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Embedded Racism
Japan's Visible Minorities and Racial Discrimination
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2015
Summary
Despite domestic constitutional provisions and international treaty promises, Japan has no law against racial discrimination. Consequently, businesses around Japan display “Japanese Only” signs, denying entry to all 'foreigners' on sight. Employers and landlords routinely refuse jobs and apartments to foreign applicants. Japanese police racially profile 'foreign-looking' bystanders for invasive questioning on the street. Legislators, administrators, and pundits portray foreigners as a national security threat and call for their segregation and expulsion. Nevertheless, Japan’s government and media claim there is no discrimination by race in Japan, therefore no laws are necessary.
How does Japan resolve the cognitive dissonance of racial discrimination being unconstitutional yet not illegal? Embedded Racism carefully untangles Japanese society’s complex narrative on race by analyzing two mutually-supportive levels of national identity maintenance. Starting with case studies of hundreds of individual “Japanese Only” businesses, it carefully analyzes the construction of Japanese identity through legal structures, statute enforcement, public policy, and media messages. It reveals how the concept of a “Japanese” has been racialized to the point where one must look “Japanese” to be treated as one.
The product of a quarter-century of research and fieldwork by a scholar living in Japan as a naturalized Japanese citizen, Embedded Racism offers an unprecedented perspective on Japan’s deeply-entrenched, poorly-understood, and strenuously-unacknowledged discrimination as it affects people by physical appearance.
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Bibliographic data
Copyright year
2015
ISBN-Print
978-1-4985-1390-6
ISBN-Online
978-1-4985-1391-3
Publisher
Lexington, Lanham
Language
English
Pages
351
Product type
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Table of contents
ChapterPages
Contents No access
Preface and Acknowledgments No access
Introduction No access
1 Racial Discrimination in Japan No access
2 How Racism “Works” in Japan No access
3 “We Refuse Foreigners” No access
4 Legal Constructions of “Japaneseness” No access
5 How “Japaneseness” Is Enforced through Laws No access
6 A “Chinaman’s Chance” in Japanese Court No access
7 From Foreign Fetishization to Fear in the Japanese Media No access
8 Maintaining the Binary No access
9 Putting the Concept of “Embedded Racism” to Work No access
10 “So What?” No access
Glossary No access Pages 307 - 312
Appendix A: Sakanaka’s “Big Japan” vs. “Small Japan” No access Pages 313 - 320
Appendix B: This Research’s Debt to Critical Race Theory No access Pages 321 - 324
