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I'm going to talk about a very uncomfortable topic, which is racism and xenophobia in Japan.

A "skin whitening" booth near my house, created to take your photo and make you look more like a white person.

It exists. It's extremely prevalent. However, most people who exhibit this behavior are entirely unaware of what they are doing. It's the product of an extremely homogeneous, isolated society, where foreigners, despite their recently increasing numbers, are still the VAST minority.

We aren't just black sheep. We're like a God damn dinosaur in the middle of the herd.

Japan is a highly educated, first world country. It knows what racism is. People know it's bad. But because actual interaction with the outside world is so few and far between, people know of it, as something they've learned of in textbooks and seen on television, but have trouble conceptualizing it as something that exists in the real world.

As such, when met with a foreigner, you'll find situations like...

-Long stares
-Visible desire to avoid you
-Awkward smiles
-Refusal to acknowledge your Japanese (often accompanied by "I don't speak English" or scattered English phrases)
-Conversely, the compliment "Nihongo jouzu" ("your Japanese is very good") after saying something super simple, like "how much is this" or "where is the bus stop"

And such.

Some of my favorite personal examples have been people telling me my nose is huge, children pointing at me and screaming "foreigner!!!", other teachers openly talking about how they find foreigners scary because they don't know how to talk to them (thinking I couldn't understand them), my students asking me if my eyes are real and if I see differently from normal people, and, the biggest of all, sitting in on a world history class about the physical and cultural differences between Japanese people and the rest of the world.

That lesson was something else. The teacher mentioned how black people love to eat watermelon and dance before singling me out as the "white guy" example, asking me to stand up, pointing out my nose, eyes, and hair as different, all before saying Americans tend to be louder and care about their own opinions a lot.

In the west, we call these things microaggressions. They aren't hostile in nature - often quite the opposite - but they are offensive because you are being compartmentalized, dehumanized, and put in a very different space from "normal" human beings.

Gaijin is a slang term for foreigner. It can be considered offensive.

It's not a good feeling, being put in a different zone like that.

Of course, not everyone is like this. If I were to make a generalization like that, I'd be doing exactly what I'm complaining about. There are loads of nice and understanding and wonderful people without a hint of this behavior. But it would be disingenuous to say that it wasn't very prolific here.

So what can we do to combat this?

The answer is - not much.

The best we can do is learn Japanese, get involved with the community, and make friends. You can't tell someone they're being slightly xenophobic - you need to show them you're a normal human being. Then they hopefully realize the error of their ways, in retrospect.

Since I'm a white guy, I normally don't experience this stuff in America. I know a lot of people would probably say something along the lines of "cry me a river" for the soft-racism I experience here as opposed to the real, dangerous kind back home.

I suppose they wouldn't be off base in saying something like that. One of the only ways to experience what it actually feels like to be a minority is to become one.

And, in many ways, it's been enlightening. I would actually go so far as to say that all non-minorities should experience it in their lives at some point. It drives home how important it is to really see other people, their hearts and not their face, to respect them and talk to them, not at them.

It's been interesting. I really hope that, as Japan continues to globalize itself, that the problem can diminish over time.