Full Description
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.
Contents
Part One: The Context of Racism in Japan
Chapter One: Racial Discrimination in Japan: Contextualizing the Issue
Chapter Two: How Racism 'Works' in Japan
Part Two: "Japanese Only": Examples of Racial Discrimination
Chapter Three: Case Studies of "Japanese Only" Exclusionary Businesses
Part Three: The Construction of Japan's Embedded Racism
Chapter Four: Legal Constructions of 'Japaneseness'
Chapter Five: How 'Japaneseness' is Enforced through Laws
Chapter Six: A 'Chinaman's Chance' in Japanese Court
Chapter Seven: From Foreign Fetishization to Fear in the Japanese Media
Part Four: Challenges to Japan's Exclusionary Narratives
Chapter Eight: Maintaining the Binary despite Domestic and International Pressure
Part Five: Discussion and Conclusions
Chapter Nine: Putting the Concept of 'Embedded Racism' to Work
Chapter Ten: 'So What?' Why Japan's 'Embedded Racism' Matters: Japan's Bleak Future
Appendix One: Sakanaka's "Big Japan" vs. "Small Japan"
Appendix Two: This Research's Debt to Critical Race Theory
