Personal anecdote: I was trying to get housing lined up for a job offer in Japan, but every place I liked, I head from the realtor "Oh, that place isn't accepting foreigners."
Love the country, but it's definitely a "We love you visiting, but please go home" vibe.
And the problem with that is it's technically illegal (yes really, see ICERD of 1996, yet there is TONS of blatant misinformation about this online), but is extremely common and widespread because nobody bothers to sue for it. I mean, you wouldn't want to rent from someone that irrationally hates you in the first place, so they just keep moving and nothing ever improves.
And even though it is technically illegal, some courts in Japan have already ruled that some types of "discrimination" is somehow OK if it's argued as a specific technicality, such as "foreigner means not a citizen and therefore more likely to move back home" rather than declining explicitly based on race/skin color/country of origin. Plus "precedent" is not really a thing in such civil law countries so that makes further cases no less difficult to defend.
Personally i think it's hard to say that they are accepting of foreigners. Other than the many, many, impressions of how it's nearly impossible to assimilate in Japan, I can also attest to how embarrassing it is to visit a country with such strict etiquette guidelines.
I don't have a problem with this though. In 200 years, Japan will still be Japan. They are willing to suffer the economic consequences for this so I don't think it's really our business.
I couldn't disagree with this more, and I am quite disappointed that this has made the front page of HN. If you're any person of color (brown, black), you're not treated very well in Japan. I've had at least six friends go there over the last two decades to find this out. Actually, Japan is where dreams go to die. New grads join one company after graduating college and have to stay with it for decades. A few years ago, their medical education system was implicated in changing answers for high-scoring female students so they wouldn't attain a seat. Anecdotally, all of my wife's friends who have transferred to Google Japan have seen their careers stagnate, and they have had to return to Silicon Valley. Finally, because of the 'Lost Decade,' the country was in a recession from 1991 to 2010..while they might have xenophobia on the menu, they have more pressing issues to address to become an actual functioning and healthy democracy
I think Japan is going to have another economical crisis mainly due to immigration.
Crime is going to rise considerably and Japanese people will feel like Japan is becoming less "Japan" whether that's culturally or racially. I already feel that myself every time I visit, I think it is slowly getting worse.
This is just looking at the (lack of) xenophobic from a different (political) perspective and then making a clickbait title out of it. Even the article itself is contradictory in this way:
> the common trope that it’s a xenophobic country that doesn’t want immigrants is just provably false
> what I mean is that it’s not abnormally xenophobic
Then just say that instead. that should have been the title IMO.
I think both the US and Japan (and many other countries) can all be called xenophobic/racist/etc. depending on what perspective you look at it from. Maybe what matters more is how the majority of people feel and what the government says and does relative to that.
Love the country, but it's definitely a "We love you visiting, but please go home" vibe.