Japanese Ethnocentrism and Globalization

Japan has frequently been portrayed as a uniquely homogeneous society both racially and ethnically. For decades, the Japanese leadership inculcated in the populace the myths of Japanese racial purity and of the ethnic superiority which was supposed to be guaranteed by the uninterrupted lineage of the imperial household over centuries. In the years of rapid economic growth since the 1960s, many observers have attributed Japan’s economic success and political stability to its racial and ethnic homogeneity. Conscious of the extent of support for racist ideology of this type, the Japanese establishment has often resorted to the argument that mono-ethnic Japanese society has no tradition of accepting outsiders. Exploiting this, the government accepted only a small fraction of refugees from Vietnam and other areas of Indochina into Japan in the 1970s and 1980s, although the nation had brought millions of Koreans and Chinese into Japan as cheap labor before and during World War II. The ideology of mono-ethnic Japan is invoked or abandoned according to what is expedient for the interest groups involved in public debate. Since the ratification of the Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees in 1981, Japan accepted only 616 refugees in the three decades up to 2012.

Analysts of the social psychology of the Japanese suggest that the inferiority complex towards the Caucasian West and the superiority complex towards Asian neighbors have played a major role in Japanese perceptions of other nationalities. The leadership of modern Japan envisaged a ‘ladder of civilizations’ in which Euro-American societies occupied the highest rungs, Japan was somewhere in the middle, and other Asian countries were at the bottom. Also notable is the persistence of the doctrine of wakon yōsai (Japanese spirit and Western technology), the dichotomy which splits the world into two metaphorical hemispheres, Japan and the West, and assumes that the spiritual, moral, and cultural life of the Japanese should not be corrupted by foreign influences no matter how much Japan’s material way of life may be affected by them. Borrowing some elements of imported Western imagery, the Japanese mass culture industry has portrayed black persons in derogatory ways in comics, television programs, and novels. Popular among business elites, books which perpetuate anti-Semitic stereotypes based upon the old propaganda of the ‘international Jewish conspiracy’ hit the bestseller chart from time to time.