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How Homogeneous Is Japan?

noahpinion.substack.com

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Re: How Homogeneous Is Japan?

#71

Post by u678u »

627467 wrote: post #2

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.

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.

Re: How Homogeneous Is Japan?

#72

Post by fredrikholm »

DoofusOfDeath wrote: post #69
JoeAltmaier wrote: post #67

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.

Re: How Homogeneous Is Japan?

#73

Post by prestigious »

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.

Re: How Homogeneous Is Japan?

#74

Post by cainxinth »

xorfish wrote: post #19
ThePadawan wrote: post #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.…

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…

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.

Re: How Homogeneous Is Japan?

#75

Post by prepend »

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.

Re: How Homogeneous Is Japan?

#76

Post by kebman »

sheefrex wrote: post #14
CorrectHorseBat wrote: post #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.

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.

Re: How Homogeneous Is Japan?

#77

Post by kebman »

csomar wrote: post #10

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…

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

Such as The Constitution?

Re: How Homogeneous Is Japan?

#78

Post by mc32 »

prepend wrote: post #75

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…

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.

Re: How Homogeneous Is Japan?

#79

Post by katbyte »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #55
hogFeast wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Re: How Homogeneous Is Japan?

#80

Post by vharuck »

kome wrote: post #47
CorrectHorseBat wrote: post #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.

"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.

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.
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