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Japan Begins Experiment of Opening to Immigration

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Re: Japan Begins Experiment of Opening to Immigration

#251
post #249
post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>But from what I have read in this thread, much of the speculation about the loss of the 'unique' Japanese culture has more to do about what is happening in the west than what will happen in Japan. Yes. Japan has become sort of an ideal example of a successful modern ethnostate for Western opponents of multiculturalism. A lot of fears Westerners express about Japan losing its cultural homogeneity are just a proxy for…

With Trump, Brexit and the turmoil in Europe we're way past just "opposing" multiculturalism. Multiculturalism seems to be imploding. I was and am not fascinated by Japan, and to be honest I didn't always enjoy my visit there. It was frustrating to feel so... foreign. I complained about them not speaking English and was annoyed that I couldn't even read a simple sign. And yet, looking back I cherish that time and a f…

And yet Japan has been exchanging cultural and genetic material with the rest of East Asia for thousands of years, and the West for centuries. Even during the Sakoku period, they were trading with the world through the port at Dejima.

Pretending it's an island untouched by and uninterested in foreign culture is changing it to fit one's imagination. Someone may well have "bent to your will" a bit had you put in a bit more effort than your comment suggests you did while there, as hospitality is deeply ingrained into their culture.

Re: Japan Begins Experiment of Opening to Immigration

#252
post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you only consider only white and black people to be foreigners. I'd say that there are a lot of Chinese and various other Asian ethnicities mixed in there that are hard to tell.

They're only "hard to tell" if you don't spend a lot of time around people of Asian ethnicity. It is very rare I cannot tell a Japanese person from a Chinese person from a Korean person. Reading comments on this thread below yours, there are a surprisingly high number of people on HN who think all Asians look alike. Spend a few months in an Asian country and white people begin to all look alike while Asians become qu…

Well, I am Chinese and people cannot tell me apart from whatever Asian country I happen to be in. In fact, visiting Taiwan, people frequently mistake me for Japanese or Korean even though I don't say a word. And having stayed in Japan for extended periods of time no one has presumed I was Chinese before I opened my mouth.

If you're a tourist, you're very likely to carry certain cultural mannerisms or clothing that give you away, but otherwise stripped down naked there's very small physical differences.

If the foreign Chinese or Korean person has assimilated (learned the language), you would hard pressed to tell.

Masayoshi Son, the richest Japanese person, is ethnically Korean, and he had switched his last name back to his Korean surname so that he could be recognized as a Korean.

Much of what you perceive to be differences in phenotype among Asians are usually geographical or culturally acquired differences. For example many people think that Filipinos must have dark skin, or that if you have fair skin you must come from Japan or South Korea, but in reality that has more to do with how much sun those respective cultures manage to avoid, and skin-care products.

Re: Japan Begins Experiment of Opening to Immigration

#253
post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're only "hard to tell" if you don't spend a lot of time around people of Asian ethnicity. It is very rare I cannot tell a Japanese person from a Chinese person from a Korean person. Reading comments on this thread below yours, there are a surprisingly high number of people on HN who think all Asians look alike. Spend a few months in an Asian country and white people begin to all look alike while Asians become qu…

Well, I am Chinese and people cannot tell me apart from whatever Asian country I happen to be in. In fact, visiting Taiwan, people frequently mistake me for Japanese or Korean even though I don't say a word. And having stayed in Japan for extended periods of time no one has presumed I was Chinese before I opened my mouth. If you're a tourist, you're very likely to carry certain cultural mannerisms or clothing that gi…

It seems you misunderstood a bit, which is my fault, so I'll explain.

Facial blindness for racial features occurs when you're not accustomed to having to noticing such features. Most homogeneous regions can readily identify outsiders: they just look different. They're less likely to be able to identify where the outsider is from.

Guessing from facial features, with great but not perfect accuracy, is a skill. Like any skill it needs to be practiced. It is also never 100% accurate but I'm right most of the time.

Korean people have rounder faces and a less distinct chin than Japanese people. Chinese people are a bit in-between the two in terms of head/face shape. Koreans tend to have smaller noses and less pronounced cheek bones. Japanese have thicker eyebrows. The "double eyelid" is more common and prominent in China/Japan than Korea. China varies a bit more by region - but the people from Guangdong look different from those in Jiangxi or Gansu.

As a rule of thumb the north-south effect applies to Asian just like it applies to most of Europe: people in the northern regions are on average taller with lighter skin than people in the southern regions.

It also isn't just East Asia. Most people have difficulty telling African people apart because it isn't a skill most people need to practice. In East Africa, (eg. Uganda, Kenya, and Somalia) people tend to have larger foreheads (or more accurately: higher hairlines) than in other African countries. I actually learned a lot of this from watching a linguist, who often goes out to speak with people in public [0]. To approach and open a discussion he often has to guess their ethnicity in order to guess which language he should speak. He does so with a very high accuracy, including regional differences for Chinese people (he speaks Mandarin and Cantonese and from what I remember a few more regional dialects). He often does this without ever hearing the other person speak first, although he does sometimes overhear them speaking and butts in to chat.

>If the foreign Chinese or Korean person has assimilated (learned the language), you would hard pressed to tell.

