Job Discussion Forums

guest of Japan · Joined: 28 Feb 2003 Posts: 1601 Location: Japan

Cshannon, we are a means for Japanese people to make money. You are employed so that your employer can make 20 to 50 times you salary off your image and labors. To most of your students you are a novelty or a means for them to develop a skill which will earn them more money. Your competence as a teacher is determined by how bubbly and amiable your personality is. There are good people in this country who will value the opportunity to get to know you. To them you are relevant, but on the whole none of us typing on this forum mean diddly.

PAULH · Joined: 28 Jan 2003 Posts: 4672 Location: Western Japan

PAULH · Joined: 28 Jan 2003 Posts: 4672 Location: Western Japan

PAULH · Joined: 28 Jan 2003 Posts: 4672 Location: Western Japan

Akula the shark · Joined: 06 Oct 2004 Posts: 103 Location: NZ

What is evident from a lot of postings is that racism in Japan is far more visible to those who have lived there the longest. Someone who only lives in Japan for a year, works, travels about and enjoys the limited time they have in Japan may well be quite oblivious to it all.
Many Japanese do prefer the fresh off the boat Gaijin who doesn't rock the boat and doesn't know what is going on. In Japan, the more a gaijin knows, the scarier he or she becomes.

PAULH · Joined: 28 Jan 2003 Posts: 4672 Location: Western Japan

I can only assume also that Shannon does not speak japanese, has never had people make personal insults and remarks about them and their spouses and families, in Japanese assuming the foreigner can not understand what the japanese are saying

I have heard of cases where a foreigner's Japanese spouse has heard her neigbors making insulting remarks about her and her family within earshot, or foreigners hear Japanese in the next booth talking about them in Japanese while dining in a restaurant. The foreigner actually got up and told them that they understood every word that was said about them.

If you dont speak and understand the language you wont know people are being nice to your face, but stabbing you in the back when your back is turned.

cafebleu · Joined: 10 Feb 2003 Posts: 404

As somebody who lived in Japan for over 5 years I have to agree with Paul and disagree with most of C Shannon`s counter arguments. One point about `race` and `nations` for C Shannon -

The Japanese are NOT a race. They are predominantly Chinese/Mongolian/Korean descent with some Ainu and Polynesian.

That the Japanese Government, its Ministry of Education, countless official organisations and groups, and many Japanese persist in calling themselves `the Japanese race` and use that to justify their so called `uniqueness` and excuse for legalised discrimination againts all outsiders including the Chinese, Korean and Mongolian from whom they are descended tells me something about the pervasive mentality in that society.

Not since I had heard of the so called Aryanism of `the Germanic race` under the Nazis etc has a country`s people been so unashamed of using a mythical racial origin to justify institutionalised discrimination. And this is not the pre-World War 2 world we are living in.

homersimpson · Joined: 14 Feb 2003 Posts: 569 Location: Kagoshima

PAULH · Joined: 28 Jan 2003 Posts: 4672 Location: Western Japan

Maybe you should ask your Japanese friends what "soto" and "uchi" are.

Think if them as being concentric circles with "I" in the middle. Outside that are family and relatives. Outside that is workmates, school friends, your sports circle team mates ex-boyfriends and people you went to elementary school with. On the outside is the mailman, the person sitting next to you on the bus. The average foreign language teacher is on one of these outer rings in terms of how close they are to a persons inner-circle. You are about as relevant to them as yesterdays newspaper in terms of how important you are to them. A pleasant once-a-week diversion but they wont be naming their children after you and as the other poster says you will be replaced in their affections within the week as soon as your plane lands back home. Dont start to believe you actually mean anything to your students.

You will have students take you out for drinks, practice English with you, be sociable and be your "Friend" and cry at your farewell party. However you will never be a bestman or nakodo at their wedding and most likely not visit their houses or have them come and stay with you on your home country on a homestay. They will never come and ask you for a loan. Chances are you will never meet their parents and brothers and sisters.

Im only relevant in this country in terms of the status I have over my students, my position as their teacher who decides their grades and what I achieve professionally, perhaps with some reputation within my teaching career. Once they have graduated I am history and a distant memory for them. I have never been invited to their weddings. In 15 years (and thousands of students later) I have got New Year postcards (nengajo) from students about twice.

Cshannon · Joined: 10 Dec 2004 Posts: 114

No point continuing this argument. I think the topic's been basically exhausted, and I think we've all made up our minds. Good discussion, but I don't have much to add. Agree to disagree?
I just don't feel my race is that much of an issue in this country. I've admitted racism exists here, like anywhere in the world, but I don't feel it's an especially "racist" country. Close-minded, provincial, xenophobic, and at times racist, but not especially racist as people on this forum like to believe. No point repeating my reasoning. Maybe I'll change my mind or see it differently later, but for now that's how I feel.

In the meantime I don't feel irrelevant, and I don't think I will be anymore forgotten here than anywhere else I might choose to live/travel that's not my homeland (I've been to other countries and didn't feel any more relevant than here in Japan). Even if I am to be completely and utterly forgotten to the extent that I might as well have never been here at all, I still don't think that's racism.

Sometimes I feel sorry for Japanese people who have no idea how limited their perspective is - lost in the herd- but I don't think they're especially racist.

