth: I don't want conservatives to give up on the idea of limited government; I think Republicans are right about some things, Democrats about others, and we need both perspectives.

> But I'm stuck on the ACA. It's the example you provided. In reality, no normal person on my side of the aisle thinks that opposition to the ACA is racist, nor do I think you can find credible mainstream Democratic sources saying that.

Who is a normal person? The Forbes article I posted is from a Duke MD. The article appears to be based on Senator Jay Rockefeller’s contemporaneous claim that opposition to the ACA was because Obama was the “wrong color.” It looks like no other Congressional Democrat backed that idea, so you’re right in that respect.

On the broader trend, Jonathan Chait, himself a liberal pundit, has clearly noticed it. https://nymag.com/news/features/obama-presidency-race-2014-4...

> One of the greatest triumphs of liberal politics over the past 50 years has been to completely stigmatize open racial discrimination in public life, a lesson that has been driven home over decades by everybody from Jimmy the Greek to Paula Deen. This achievement has run headlong into an increasing liberal tendency to define conservatism as a form of covert racial discrimination. If conservatism is inextricably entangled with racism, and racism must be extinguished, then the scope for legitimate opposition to Obama shrinks to an uncomfortably small space.

Though in the same piece he writes:

> America’s unique brand of ideological anti-statism is historically inseparable (as I recently argued) from the legacy of slavery.

Chait, at least six years ago, correctly observed that these arguments are fallacious:

> And yet—as vital as this revelation may be for understanding conservatism, it still should not be used to dismiss the beliefs of individual conservatives. Individual arguments need and deserve to be assessed on their own terms, not as the visible tip of a submerged agenda; ideas can’t be defined solely by their past associations and uses.

More recently, however, Chait has embraced the trend he was skeptical of in the above passage.

In August 2020 he wrote: https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/08/senate-washington-dc...

> The Senate is a bulwark of white power.

A few months later he writes, without a hint of irony:

> Why Are Conservatives So Angry Biden Denounced White Supremacy?

Now maybe I read too much Jonathan Chait. But I truly find his rhetoric truly perplexing, for someone I perceive as being maybe solidly left wing, but within the Overton Window. I thought that anti-statism was something the left and right broadly agreed on. (During the Obama era, polls showed that even half of Democrats listed “big government” as the “biggest threat to America.”)

I like Chait. I also don't think any of these people are wrong about the culture war issue you're talking about, and if that had been all you said, we wouldn't be 2000 words deep into this thread. But that's not what you said.

The article you posted is from a health policy "take machine" (check his Twitter, he's like a JV Ezra Klein) who concludes that opposition to the ACA is mostly not racist, and is using the idea as a framing device for a post summarizing a journal article about racial disparities in health care, which are obvious and real. The use of the word "racist" to describe the status quo ante of the ACA is counterproductive and stupid (see: "takes"), but it's also not part of the mainstream conversation.

You suggested otherwise. I suggest you concede the point, because, again: we're being held hostage by stupid things people say. Even smart people will say some stupid things, and we can let whole debates be defined by stupidity.

(We have another big health policy debate coming up, and as a liberal Democrat who opposes single-payer, I'm dreading the amount of stupidity we're all going to have to wade through to get to any kind of engagement with the real issues).

The key word in the quote is "some"

Disagreeing is racist, homophobic, sexist, etc.

If you have any opinion not belonging to the loudest angriest group, then you get all the labels and worse.

Former prime minister Abe Shinzo is famous right-wing politician but interestingly, he introduced limited term immigrants(?) program in weird way due to shortage of lower salary worker.

I'm not a fan of this article because it focuses on the most 'technical' definition of homogeneity based only on race, immigration, skin-color, etc. It also reads to me like "I know more about Japan than you" elitist talk which is all-to-common in fandoms of various kinds (and Japanophiles in general).

When I talk about the diversity of Japan, I like to focus on the different regions of Japan. Much like we recognize distinct traits between people from California, Texas, Minnesota, and New York in the US, Japanese people have distinct characteristics depending on which region they are from: Okinawa, Kansai, Tokyo, or Hokkaido to name a handful. Beyond that each of those regions is geographically different and has their own local customs and cultural quirks which I've always enjoyed learning about.

I think such a narrow view of what 'homogeneous' means is only used to serve a specific goal, and not to analyze the topic as a whole and in good-faith. Disclaimer: I grew up in Japan as a foreigner and still have much to learn, but it's my favorite place in the world by far.

Landing in Japan, I was surprised to find that people did not look that similar. I mean, this is Asia and all Asians look the same. But Japan had some yellowish, whitish, brownish people that were all, euh, Japanese. In a sense, they were Japanese because they behaved like Japanese. It seems that behavior plays a big role in how people can identify another one as being one of them.

Robert Sapolsky has a great series in Youtube about Behavioral Biology. One of the insights he brings is about Arabs: According to him, Arabs adopted very long names so that they can avoid racial conflict. When two persons recites their names and find a family name that's similar, they assume that they are family and this helps them co-operate. Now that's BS (given a long enough last name, you are going to find a similar grand-parent name) but it happens to work. Islam had this too: Your fellow muslim is your "brother".

It's time some countries realize that this has been a solved problem: To uproot racism, you need to rally your population behind common denominators and values.

> To uproot racism, you need to rally your population behind common denominators and values.

That's all very nice but how do you apply it to the situation where you have a minority group with little to no interest in integrating into the indigenous culture?

You make them do it anyway.

It's interesting to note in this context that unlike most countries, China fully assimilated its Jewish population.

I think forcibly assimilating minorities and China are a hard sell to mention together in a sentence without also mentioning Uighurs and Tibetans

True, I have heard they are assimilating their Muslim population very effectively too. They even have assimilation holiday camps, fun for all the family.

I'm sort of morbidly fascinated by the equation in the American press of "China's Muslim population" with "China's Uyghur population". They're very different things.

If that is true could Olympus elaborate on how?

There’s another large Muslim minority group called the Hui, who aren’t included in the Xinjiang camps and are generally treated well by most accounts I’ve seen.

