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How Homogeneous Is Japan?

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Re: How Homogeneous Is Japan?

#131

Post by 627467 »

DC-3 wrote: post #11
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. That's all very nice but how do you apply it to the situation where you have a minority group with little to no interest in integrating into the indigenous culture?

...or when "indigenous" culture pretend that integration only works in a single direction-minorities being absorbed into bigger group without impacting any change in "original" culture.

Re: How Homogeneous Is Japan?

#132

Post by rayiner »

dragonwriter wrote: post #112
11thEarlOfMar wrote: post #92

"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…

"Chauvinism" isn't incorrect, but a very loaded framing. Conservatives believe that culture is of overriding importance to the prosperity of a society, and do not embrace cultural relativism.

What makes the United States rich and Bangladesh poor? A liberal would immediately go to explanations involving colonialism, etc. A conservative is much more likely to go to explanations involving bribery, political corruption, etc. Liberals tend to be cultural relativists, so they perceive those cultural explanations as being "chauvinist" or "racist." But there are plenty of Bangladeshis who would give the same explanation. Among other Bangladeshis I know (I'm from the country), especially ones back home, they're much more likely to blame cultural/political institutions rather than colonialism.

Re: How Homogeneous Is Japan?

#133

Post by Blikkentrekker »

ksm1717 wrote: post #129
Blikkentrekker wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. 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-Am…

I did not know that Polish was spoken more in Ireland than Irish, and I still don’t know it. Also Anglo Saxon is probably the whitest descriptor imaginable. The fact that the differences are minute to you means you probably don’t have the authority to speak on this.

The difference are certainly minute compared to the possible variety of differences in the world.

In Japan, for instance, varies ethnic groups live that either speak languages that are are as far removed form Japanese as Danish is from English, or genetically not related at all.

To not even start about “Han Chinese”, which is an “ethnic classifier” that is so wide, it s more analogous with “Germanic”, “Slavic”, or “Romance” than it is with “Anglo-Saxon”; and contains a larger number of inhabitants than any of them respectively.

“Anglo-Saxon” on a world perspective is really quite close together and comparable to “German” or “Francophone”.

Re: How Homogeneous Is Japan?

#134

Post by ithkuil »

ksm1717 wrote: post #129
Blikkentrekker wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. 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-Am…

I did not know that Polish was spoken more in Ireland than Irish, and I still don’t know it. Also Anglo Saxon is probably the whitest descriptor imaginable. The fact that the differences are minute to you means you probably don’t have the authority to speak on this.

> and I still don’t know it

What do you mean?

EDIT: FYI while Irish is one of the two official languages of the republic of Ireland, it's a minority language, with less than 100k native speakers

Re: How Homogeneous Is Japan?

#135

Post by [deleted] »

ithkuil wrote: post #134
ksm1717 wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I did not know that Polish was spoken more in Ireland than Irish, and I still don’t know it. Also Anglo Saxon is probably the whitest descriptor imaginable. The fact that the differences are minute to you means you probably don’t have the authority to speak on this.

> and I still don’t know it What do you mean? EDIT: FYI while Irish is one of the two official languages of the republic of Ireland, it's a minority language, with less than 100k native speakers

[deleted]

Re: How Homogeneous Is Japan?

#136

Post by rayiner »

bilbo0s wrote: post #106
11thEarlOfMar wrote: post #92

"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…

If Right now means racist, what is the label for someone with the political attributes of Right, but who is not racist? "Conservative". But in the US for instance, there are very few, say, fiscal conservatives. "Fiscal Conservatism" simply doesn't exist the way that we might have been used to seeing it in the 70's or even 80's. Modern administrations on the right consistently outspend modern administrations on the le…

Conservatism is a lot more expansive than just "fiscal conservatism." The Republican Party as originally constituted wasn't even fiscally conservative.

Most center-left people and center-right people just don't meaningfully disagree on, e.g., whether we should still have Social Security. Social and political conservatism are the flashpoints.

For examples consider the 1619 Project. It freaks out social and political conservatives because veneration of society's history and institutions is a basic precept. This is not something unique to American Republicans. I once had a Japanese acquaintance go through several hundred years of history to explain to me why Japanese culture is less susceptible to political corruption than Chinese culture. Conservatives internalize the saying that "90% of everything is crap." They believe that our current prosperity is the product of a set of societal choices, and we need to install respect for those choices because if we try something new, there is a 90% probability it will be bad and harmful.

Liberals are, by their nature, don't venerate history, and are optimistic about new ideas. It doesn't matter to them that there are almost no examples of successful countries that cast an intensely critical eye on their own history. They don't think we need to venerate Jefferson, the Constitution, etc., to preserve our democracy. They're optimistic that we can replace reliance on history and tradition with new frameworks and new ideas. And they're confident that those things will turn out well.

Re: How Homogeneous Is Japan?

#137

Post by CivBase »

zarkov99 wrote: post #99
11thEarlOfMar wrote: post #92

"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…

To be fair, the author mocks the left as well, right after: "while to some on the Left, it’s a bastion of xenophobia and isolationism" He is obviously parodying two extremes: the right's "racism is fine" and the left's "everybody else is racist".

I'm not sure how to read that as mocking the left - unless the author is saying that liberals commonly overstate Japan's isolationist ideals and tendencies for xenophobia. Even if that was the author's intent, it's a pretty minor mock compared to being associated with ideals of racial purism.

Re: How Homogeneous Is Japan?

#138

Post by 13415 »

rozab wrote: post #58
jonathanstrange wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not a real paradox, which is why Quine called it a "veridical paradox." You're just taking your personal feeling about a difference as the primary criterion for evaluating the subjective significance of the difference, but these feelings differ from person to person.

Reducing... "That's not a real paradox, which is why Quine called it a 'paradox'"? meta

You mean in the same sense as every alleged policeman is a policeman and every false diamond is a diamond?

Re: How Homogeneous Is Japan?

#139

Post by CivBase »

Spooky23 wrote: post #115
11thEarlOfMar wrote: post #92

"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…

Today, it’s more like a centrist. 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 life…

> 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.

I don't watch much TV (especially "news" channels) so I might just be out of the loop here, but how has US conservative media been pandering to racists?

Re: How Homogeneous Is Japan?

#140

Post by astrobe_ »

jeromegv wrote: post #126
astrobe_ wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

France. No government agency can mention or ask about ethnicity - in particular, our national statistics agency, the INSEE. Private organizations can, but this is not often seen. I think its an heritage from WWII, in particular the "yellow star". France refuses to consider racial differences (and religious differences too), it seeks unity in everything, to the point that it almost drove local languages to extinction.…

If France is so blind to ethnicity, would you say that your experience as a Frenchman is the same regardless of the colour of your skin? Access to employment, interaction with police, visibility in medias, access to politic circles etc. What you describe is the French dream but is that somewhat a reality?

I am not quite sure what you are getting at. Yes, this is the french ideal (and it's not so special, really), and yes, we are not here yet wrt to discrimination, be it for race, gender or sexuality.

This is what the majority of the french people vote for, but of course not all french people agree with that, unfortunately.

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