How Homogeneous Is Japan?
noahpinion.substack.com
How Homogeneous Is Japan?
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Re: How Homogeneous Is Japan?
#2Racial stats and forms asking about it are an underestimated force that perpetuates systemic racism, increases segregation, discrimination and undermines social cohesiveness. Change my mind.
Re: How Homogeneous Is Japan?
#3> 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...
Re: How Homogeneous Is Japan?
#4Carefully 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."
Re: How Homogeneous Is Japan?
#5Not 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.
Re: How Homogeneous Is Japan?
#6A 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.
Re: How Homogeneous Is Japan?
#7I migrated to a homogeneous country in Asia and I've never reconsidered my decision. To them I am and will always be a foreigner, but it's bearable to live in a stable society with no racial unrest, low crime rate, overall conservative society with a subtle note of progressiveness, and other good attributes that derive from homogeneousness.
Re: How Homogeneous Is Japan?
#8"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.
Re: How Homogeneous Is Japan?
#9>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.
Re: How Homogeneous Is Japan?
#10Landing 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.