The Hui also got caught up in the "war on terror" (read: anti-Muslim policies) that supposedly only targeted Uighur separatists. Example from Chinese state media: https://www.globaltimes.cn/content/1092308.shtml

Now, arguably the anti-halal policies were about trying to ban misleading advertising, because it's a bit silly to claim halal status on everything. Malaysia is another country that also has a bit of problem with this. But then, China has an awful lot of other misleading advertising and false claims (in particular around TCM and efficacy of folk remedies) that the government ignores or promotes. Why only target halal?

Misleading advertising aside, it's definitely the case that Arabic script for halal disappeared from legitimately halal restaurants all over China as part of this crackdown. The message seemed to be that it is okay to be Muslim, just keep quiet about it and do not advertise it too much.

I think that's a fair summary of the attitude.

The Hui are definitely suffering, in the public mind, from conceptual association with the Uyghurs. As long as the Uyghurs claim to represent "Islam", it's somewhat unavoidable for the Hui to be dragged down with them.

Nevertheless, it is quite plainly the case that oppression of the Uyghurs targets them for being culturally distinct (and, to a certain extent, seditious), not for being Muslims. It baffles me that Western media are so monomaniacally focused on criticizing this in terms of "oppressing people because of their religion" when (1) that is obviously not what's going on, and (2) "oppressing people because of their race", which is going on, is at least as bad in the eyes of Western media consumers as "oppressing people because of their religion" is.

Every time this happens, it signals as loudly as possible that the reporter has absolutely no clue what they're purporting to talk about. And it is fascinating that it seems to be so important to so many of them to talk about it anyway.

> But then, China has an awful lot of other misleading advertising and false claims (in particular around TCM and efficacy of folk remedies) that the government ignores or promotes. Why only target halal?

Well, from the article:

>> The Ningxia government has taken measures against the pan-halal tendency and Islamic thought influenced by theologies common in Arab nations, which is referred to as Arabization.

>> The Ningxia Ethnic Affairs Commission vowed in May 2017 to properly handle the pan-halal and Arabization tendencies, promoting socialist core values and placing national flags at religious sites, read a statement on the website of the Ningxia government.

I feel pretty sure that what they really care about is the Arabization. The two aren't totally unrelated; a marketplace that bifurcates everything into "halal haircuts" and "haram haircuts", "halal art lessons" and "haram art lessons" is providing space for (or, depending on your point of view, expressing) the idea that what's most important is to be a Muslim first and Chinese second.

I imagine it's somewhat to differentiate the Uyghur Muslims from other Muslims. Especially given that the general Muslim population has been demonized for so long.

Be kind of harder to convince the population to care about the other if that other is already lumped to a group that is given an enemy attribute.

Sure, just like the Chinese constitution technically ensures personal and religious freedom.

For example, I could start my own cult and write all the angry blog posts I wanted.

Now, once I gain more than 100 followers, the dynamics start to change slightly.

Vote for an overall better society with more equality. Don’t vote for populist parties who use minorities as scapegoats.

Everything else follows as a natural effect of that.

Immigration is hard, but politicians would like to see it all solved in their term period.

That’s a non-answer. National populist parties rise with increased immigration and a feeling of their society changing from what they’re used to.

How do you tell people who vote for these parties to not do it? I’m also an immigrant but it’s become very clear to me that telling people what they want is bad and they shouldn’t want it is not working at all

The short answer is a fuzzy “more educated and equal society”. You don’t tell people what to do. They will automatically do the society-endorsed right thing(tm).

Just like religion and blind faith drops when education increases.

You could argue that “marginalized local communities” are driving the votes for populist parties, thus creating the whole problem, and by taking better care of them will actually free up more resources for everyone in the long run, because immigration is no longer this massive expense that everyone thought it was.

...or when "indigenous" culture pretend that integration only works in a single direction-minorities being absorbed into bigger group without impacting any change in "original" culture.

My understanding is that the Yamato are not indigenous to Japan. For example [1]:

> Now [1997], in two landmark actions, a court and Japan's national legislature have taken the first steps to recognize that Japan's Ainu (EYE-new) people predated the Yamato race that conquered its land and systematically attempted to stamp out its existence. For Japan, a nation with a near-religious belief in the homogeneity of its people, these decisions mark the first time it has ever formally acknowledged a minority group living in its midst.

[1] Apologies for the AMP link, but trying to open the article URL directly redirects me to the Baltimore Sun home page.

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.baltimoresun.com/news/bs-xp...

That's simple. Integrate or be removed. Cultures across time have dealt with attempts to supplant them with hostility. Whether you see that as a viable option is up to you.

> Islam had this too: Your fellow muslim is your "brother".

But then comes along people who vie for political power. In the process, they start to again divide people along certain differences, one which may be racial, sometimes it is lineage. And so you see the process of unification being reversed.

It is difficult to think of a worse example than Islam or a religon generally for "uniting people".

Any attempt to unite people is inherently exclusionary. That is not problematic in itself but, inevitably, some people equate unity with superiority. It is a fine line.

What has improved (this is contentious) is: decline of religion, increased in shared interest, more diverse identities (i.e. people identify in more than one way), and more knowledge about people who are different with the internet/media/etc. Nationalism is, however, still understated as a cause of strife (I am in the UK so that perhaps colours my perspective).

> To uproot racism, you need to rally your population behind common denominators and values.

Such as The Constitution?

Seems like Americans have less and less in common, especially in ways adjacent to patriotism, all of the time. Much has been written about anti-intellectualism in these circles, where most of us have distinguished ourselves from the rabble by intellectual pursuits. But intellectuals would also rather write thinkpieces about how the majority of American history has been whitewashed (and... male-washed?) And I can't even say they don't make good points! Can most African Americans really be expected to rally around the Constitution or the lofty ideals of the revolution? I'm thinking they probably have a different perspective on that. A different experience of America and its history.