I attend a Japanese class (in the US) with Chinese, Korean, Filipino, and Japanese students many of whom speak the language fluently. I did not have any trouble guessing except for one man who was half Korean-half Japanese. Now this isn't a topic I always bring up and it's not like I go around trying to guess peoples' ethnicity, but among friends who are learning a language together it usually comes up at some point.

Again, to reiterate: It is never 100% accurate. People are of mixed races all over the world, very few people are completely homogeneous. Recessive traits can appear, maybe they were raised in the South but by Northern parents. Maybe they're just a tall shut-in. Maybe they have a lot of makeup on. Maybe their diet was very different growing up. There's a lot more that goes into looks than just genes.

Just because most people can't play a 7-string guitar doesn't make it impossible to play a 7-string guitar.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/user/laoshu505000/videos

Re: Japan Begins Experiment of Opening to Immigration

#254
post #226
post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The conflation that is happening in this thread is between culture and ethnicity not nationality and ethnicity. When someone of mixed race says they are "all Japanese" they are obviously talking about their culture and not their passport.

Culture is tied to nationality. Do you have an example indicating the contrary?

Of course. Nation states have not been round that long. Just a few hundred years.

Jewish culture exists throughout the world. All religious cultures actually. Islamic culture.

Immigrants often retain many aspects of their culture when they move to a new country.

The US itself is a huge mismash of different cultures. People in the US are not bound by a single cultural identity. They are bound by the constitution and the principles and values it represents.

Re: Japan Begins Experiment of Opening to Immigration

#255
post #245
post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If mixed ethnicity makes you less Japanese than of course you will be discriminated against. At the very least families who want their descendants to be "more" Japanese will resist allowing their children to marry those who are "less" Japanese. That is discrimination. Even the term "less Japanese" sounds like a perjorative in a country so deeply founded on a specific cultural identity. We live in a global world now.…

"We live in a global world now. Countries that fundamentally tie their culture to ethnicities will someday be a thing of the past. " No we don't and no they won't be. The only countries that are making this mistake are those from Western Europe and the US & co. Others are proud of their heritage, cherish it and fight for their culture. Your utopia may only be true once we become space-faring and encounter other speci…

I am not describing a utopia. I just do not think, barring some world-wide catastrophe, there is any way you can turn the clock back on globalism at this point. I know people want to go back. People always want to live in the past. Many Trump voters were voting for someone to take them back to the past. Same with Brexit. But go far back enough in the past and you will see everything was once different.

The world is changing and that change is pointing in one direction however much people want to fight it.

Re: Japan Begins Experiment of Opening to Immigration

#256
post #241
post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but rather are the genetic conglomerate of their ancestors (which is hard to argue against) and thus links in a chain But that's exactly it. It's not like that. Or shouldn't be. That's not what makes a person a part of a group (town, city, region, country, etc). It's a constraining, and wrong way of looking at things. It's something to grow out of. Heck, in my hometown we consider someone as 'from' this town (to tr…

It seems to me that disturbingly many people (predominantly western white men, I'd hazard, but women aren't spared either) are afflicted by a syndrome which makes them truly believe that race, ethnicity or nationality don't matter and that we're all the same . Not that we should have the same rights and obligations, but that we're the same with some cute, "enriching" but irrelevant exceptions such as music, food, etc…

> It seems to me that disturbingly many people (predominantly western white men, I'd hazard, but women aren't spared either) are afflicted by a syndrome which makes them truly believe that race, ethnicity or nationality don't matter and that we're all the same.

I believe that the Chinese call such individuals "Baizuo".

Re: Japan Begins Experiment of Opening to Immigration

#257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Speaking in support of the gp's point: Dearborn's community of Middle Easterners (more than just Muslims, also heavily Chaldean) speaks an awful lot of Arabic and not so much English. Similarly, the Chinese community in Ann Arbor is very insular and sticks heavily to Chinese over English. This is not a normative statement to say that this is bad, but in this region there are immigrant groups that aren't assimilating…

Give it time. How many Polish only speakers do you see in Hamtramck in spite of the large Polish-descended population there?

Do you think that has anything to do with the pols in this case and Mexicans in the GP example - that they are both Christian cultures assimilating into other Christian cultures?

Re: Japan Begins Experiment of Opening to Immigration

#258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Give it time. How many Polish only speakers do you see in Hamtramck in spite of the large Polish-descended population there?

Do you think that has anything to do with the pols in this case and Mexicans in the GP example - that they are both Christian cultures assimilating into other Christian cultures?

[deleted]

Re: Japan Begins Experiment of Opening to Immigration

#259
post #222
post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Japan is extra special in this regard. My brother who is japanese, married a japanese national, speaks japanese and lives in japan is not "Japanese". That's what the article is referring to.

Could you elaborate on what specifically makes him "not Japanese"?

Lack of Japanese genes

Re: Japan Begins Experiment of Opening to Immigration

#260
post #178

As a naturalized US citizen, I had to give up my Japanese citizenship. It was a hard decision to make since half my immediate family is still Japanese and I still love Japan. In part I never forgave Japan that they forced me to make this decision. Which is why I'm excited for a more ethnically diverse Japan. As a resident of the Bay Area I only see diversity as an advantage of introducing new thoughts and creativity.…

If it changes too much, will it be the same Japan you left and loved?
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