111–120 of 232 posts
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.
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 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 racis…
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.)
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…
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.
"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 racis…
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
"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 racis…
> 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 sy…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> what is the label for someone with the political attributes of Right, but who is not racist? I hope I get this right. Everyone is racist, but it's only bad to be a racist if you have power. White people have all the power and so are the worst type of racist. To deny being racist is to be fragile and also proof that you're a racist. So 'someone with the political attributes of Right, but who is not racist' doesn't e…
I hope you don't believe the absolutism of "white people have ALL the power"...
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.
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.”
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?