That's not even to mention this generation's disillusionment with the 1st amendment, the rejection or reinterpretation of the 2nd, the gradual erosion of the 4th. The association of constitutional 'audits' (YouTube that for a good time) with right wing conspiracy nuts. The conflation of patriotism with jingoism. I don't know how much of a rallying point the constitution can be going forward. And I wonder where that leaves us.

> In a sense, they were Japanese because they behaved like Japanese. It seems that behavior plays a big role in how people can identify another one as being one of them.

I find this to be the case too in the Netherlands.

There is a large immigrant population and they cannot be identified by the color of their skin, but easily by their body language. It is strangely reproducible to spot a Pole from a rather far distance from the way he walks.

A friend of mine is “Turkish”, but he came to the Netherlands quite young and thus did not undergo Turkish socialization and walks and speaks as any Dutchman, so many are quite surprised when it's eventually revealed that he speaks Turkish fluently and was born in Turkey, as many Turks, though not visually very distinct from the Dutch, have a certain body language that often identifies them that often disappears within a generation with those that did spend their formative years in the Netherlands.

Similarly, I am not white but since I spent my formative years in the Netherlands my body language and accent are completely Dutch, but my parents both have a hint of Surinamese accent and body language that instantly identifies them, though one of them is white.

> Robert Sapolsky has a great series in Youtube about Behavioral Biology. One of the insights he brings is about Arabs: According to him, Arabs adopted very long names so that they can avoid racial conflict. When two persons recites their names and find a family name that's similar, they assume that they are family and this helps them co-operate. Now that's BS (given a long enough last name, you are going to find a similar grand-parent name) but it happens to work. Islam had this too: Your fellow muslim is your "brother".

> It's time some countries realize that this has been a solved problem: To uproot racism, you need to rally your population behind common denominators and values.

Yet what this simply seems to create is conflict with external parties until it reaches the entire world.

It seems as though many men have a drive to be part of an ethnic, tribal conflict. I even find that, most ironically, what brings men together is the combined struggle against other men.

There is nothing quite like a war with another nation, that makes a nation forget it's petty differences.

"About 2.2% of Japan's total legal resident population are foreign citizens" [0]

"Japanese people make up 98.1%, Chinese 0.5%, Korean 0.4%, and other 1% (includes Filipino, Vietnamese, and Brazilian) of people living in Japan, according to the CIA World Handbook" [1]

So Japan is exactly as ethnically homogenous as you would think.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethnic_groups_of_Japan

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethnic_issues_in_Japan

> About 2.2% of Japan's total legal resident population are foreign citizens

You've conflated "citizenship" with "ethnicity".

Normally that is a valid point, but for Japan there is an enormous overlap.

> enormous

How enormous? We wouldn’t need words like that if we looked at the right numbers.

https://www.turning-japanese.info/2016/09/totals.html says:

> As of 2015, a total of almost 581,000 people have become legally Japanese since the fall of the shogunate and the rise of constitutional "westernized" Japan.

This seems consistent with other sources I found while doing a quick search.

This suggests less than 1% of the number of citizens of japan was not born a citizen.

Of course, some of those people will have children and those children's ethnicity could be not Japanese ethnically (or partially) but still the number of citizens of Japan that are not ethnically Japanese is quite small, and the number of citizens of Japan that are not ethnically east asian is much smaller still.

Also a lot of the Koreans in Japan migrated before 1940, peak in 1930. So the Koreans taking up citizenship are often third generation living in Japan, after beeing culturally fully integrated. So according to your numbers it would be fair to put the 'real foreigners' who took citizenship in the 0,1 to 0,3% range.

Did you read the article? The census considers anyone with Japanese citizenship to be "Japanese". Therefore it's useless as a measure of ethnic diversity.

I don't think it's useless at all in that Japan is one of the hardest country on earth to get citizenship.

I've got family in Japan. All you need to do is to go to Japan to see that it's very "japanese".

You can get residency semi-easily but getting citizenship is extremely hard.

It's not the EU or the US where a huge lot of "foreigners" can become citizen.

Note also that Japanese law implements blood citizenship and not birthright citizenship. Domestically born children of immigrants remain immigrants, in general.

If by immigrants you mean immigrant non-citizen residents, that's how it is in most of the world.

Very notably not in the US, however. All persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.

Because of our history of slavery and settler colonialism more generally. The circumstances differ because of our somewhat unique historical circumstances, although some European countries enacted similar measures for their former colonies.

Sure. Was just pointing out that Japan doesn't adhere to some bizarre purity policy: it's just the worldwide default. It's the USA who is an outlier.

Arudo Debito, who was born in America but became a Japanese citizen in the 1990s, wrote a detailed article comparing the two countries' naturalization processes:

http://debito.org/naturalization.html

It is actually quite easy to become a Japanese citizen. I’d be interested to hear where you got the impression that it is difficult. It basically requires 5 years of legal residence, a steady job, mediocre language ability, and paying taxes properly. For many people, attaining citizenship is easier than permanent residency.

>You can get residency semi-easily but getting citizenship is extremely hard.

As far as I can tell from the description of the procedures involved, it's actually easy - and certainly easier than the US, and it requires less time in the country to apply than some European countries. One reason why it's uncommon however could be because Japan does not allow dual citizenship, and it's harder to get into the country in the first place other than teaching English.

The census figure quoted in these wiki articles is exactly the statistic the author is refuting in the start of this article.

no, you really missed the point of the article: citizenship is not ethnicity

"Tokyo public schools will stop forcing students to dye their hair black, official promises" (2019)

https://japantoday.com/category/national/tokyo-public-school...

"According to a new survey published by Tokyo news outlet The Asahi Shimbun, 57% of public high schools in the city require students to prove that their hair color is natural."

https://www.businessinsider.com/japanese-students-hair-color...

I find this to be a rather interesting thing myself.

The Japanese logic of forcing the students without black hair to dye it black is that it would be unfair to not do so, as they would otherwise have a choice that other students would not, as they can obviously not be allowed to not dye it black.

In many other countries, one is allowed one's natural hair color, but not dye it at all.