Lister100 · Joined: 26 Aug 2004 Posts: 106

Hey Paul, I was just wondering if you've noticed Japanese people rolling up the welcome mat more than usual in the last 4 years. As a foreigner I take a lot of interest in how this country sees foreigners. I'm also interested in how my country sees foreigners and if we aren't just deceiving ourselves in believing multiculturalism is the path of the immediate future. The western world doesn't make a very large dent in the world's population. This subject is obviously a touchy one for you so I'll let it drop. But I'm not looking for any hugs, just wondering if the behaviour I'm seeing is what I think it is. You don't have to speak Japanese to know somebody has a problem with you. A poker player can read the universal tells when they show themselves. Your right though, no point worrying about that which you cannot change.

But for the record,

there are only three confirmed races in the world last time I checked.
Mongoloid, Caucasian and Negroid. However, there are countries that have mixed there quotients up in such a way as to appear like no other people in the world. India I think has a mix of all three races and DNA evidence has proven the Aryans(caucasian tribe) did invade that country way back when. Some people say that the Ainu in Japan's north were descended from these same Aryans although I don't know if that has been proven yet.

The Nazi's extermination of the Jews was not racially motivated, but ethnically motivated as many Jews that were killed for their religion were in fact more caucasian than anything else. Very few places have pure races still if any. You might find some people in places like China, the African interior and nothern Europe. Although I don't know how much of this is on topic anymore.

Racism as a means of descrimination is more something people made up to justify their fears and hatred of people they can't understand, especially in Europe. You'll hear people talk about Slavic, Germanic, Celtic and later even more absurdly Anglo-saxon, German, Hispanic, Gallic as races. Really their all the same race except for maybe a difference in hair colour and eyes, which is about the easiest thing to mutate since there are so few genes controlling it and the odd person that resembles a race that invaded the area for a period of time.

Sherri · Posted: Thu Mar 31, 2005 6:15 am Post subject:

I posted this link about the myth of race once on the general discussion board. It is very interesting. It made me question the whole idea about what race is and even if there is a such thing as "race".

http://www.pbs.org/race/000_General/000_00-Home.htm

Also for the record, I left Japan after 14 years last summer. Racism and the problems faced by non-Japanese living in Japan for the long term (mentioned by previous posters) played a major role in the decision. I also resented not being able to have my name on my husband's family registry.

Sherri
Enjoying the multicultural society in Hawaii

PAULH · Joined: 28 Jan 2003 Posts: 4672 Location: Western Japan

Mark · Joined: 23 Jan 2003 Posts: 500 Location: Tokyo, Japan

Just a comment about a previous post that said there were "only 3 confirmed races". That's somewhat inaccurate. The basic general opinion these days is that there is no such thing as race.

There are lots of ways of classifying people and the number of races in any racial system depends on the criteria that you use to determine the races. So, there's a 3 race system, a 5 race system, a 25 race system, and so on. It all depends on which factors you consider racially important.

But the most important thing is that a race is considered to be a group of people who are fundamentally biologically distinct in some way from other groups. There's no such thing. Many people are confused about this. I remember an incident when I was studying human evolution in university, and an acquaintance was asking some questions about this and asked, "But what about the racial genes?" There's no such thing. There are no genes that are unique to one "race".

What you do get, however, is different gene frequencies. For example, a gene might be more common in one area of the world than another. As well, groups of genes appearing in combination more frequently in one place than another. It's these combinations of genes that people can use to track ancestry. There's also mitochondrial DNA, which can be used to track ancestry.

Basically, you can get a genetic chart showing how closely related different populations are, which represents the point at which people moved off to form a seperate breeding population. The first division, if I recall correctly, is between Africa and outside of Africa. So, once modern humans left Africa, we had two (albeit somewhat connected) breeding populations. And so on. More and more divisions, some populations being more isolated than others.

But, importantly, these differences reflect general population characteristics, which are not reflected in every person. There are no clear lines between "races".

Food for thought, there's actually more genetic diversity in sub-saharan Africa than there is in all of the rest of the world. In other words, a Swedish person may be more genetically similar to a Japanese than one black African is to another. Just because people look similar, doesn't mean that they're more closely related. Africa is the birthplace of humanity, we've lived there for 100,000 years and that's a lot of time to build up local genetic diversity.

As for Japan, after the last big movement of people around 300 AD IIRC, there hasn't been a big influx of people. Japan formed a relatively isolated breeding population, which means that they should be fairly genetically distinct, i.e. gene frequencies that are different from other areas as well as gene combinations that are not usually found in other areas. But this doesn't mean that they constitute a "race".

I actually think it's pointless to talk about whether or not a group of people constitute a race, as it's impossible to put firm borders around a group of people and say that they're a race, as there's always overlap to the next group. General population characteristics are different from race.

There's also the idea that if you go back 500 years and do a genetic test on one of your direct ancestors, you'll find that you are no more genetically similar to that person that you are to any other random person from anywhere on the planet. This may seem weird, but general population characteristics are different from individual characteristics.

The most important thing about race is that people believe in it. It's a very strong social construct. Japanese people believe that they're a race that is unique in the world. None of us is going to change their mind about this. Japanese are Japanese, and Koreans are Koreans, regardless of whether the Korean person was born in Japan. Being Japanese is a club that is not accepting applications for new members. That's the way they think and we just have to live with it as it's not going to change anytime soon.

I had a student in class tell me that Japanese have trouble eating Western food because Japanese have different internal organs than Western people. End of story.