Extreme tourism influx due to covid rebound and weak yen. And most Japanese people not being observant enough to understand that those foreigners causing trouble (or simply just putting pressure on existing infrastructure) is not the residents but shitty tourists.
Most of the issue they have would be reduced if the yen got stronger or they introduced some expensive tourist fee, but that's very unlikely
Most people in any nation aren't observant enough, without exception. Since it's the Japanese people whose opinion counts here, it's their turn right now to be called out for it.
This is the actual answer but too many people are invested in their own narratives to see it.
When you visit someone's country you are not just a guest, you are the model for everyone else who comes from where you do and who looks like you do. The assumption is that how you behave is how others from where you came from will behave. In an age where social media exposes everyone all the time, bad behavior gets seen and shown to others and conclusions drawn based on that behavior.
But rather than admit that this is a thing which exists, others just want to press tired arguments about race and racism. Which even if true, who cares? It's their country. They're allowed to welcome or decline anyone they wish. How arrogant are we really to think that we can dictate who and what others allow in their homes?
You know, Johnny Somali fled Japan, went to South Korea, tried the same shit, got arrested and is now in South Korean prison. I think it briefly made news but nowadays I doubt most people remember him.
If you have a functioning society and a petty criminal, you can just... arrest them. No needs for all those xenophobic drama.
Or not, I guess. After all, what am I to tell Japanese people what to expect from their own police?
Somali did much more than just disrespect, e.g. deepfake pornography of women he met, trespassing onto construction sites, throwing food in businesses.
Not sure how it's work in japan, but many of these things require a formal criminal complaint in my country and people are not used to disrespectful people.
Saying that it's the issue of a country is wrong and to simple minded.
> But rather than admit that this is a thing which exists, others just want to press tired arguments about race and racism.
It seems like your preceding paragraph argues that this racism exists, without using that specific word.
> How arrogant are we really to think that we can dictate who and what others allow in their homes?
How often do you see that, as opposed to people simply stating how they feel about who/what others allow in their homes? I’ve rarely seen the former and almost always see the latter.
I agree that pr** should be banned from Japan.
But he was used a tool against people who have nothing to do with him.
My black friends tell me that it is very hard to be taken seriously when your kin thinks that attitude is a matter of noise.
One of them told me his relationship ended with his fiance because her father was "racist" and didn't believe he was one of the most well paid engineers in the state.
Sanseito scapegoating foreigners for every problem (particularly Chinese and SE Asian), highly organized social media campaigns with a lot of help from western right wingers, nuisance video streamers exploiting the weak yen to do 'insult/abuse the locals vacations' for cheap, and a rise in anti-Chinese sentiment since the beginning of the year.
Early in Takaichi's premiership, she answered a parliamentary question about the possibility of a Chinese attack on taiwan by sying that this would present an 'existential' problem for Japan. This alarmed the Chinese who saw it as an intrusion on their private business and a reminder of Japanese war atrocities; but before they could make a restrained diplomatic complaint, a Chinese consul in (iirc) Osaka went nuts on social media telling Takaichi to pull her filthy neck in before it was chopped off. After that neither side could back down without losing face so they're stuck in a diplomatic deep freeze.
There are a lot of other structural factors I could go into but those are the major differences since 2024. Actual incidence of crime or large population shifts seem to be absent.
Purchasing power dropped with yen weakening, shrinkflation and inflation in all shopping categories, stagnant salaries and work policies + politicians who are preying on all of this with the "foreigners bad" rhetoric.
Large social media campaigns full of misinformation about how foreigners are all getting free fully-paid higher education, cheating welfare, and how foreigners don't pay any taxes at all, complete with AI-generated infographics showing sad japanese families handing over cash to foreigners wearing hijab.
I don’t support xenophobia, but after visiting Japan, I can see how it happens. Foreigners are disruptive and disrespectful, often carelessly, but also often when they are trying not to be. I was really trying to be polite and respectful, and I learned some Japanese (not nearly enough), and I could tell I was bumbling at times.
It is one thing when it is one person, it is another when it is every tenth person.
I came away with more empathy for Japanese xenophobic sentiment. I was getting frustrated by rude gaijin and I was one (well I was trying really hard not to be rude).
I personally don't have a problem with xenophobia. I see it as the other side of the coin from openness to 'foreign' cultures and peoples. Both always exist in a society (opening up and shutting out) and you need both.
A people that don't have any xenophobia will have their country taken over and their culture erased. While also, a people that don't have any openness to foreign people and foreign cultures will stultify. You need both, in balance (and often that balance is shifting, in one direction or the other).
> I don’t support xenophobia […] I came away with more empathy for Japanese xenophobic sentiment
What more does supporting it entail than being sympathetic to the sentiment? You’re not Japanese, it sounds like, so being xenophobic towards non-Japanese doesn’t work in this context. Only a Japanese person could experience it.
Would it also be xenophobia, or more xenoannoyance? Are the Japanese really terrified of foreigners or just annoyed at misbehavior?
that's a huge jump in 1 year. What happened?
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