In some others, one is allowed to only dye it into naturally occurring colors; one might argue that for Japan anything other than black veers close to this philosophy since 99% of Japan has black hair.

In yet other countries, schools are not allowed by law to prohibit students from dying their hair in whatever color they might want. — I live in such a country so naturally from my perspective the obsession with hair color seems quaint.

But one is I suppose to appreciate that in Japan at one point only street thugs would dye their hair blond so it became a certain dog whistle. It is not too dissimilar from many North-West European schools in the early 2000s banning any and all clothing of the brand Londsdale, until some courts overruled that, as the brand became a dog whistle for Nazis, as when carefully covered the lettering leads “NDSA” which is one letter short of “NDSAP”.

Not sure how interesting this is, but since the article mentions Scandinavia and "homogeneous society", that's not really true either. Unlike Japan, Sweden keeps track, not of "race" but country of origin for migrants or children of migrants.

For Sweden, 36.5% of men aged 15-44 are either foreign born, or has at least one parent foreign born. This data is from the Statistics Sweden (SCB) for 2019.

In this cohort, 62.5% are from, or have a parent from, Africa/Asia (Middle East), 9.3% from Western Europe/USA, 3.5% from the other Nordic countries, an 24.7% are from "Other" countries.

I'm not sure about the data for the other Scandinavian countries.

For Norway, 2020, I think about 25% of the population where either foreign born or has at least one parent foreign born [1]

https://www.ssb.no/statbank/sq/10046114

OP missing the point. Its about culture, not all the details they're trying to hang on it (dna, nationality).

You don't need to explain to a Japanese who's Japanese. They can tell within 2 seconds of meeting them. Its all about culture.

As someone who doesn't know much about Japanese culture, I find this really interesting.

Can you elaborate a bit on which details would provide that info?

Not Japanese, but studied the language and has spent a lot of time with native Japanese people.

The easiest, least contextual example would be behavior in public spaces. _Everyone_ is taking great lengths not to disturb others, ranging from not taking phone calls in public to eating over thrash cans in order to minimize dropping food directly on the pavement.

It's the constant consideration and respect for others (at the expense of your own individuality and liberty) that becomes glaringly obvious when one fails to meet the (giant) list of norms and implicit rules. If you haven't grown up with them, they are very hard to replicate without making mistakes, which is something native Japanese (generally) don't do.

>The refusal to gather statistics on ethno-racial diversity is unusual

Is this true? I don't understand why any country would want to open the box of pandora that is gathering statistics on ethno-racial diversity. I always thought countries like the USA and China were the exception.

As far as I'm aware, France and to a lesser degree Germany also don't collect this information.

> https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jun/16/france-and-ger...

AFAIK Sweden does not collect such information either. Norway does, however.

Just off the top of my head for countries that also track ethnicity/race in government statistics: Belgium (because the Walloon/Fleming ethnic divide is so central to its politics), Germany (under the euphemism "migration background"), Russia, Israel, Lebanon...

Ethnicity is an extremely important identity category, and if you want to manage that diversity you need information.

>Germany (under the euphemism "migration background")

That's very different from the US keeping track of race though. After a generation there's no way for the German government to tell the children from naturalized citizens from other German citizens.

> That's very different from the US keeping track of race though.

You'll also never see a German statistic even using the word "race" for humans beings.

The use of "race" for ethnicity is indeed a uniquely American thing; most of the countries I've mentioned use "ethnicity" or "nationality".

It's even weirder: in the US, ethnicity is a separate official category from race that has two buckets: either "hispanic or latino" or "not hispanic or latino". Which... what?

The US tracks ethnicity and race separately, and tracks Hispanic origin as the main driver of population growth is Hispanic migration

US got its initial Latino population from conquering bits of Mexico; and while in the US Latinos were a separate ethnic group from Anglos, the internal "racial" divisions in Mexican society between criollos and mestizos were important enough to collect data on.

(And criollos considered themselves "white" and were unlikely to mark themselves as "Hispanic" if it were presented as a separate option.)

US ethnic relations are weird.

not for recent stats in any case...

"Migration background" is defined as by the Statistisches Bundesamt as anyone having at least one grandparent who immigrated after 1949. We're only just getting into the period where descendants of e.g. Croatian immigrants of the '50s are not classified as being of "Migration background".

This is, of course, only used for statistical purposes; this information isn't tracked on an individual basis for use in any day-to-day decisions.

The German government doesn't know who it's citizen's parents are?

>Belgium (because the Walloon/Fleming ethnic divide is so central to its politics)

No we don't? Those divisions are entirely decided by the place where you live and for a few things in Brussels your language proficiency/the language you choose.

For the rest only (original) nationality and place of birth (and those of your parents) are taken into account for statistics.

France. No government agency can mention or ask about ethnicity - in particular, our national statistics agency, the INSEE. Private organizations can, but this is not often seen.

I think its an heritage from WWII, in particular the "yellow star".

France refuses to consider racial differences (and religious differences too), it seeks unity in everything, to the point that it almost drove local languages to extinction.

> Ethnicity is an extremely important identity category, and if you want to manage that diversity you need information.

As a french person I object to this. It's all about culture, not face features. If you want to study "communities", don't look at the face, look inside the head. And the idea that a government would "manage" ethnicity is exactly the kind of thing that repulses us.

If France is so blind to ethnicity, would you say that your experience as a Frenchman is the same regardless of the colour of your skin? Access to employment, interaction with police, visibility in medias, access to politic circles etc.

What you describe is the French dream but is that somewhat a reality?

I am not quite sure what you are getting at. Yes, this is the french ideal (and it's not so special, really), and yes, we are not here yet wrt to discrimination, be it for race, gender or sexuality.

This is what the majority of the french people vote for, but of course not all french people agree with that, unfortunately.

> would you say that your experience as a Frenchman is the same regardless of the colour of your skin?

You are committing the American mistake of thinking that people sharing a skin colour also share a culture. There will be a tremendous amount of cultural difference between a black Senegalese who is a first generation immigrant and someone from the Reunion whose great grand parents were already all French citizens.

You don't need to collect ethnicity based statistics and start treating people differently based on the color of their skin to fight racism.

> There will be a tremendous amount of cultural difference between a black Senegalese who is a first generation immigrant and someone from the Reunion whose great grand parents were already all French citizens.

To which I will also add that there can be great cultural, social and/or economic differences between two first-generation black immigrants from two different african countries, or even from the same country, that it does not make real sense to lump them under the same category.

I am Dutch; it is quite similar here.

It is about “ethnicity” as in country of origin and customs, not skin color.

I was not born in the Netherlands but did spend my formative years there; my skin is certainly a fair bit darker than the average Dutchman; my eyes are more oval; my nose is wider and smaller; my lips fuller; my hair is a perfect black. — yet never have I been treated as non-Dutch.

This is very different for my parent who speaks Dutch with a Surinamese accent and has different mannerisms, as it is for my parent's younger sibling who looks quite white but also has the Surinamese accent and mannerisms.

Surinamese people in the Netherlands definitely seem to feel some sort of kinship, and large parts of my family live in areæ of high concentration of Surinamese people, but these come in all colors, many of them are quite white but speak with a Surinamese accent.

> As a french person I object to this. It's all about culture, not face features.

I mean... yes? "Ethnicity" is a cultural category, not a genetic one. Specifically, its boundaries are socially-constructed, and the US is unusual in constructing said boundaries mostly around blood-quantum and hypodescent rules. e.g. the distinction between "Arab", "Jewish", "Circassian", &c ethnicities in Israeli identity documents is based on the specific criteria of those groups.

> Just off the top of my head for countries that also track ethnicity/race in government statistics: Belgium (because the Walloon/Fleming ethnic divide is so central to its politics), Germany (under the euphemism "migration background")

That is the point. They don't track race; they track country of birth, as does Japan. — this is an objective standard.

The U.S.A. is rather unique in that it tracks subjective, self-reported race.

Russia and Israel track "ethnicity" based on, respectively, self-identification and the internal membership rules of each ethnic group.

Here is one reason: basing policies on actual facts rather than dogma.

"The refusal to gather statistics on ethno-racial diversity is unusual"

Not gathering racial statistics is the norm in continental Europe. It's mostly Anglo-Saxon people (us, uk) and their love for the idea of "race" that is the exception.

"Not gathering racial statistics is the norm in continental Europe. It's mostly Anglo-Saxon people (us, uk) and their love for the idea of "race" that is the exception."

In the UK, statistics are collected on the ethnic origin of people in order to provide insights into important issues. For example, the COVID-19 pandemic has revealed that deaths from COVID-19 are higher among black and South Asian groups. Without these statistics we might not back have identified that these communities are more vulnerable to COVID-19.

Another example: statistics have identified that South Asians have a much higher incidence of diabetes. That insight means health professionals can research why the risk is higher in those communities.

Statistics that capture ethnic origin can also provide insight into issues of inequality, health, employment, housing and more. In my view, capturing this data is important and helpful. Without it, insight and analysis will be incomplete.

But is it more meaningful than many other variable that one might collect statistics of?

What stands out for me in particular is that there is often talk in academic achievement and income level as a function of race, but it turns out that the far less discussed variable of the time of the year one was born in, is a bigger indicator than race.

It feels as though it be a self-fulfilling prophecy to me. They think race is so important that the moment they find anything that correlates as a function of it, they chant it, whereas race is often not even the actual proximate cause, but something else that correlates with it such as, for instance, urban residence, and no such chants are made when even higher correlations are found with other variables they don't seem to care as much about.

Probably, genetic factors for health outcomes aren't exactly some tenuous link. Differential genetic composition of the various races has been shown repeatedly to affect anything from disease risk to drug response.

I don't think the data couldn't be useful, I just don't think it's worth it.

The first problem is how will you collect this data? Self report? Assigned by the government based on your parents? DNA test?

Who will you give this data to?

What will you do with the conclusions? Say for Covid-19, will you make rules stricter for some ethnicities? Or prioritize them for vaccines?

How do you even know how correct this data is? There's a big correlation between ethnicities, wealth and social customs. Or do you want to give the researchers also information about that?

For me all the answers on those questions are negative. I see no way to do this in an ethical way.

We already know there are issues with equality, employment etc of some ethnicities, I think collecting statistics on it will only make the racists in our society believe stronger in their views. I don't believe we can stop racism by introducing more (positive) racism.

In general, the federal and state governments in the US don't track race because the government is obsessed with it. It's because our society was and still is obsessed with it. It'd be nice if we could ignore these vague and mostly subjective categories that don't even mean much genetically, but we'd be burying our heads in the sand to think they don't matter. Black Americans have been discriminated against more than white Americans, so those numbers help flag emerging problems. They're also the only way to know how much we're reducing racial disparities.

There may be more diversity in Japan than given credit but there is more similarities between a Korean and a Japanese than there are between someone from Syria and a French person. Pretty naive to gloss over that fact.

Actually out of curiosity, I'd love to hear a Japanese or Korean persons take on this claim. Im from the Middle East so Syria and France seem pretty different for me, but maybe if you're from the country/region being compared it's a lot easier to see the differences.

There's a Japanese take on that claim in the article

My background: citizen of USA, son of two immigrants from Korea. Hopefully someone who actually lives in South Korea or Japan can step in here too.

Subjectively, it seems to me like Japan and South Korea are somewhat culturally similar, but they are not the same, and the differences are important to people there. Furthermore, 20th century history has created a lot of hatred on both sides. These wounds are starting to heal with time and _I think_ the younger generation in Korea tends to care less about the issue. Many people in both countries go to the other country for tourism, and each country's cultural exports are popular in the other country.

For an analogy (though not a close analogy, because the political situation is different): Israel and Syria are pretty similar though, right? Both speak Semitic languages, they have similar food, similar weather, similar religions, and often you can't tell them apart just by looking at them. So they should be friends. :)

There is a border in common between Korea and Japan. I don't remember seeing one between Syria and France. Not to sure what's your point....

To prove that they didn't read the article, which directly counters this idea

Japan is an island. How exactly does it share a border with Korea?

Did you even read the article? That's not how Japanese think at all

Racial stats and forms asking about it are an underestimated force that perpetuates systemic racism, increases segregation, discrimination and undermines social cohesiveness. Change my mind.

Why? The onus is on you to support your argument. Not on others to disprove yours with no sources.

ethnicity is a very important legacy for every ethnic group, acknowledging the existence of the different ethic groups living in a country means being more aware of the specific needs of everyone instead of crushing minorities under the umbrella of homogeneity.

it's the laws that perpetuates systemic racism.

For example in Japan Ainu, Ryukyuans and Yamato are different, have different languages, traditions and sometimes even different alphabets.

Here in France there is no such thing as "race" or "color" or "ethnicity" from the State's point of view. The census doesn't ask anything related to race / color / ethnicity. As far as the state is concerned, you're either a French citizen or a foreigner.

However, during 2020, there were a few cases of alleged [0] police brutality towards "minorities". This has opened a wider debate over the place of minorities in the French society which, of courses, started to talk about racism. There was a clear attempt by some parties to bring up arguments which seemed directly taken from US events, in particular related to the George Floyd case. Of course, those arguments were met with the "France doesn't see race, so there can't be racism" argument.

Now I haven't followed those debates particularly closely, but from my (admittedly superficial) point of view, it's pretty hard to say that something is happening to a particular class of people because of who they are without acknowledging that that is, indeed, a class. In practical terms, how can you acknowledge that "black people are discriminated against if there are no black people"?

My point is that it's way more difficult to talk about things you can't measure. This slides into "I feel that", which doesn't really allow to know whether progress is being made.

---

[0] I say "alleged" because I haven't followed closely those cases so I don't know what the investigations concluded.

> In practical terms, how can you acknowledge that "black people are discriminated against if there are no black people"?

Think about how you would practically go about preventing discrimination against a group of people. I don't think any solutions require the acknowledgment that the group exists, officially. Discrimination can happen on a number of lines that are not in whatever survey the state creates so any effective solution has to address the tendency toward discrimination of all sorts. In the US, we don't collect information (officially) on sexual orientation or religion yet we still take steps to protect people from discrimination on those avenues despite having no metrics.

I think collecting that data has a danger of creating a list of officially recognized groups which can be discriminated against (at the expense of those not tracked). This happens in the US with sexual orientation because it has not been in the list of things that it's illegal to discriminate against innthe past. Instead of just making discrimination illegal, it's only illegal to discriminate by race, religion or gender. If, instead, it were just illegal to discriminate, that wouldn't be an issue.

> yet we still take steps to protect people from discrimination on those avenues despite having no metrics.

The issue is that the U.S.A. knows at-will employment to begin with where a man might be fired or hired for rather arbitrary reasons.

In many countries, the onus is on employers to justify their reasons to make financial sense.

Pertaining to Japan, I once had a discussion with someone from the U.S.A. who learned that sexual orientation is not a “protected class” in Japan, and he had assumed that that meant that one's employ could be terminated over one's sexual orientation. Japan, as it stands, is notorious for it's nigh impossibility to fire an employee for about any reason other than willful, dishonorable, illegal conduct. Even an employee that is not being sufficiently productive in Japan will be hard to dismiss if the court find that he still tries and puts in enough effort, but simply finds it hard to manage. — personal reasons, such as sexual orientation or anything one does at home is completely off the table, of course, and thus in no want of any special protection.

I replied to another poster about the collection of ethnic minority data in the UK. I repeat what I said previously: these stats are collected in order to provide insights into important issues such as health, employment, housing and yes, inequality.

For example, the COVID-19 pandemic has revealed that deaths from COVID-19 are higher among black and South Asian groups. Without this data we would not have been able to identify that these communities are at higher risk.

Link to my previous comment on this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25891543

I completely agree that it causes problems when armchair warriors point out that your diversity doesn't match what their expected diversity is. However it does make it more difficult to find and fix real problems, eg in France no one knows what exactly is going on.

I too agree that the US racial buckets are terrible. People from MENA countries like Saudi are white, and all Japanese/Bangladesh/Mongolian/Indonesians are "Asian", but somehow Pacific Islands got their own bucket. Makes no sense.

Plus now nearly everyone is heading towards mixed. My daughters friends are a bunch of Chinese/Jamaican, Russian/Indian, White/Asian, White American/African. Everyone is going to be just multiple buckets in a few generations.

"Facts about races make people racist."

Above is a perfect example of "soft bigotry of low expectations" from racist leftists.

Leftist are obsessed with race because they're projecting racists. Change my mind.

The only issue I have with that is that it's a common refrain from libertarians on the right as well.

> Given the data above, it’s obvious that [saying that Japan was a country of “one nation, one civilization, one language, one culture and one race”] was an aspirational statement rather than a factual one — a call for Japanese people to think of their country this way. It was a desire to create homogeneity out of diversity, through cultural and linguistic assimilation and through identification with the Japanese nation.

This whole section was nonsensical.

According to the Genetic and anthropometric studies on Japanese people [1], modern Japanese people:

> have about 9-13% Jōmon ancestry (which is highest in the Ainu people, who are largely of Jōmon descent) and the majority of their ancestry from the Yayoi people.

> [Yayoi] are genetically most similar to Ryukyuans and Koreans as well as other East Asian people but quite distinct from the Ainu.

WARNING: the second point can stir anger in those that culturally identify as Japanese or Korean, two groups with a history of animosity. Hopefully the controversy has diminished since the first genetic studies emerged.

> If I hear “Japan is a homogeneous society” one more time, I’m going to write a long angry blog post. Oh wait…this is that blog post.

I think this anger is misplaced.

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

Using a statistic that represents the country as a whole hides the fact that some parts of Japan are more like 99.99%, while others are more like 80%. The experience you have will depend on where you are.

Carefully read the comment to realize this "feel good" piece is written for a western audience:

> "This article was clearly written more from ignorance than knowledge and is not based on knowledge of the actual culture in Japan."

I saw that comment, and I think it misses the point. The author was not claiming that everyone lives in harmony and no one is prejudiced against those anyone else.

The point is that, if you look at official stats and see "98% Japanese", that ignores the fact that many of those people aren't ethnically Japanese, because the stats talk about citizenship, not ethnicity.

I think that comment actually proves the author's point, that there are many categories outside ethnically Japanese, and people there disagree on what it means to "be Japanese", lending credence to the idea that Japan is not a homogeneous society.

This author does a great job explaining that Japan is the most homogenous country in the G7. Just because it's not quite as homogenous as popular belief, does not mean that that popular belief is in any way incorrect.

As always, it depends on the point of view.

When you look at a country from the outside (or as a whole), you'll mostly compare it to other countries and thus will focus on what makes that country similar to itself (and different to other countries).

When you look at a country by itself, or internally, then you'll start making divisions to see what different groups there are.

Homogeneity is mostly a relative measure - the article seems to be trying to make (Japanese) internal homogeneity a universally (between countries) comparable measure.

> In fact, Masayoshi Son IS a Japanese citizen, and the only reason people think of him as being part of the Korean minority is that he’s famous enough that the media looked up and reported his ancestry.

Uh, his last name is Korean which makes it pretty obvious.

This type of base level misunderstanding deeply erodes the credibility of the author.

I agree that there is more diversity in Japan than many realize, but in my experience living there, it's still significantly more homogeneous than similarly prosperous Western countries.

Genetics is one thing, but Japan definitely did allow foreign culture into their mix. Just look at the movie "The Last Samurai" to see what I mean. I wonder if it's possible to put out a number for that.

As for my Country, as Europeans we are heavily influenced by Americans, who we completely seem to accept as our cultural leaders. How do the Japanese feel about them though?

Ah yes, the famous Hollywood documentary “The Last Samurai”. :-)

Well.. it is an anecdotal representation of some bigger cultural change that happened, though, is it not?

I would argue that Japan very definitely did not “allow” foreign culture in because the country was “opened” under threat of force by Matthew Perry. Unless you mean earlier entries of culture like firearms and Christianity in the 16th century but I’m not sure that entry can be attributed to Japan as a country that far back.

The last samurai isnt tom cruise it's the dude he meets after being injured by the japanese government, when he begins to appreciate the shogun via his interactions with the last samurai. Comments on the movie tend to give the impression that cruise is playing an asian man rather than an injured western soldier.

From where I look at it, Japanese culture seems to be quite interested in adopting exotic elements very quickly and likes them for that reason.

There is nothing more Japanese than a parfait in the afternoon, a good curry in the evening, and a traditional Christian wedding before attending the Sintou shrine for a final blessing.

I really don't know what the point of this article is, it hasn't answer the question it poses. It simply starts with a straw man argument that Japan is only thought of as homogenous because of the 2% foreign-born statistic.

Firstly, that 2% statistic is telling, even though he pretends it isn't. It doesn't tell the whole story, but it is one of the best indicators for homogeneity, because the percentage of people born abroad living in your country, says something about the recent (last 2-3 generations) inflow of foreign elements (e.g. language, food, dna, religion etc).

If you look at the statistics, Europe and the US are places where these percentages are very high. The US or Germany for example are around 15%. Given Japan is at 2%, that's actually 1 out of 50 in Japan vs 1 out of 6 in say US or Germany, a massive difference.

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

Second, even if you look at the population which is born in Japan but has a non-Japanese heritage, the very fact so many blend in and aren't known to have non-Japanese roots says something about the homogeneity as well. The author references Masayoshi Son who is seen to be Japanese and only known to be Korean due to being a billionaire that journalists looked in to, isn't an argument against homogeneity (because, look, Koreans in Japan! Didn't think that did you?) but rather for homogeneity (because look, a 3rd generation Korean like Son isn't normally recognised unless he is a billionaire. Their entire culture has blended in and become Japanese to the point it is homogeneous and only detectable by DNA-test or investigative journalism. That shouts homogeneity to me. Son needed to be famous to be recognised as Korean ,not Japanese. But Obama or Harris didn't need to be famous to be recognised as different from the majority ethnic group in the US.

People don't claim that Japan is completely racially pure. The claim is if you take a homogenous/heterogeneous spectrum and plot rich countries on it (e.g. EU, North-America, Australia etc), Japan is relative to such countries, much more on one side than the other.

There are two main reasons for this. One is that Japan simply has had much less (permanent) migration for one.

And two, even with high-levels of migration, there can still be two different responses: Integration or Assimilation. Star Trek's Borg are fully composed of new peoples, but they are assimilated. Everyone becomes Borg, unrecognisable. Whereas you can also integrate new peoples, your culture changes, you adapt to new elements, the population and the individuals therein can be recognisably differentiated. Japan is no Borg, but on this spectrum it also scores higher on assimilation than integration, vis-a-vis other rich countries like the US or Europe. And in that sense, Japan is among a few uniquely (relatively) homogenous countries.

Japan is NOT homogeneous. The author doesn't mention that before the Yamato, people already existed within Japan's border. Their descendants are very much alive and form various ethnic groups(Ainu). On the main island you would see less of these kind of diversity but Hokkaido or Okinawa are just another world.

The Ainu are a tiny tiny minority. Even moreso since (Yamato) Japan colonized the island.

Okinawans are pretty much culturally Japanese with a different flavor like Kanto is different from Kansai.

Okinawa has its own language. And was assimilated by Japan in the 19 century. Kansai is not a recently added province. Then just look at the policies. How many were built to assimilate Kansai, how many were built to assimilate Okinawa. So difference are bigger that you may think. But i'm trying tell anybody if they are Japanese or not. Japanese people cannot say from one hand that they very different from Chinese people and say Okinawa people are very close to Japanese people. That just doesn't make sense.

> Okinawans are pretty much culturally Japanese

Try saying that in a bar in Okinawa and see how well it goes over.

> a different flavor like Kanto is different from Kansai.

It’s not uncommon to hear people from Tokyo describe people from Osaka as “not being Japanese.”

I’m not saying they are Yamato (trough genetically they have lots of Yamato), what I’m saying is that culturally the differ from mainlanders a bit, but not a great degree.

Okinawa has been a part of Japan for over four centuries, so they’re pretty much integrated and there isn’t much daylight.

> Japan is NOT homogeneous

Japan is more homogeneous from a cultural and ethnic perspective than any other country of that size and population in the entire world. Therefore Japan IS homogeneous.

I find this mentality to be quite common when talking to U.S.A.-men, the conception that “U.S.A.” is not an “ethnicity” but all other countries are.

I remember a thread on 4chan a while back that asked for the user's ethnicity that had two kinds of replies: A) a country other than U.S.A.; B) a so-called “race”.

That was not the only part that piqued my interest; the other part was there were a great deal of replies that, seemingly correctly assumed that all the replies that listed a race must be from the U.S.A., inciting such vintage 4chan responses as “Race is not an ethnicity, burgerfag. Just say you're from the U.S.A..”.

I have definitely noticed this specific quirk of U.S.A.-men, an assumption that other countries are races, and that when I for instance say that I am “Dutch", that comes with the assumption that I am also “white”.

> Yep, you read that right. Japan’s government doesn’t go around asking people what race they are. A curious behavior for a country that’s supposedly obsessed with racial purity, no?

Such census too seem to be an U.S.A. idiosyncrasy.

Most countries do not track this, as far as I know. There are no Dutch statistics on the matter either because it's pure self-report. There are statistics on how much of the Dutch population is a first generation immigrant, and second generation immigrant, which is more objective, but that's it.

I have been acquainted with the knowledge that when applying for, say, a university position or even a vocational one, that in the U.S.A. one is frequently asked for one's “race”. This would seem highly suspicious in my milieu.

I think Japan would benefit socially from having immigrants from south america. Benefit in being more open how people behave socially. South america would benefit from Japanese engineering. I propose they make a mutual swap.

There is actually a very significant and large cultural symbiosis between Brazil and Japan with quite a bit of travel and interbreeding between them.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brazil%E2%80%93Japan_relations

> Now, more than 1.6 million Brazilians are of Japanese descent, making Brazil host to the largest Japanese community outside Japan. At the same time, Japan is host to the third largest Brazilian population, most being of Japanese origin.

There are quite a few Japanese citizens now living in Japan that grew up in Brazil, and have one or two Brazilian parents and speak Portugese as well as Japanese.

A lot of words in this article in order to make a very weak argument. I assume he started writing before he started researching.

From wikipedia:

> Chinese people in Japan are the largest foreign minorities in Japan. They comprise 0.64% of Japan's population.

So the largest ethnic groups in japan which aren't Japanese all comprise a percentage of the population measured in tenths of a single percent, at the most.

Now let's look at The United States:

> Non-Hispanic white - 60.1%

> Hispanic and Latino (of any race) - 18.5%

> Black or African American - 13.4%

> Asian - 5.9%

> [continued]

Ethnicity aside, what about same-generation heritage/place of birth (immigrants)?

> There were a record 44.8 million immigrants living in the U.S. in 2018, making up 13.7% of the nation’s population. This represents a more than fourfold increase since 1960, when 9.7 million immigrants lived in the U.S., accounting for 5.4% of the total U.S. population.

Japan's population is roughly 2% immigrants.

Obviously, for almost all people who aren't racists, having a racially pure ethnostate isn't important. But Japan is pretty close to one, and The United States is a very diverse place.

I don't know what the point of this article is. This is the kind of article where halfway through writing it you realize you're actually wrong and you stop writing.

Author also kinda goes in a circle by saying “just because they’re more Asian doesn’t mean they’re Japanese!!” and then pointing out that Korean Japanese blend right in and nobody’s the wiser, but a half-black Japanese is a Big Freakin’ Deal there. It’s a weird and poorly argued article for sure

> Chinese people in Japan are the largest foreign minorities in Japan. They comprise 0.64% of Japan's population.

Does that mean what we think it means, though? Does that include people of Chinese descent who are Japanese citizens (who, as the author points out, are considered "Japanese" for statistical purposes), or (as I suspect) it only includes non-citizen Chinese people?

> Does that include people of Chinese descent who are Japanese citizens.

Yes. It does not include non-Japanese passport holding Chinese.

After living there many years, my imprisons; people as individuals are very heterogenous, but in groups consensus building and standard protocol is the modus operandi; some of this is just a matter of taste; there is a sore lack of pluralism and all its benefits to thinking, decision making, and experience across society; promotion of perceptions of homogeneous one people one language one county, is part of the nationalistic project to make people believe in Japan as a real thing; there is huge variation in regional cultures and languages; there is a huge decline of religional population and economy and hence diversity; really big cities require a degree of conformity of the population to be manageable; neo liberal capitalist ideals hold the balance power now and have subsumed the nation and its culture; homogeneity is very linked with consumerism; coming from a country where is kind of rude to ask where are you from, it being the first thing out of anyone's mouth when you meet them took me on a philosophical journey over the years; Japan's contemporary language planning policy, if not by design, then by tertiary effect serves to make people more confused and inept at cross cultural communication and emphasise difference rather than similarities; the whole 'let's build robots to replace our aging workforce', is just another way of saying let's not have people born in other countries come line here; Japan has been too Japanese for to long, and the before mentioned level of plurality had led to a lack of imagination on how to solve problems, and perpetuation of ideas detached from reality when it comes to ethnicity, nationality, etc; what happens to all this empty space and developed infrastructure when 100s of millions of Bangladeshis are displaced by sea level rise?; Most of the interesting the interesting parts of Japan and the historical circumstance the led it to be what it is today, have little or no relivance to discussion on other countries about the merits of an ethno state. The Prefectures keep and publish very accurate monthly data about internal immigration and emigration, including nationality, it wouldn't be heard to research this.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com