Issue of Japanese Racism Grows With Immigration

A chance encounter on a suburban train one recent Sunday sheds some awkward light on the elusive problem of racism in Japan. It began when a little Japanese girl pointed with fascination at a black woman and asked, “Daddy, what’s that?”

The father squirmed with embarrassment. He tried to satisfy the innocent curiosity of his preschool daughter by reminding her of an old Chinese fable known in Japan as “Saiyuki.” The man prodded the child with the name Songoku , hero of the tale, which is popular among children.

Songoku is a monkey.

The young black woman apparently did not understand enough Japanese to catch the indignity of this literary allusion, but she grasped the meaning of the child’s blunt question.

“I’m a person,” she told the little girl in Japanese, “just like you.”

A tense situation dissolved into gushing smiles of international goodwill when it was further established that the woman was an American. The child was told she herself is a Japanese, and that was why they were different.

After her new “friends” got off the train, the woman confided to another American that she felt more irritated than insulted.

“It’s the same whether they’re 3 or 20 years old, they stare and point,” said the woman, who had been in Japan about a year teaching English. “Japanese are all children when it comes to dealing with other races.”

The incident was isolated, and does not reflect how most Japanese feel about people of other ethnic backgrounds. But it offers a clue as to where some disturbing misunderstandings begin.

Furor has periodically erupted in the American black community over the last several years at news that Japanese political leaders have made disparaging remarks about blacks in public. Former Prime Minister Yasuhiro Nakasone, for instance, drew heat in 1986 for saying America has a “low intelligence level” because of its black and Hispanic minorities.

A Japanese toy company, Sanrio Inc., was denounced and forced to withdraw its hot-selling line of “Little Black Sambo” dolls and beachwear last year after press reports described how these caricatures, with their thick lips and distorted features, were regarded here as cute rather than offensive.

Japan’s insensitivity in matters of race does not end with negative black stereotypes. A recent boom in anti-Semitic books has continued without serious challenge from Japanese intellectuals. Members of Japan’s ethnic Korean minority, mostly descendants of forced laborers brought here during the colonial period, still face discrimination in employment and marriage and only lately have felt comfortable using their legal Korean names.

Now, stubborn attitudes of racial intolerance and xenophobia are bearing down upon the tens of thousands of Asians who have come to Japan, often staying illegally, to seek jobs at the lower echelons of this robust economy. While small-scale employers desperately need unskilled workers to correct a labor shortage, many Japanese oppose opening their borders for fear of increased crime and social disorder.

Last month, a local newspaper disclosed the existence of an internal police report that singled out Pakistanis for contempt, characterizing them as smelly people with skin diseases who speak poor English, get mad when they are fed pork without being told and tend to “lie in the name of Allah” during interrogation.

“It is absolutely necessary to wash your hands after questioning or detaining (Pakistani suspects) because many of them suffer from contagious skin diseases,” said the document, a partial copy of which was obtained by The Times. “Since they have a unique body odor, the detention and interrogation rooms will stink.”

Police officials have apologized to the Pakistani Embassy and said they will revise the 179-page report, which was distributed in November, 1988, to regional authorities by the National Police Agency’s International Research and Training Institute for Investigation.

The intent of the report was to “raise awareness” about people of an unfamiliar culture, but it was badly worded, said Masahiro Tamura, a senior superintendent in the agency’s international criminal affairs division.

“There’s been a sudden rise in crime by foreign visitors, but we know so little about other countries, especially Pakistan,” Tamura said. “We thought it would be a good idea to say a few things about what kind of country it is, and give a few examples.”

Nationwide arrests of Pakistanis increased by more than five times since 1985, to 78 cases in 1988. As many as 1,643 Chinese and Taiwanese were arrested last year, but they were not mentioned in the agency’s training manual.

Police are not the only ones with a low regard for Pakistanis, whose relatively dark skin makes them stand out among other Asian visitors drawn to Japan by the high yen and plentiful work.

The mayor of Kawaguchi, an industrial city in Saitama Prefecture (state) with a large population of foreign workers, complained to a symposium on immigrant labor earlier this month that “some Pakistanis embarrass staff at public bath houses because they do not remove their underwear when bathing,” according to Kyodo News Service.

Mayor Yoji Nagase also reportedly quipped that “Japanese people could bump into Pakistanis at night because of their dark skin.” Nagase later insisted his remarks did not imply racial prejudice.

In September, authorities at Warabi High School, also in Saitama, barred a 19-year-old Pakistani from working as a teacher’s aide in an English class. School officials told the Mainichi newspaper that the man was “a suspicious person” and that “there are a lot of communicable diseases and crime among Pakistanis.”

Similar bias is encountered by workers from Bangladesh, who, like those from Pakistan, were able to come to Japan as tourists--without visas--until Tokyo tightened its immigration rules in April. A new law will soon require foreigners to produce certification of visa status before they can work. Employers will be face penalties for hiring illegal aliens.

“The Japanese consider themselves a single race, and they think their society will become dirty if foreigners come in,” said a Bangladeshi businessman who has lived here for 13 years--and who asked not be identified by name to avoid antagonizing his Japanese friends. “This attitude is deep in their hearts. There’s no proof of it, but if you talk to people you’re made to understand.”

Paradoxically, Japanese have considered themselves victims of racial discrimination for decades, and not entirely without cause. Japanese and Chinese immigrants were deprived of civil rights in the United States earlier this century during the regrettable era of “Yellow Peril,” and a generation of Japanese-Americans was confined to U.S. concentration camps after the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941.

A sense of persecution weighed heavily in Japan’s decision to go to war with the United States, and its territorial conquests were rationalized as an attempt to liberate the region from Western colonial masters. That view remains current among the powerful right wing of the political leadership, as illustrated last year when Land Agency Chief Seisuke Okuno was forced to resign his Cabinet post after declaring that Japan had justifiably fought against Asian colonization by the “white race.”

Even now, defenders of Japan’s whaling industry routinely attack environmental critics as racially motivated, and some observers see the specter of racism lurking behind the emotional backlash by some Americans against the recent surge of Japanese investment in the United States. They point out that there are few complaints about corporate takeovers by the British.

One hawkish lawmaker, Shintaro Ishihara, rattled nerves in Washington earlier this year by asserting in a book of essays that “racism is at the base of U.S.-Japan trade friction.”

Yet, despite this apparent gulf in communication, the Japanese have attempted to repair damaged feelings in some of the most highly visible cases of racial insensitivity. The Foreign Ministry issued a memorandum to the publishing industry in September warning of Jewish revulsion toward a recent spate of Japanese bestsellers that postulate Zionist conspiracies behind world events.

Some of the books may “offend the most sensitive areas of Jewish psychology,” the memorandum said. “The fact that such anti-Semitic works are published unchallenged and without criticism in Japan calls into question the common sense of the Japanese people.”

Government and publishing industry officials have so far responded positively to complaints, “partly because it’s bad for business,” said Neil C. Sandberg, director of the American Jewish Committee’s Pacific Rim Institute, who recently visited Tokyo with a delegation of Jewish leaders. “But part of it represents a new understanding.

“The Japanese have had very limited exposure to cultural differences for many centuries and developed a sense of uniqueness that tends to encourage either indifference or negative feelings toward foreigners,” Sandberg said. “There’s a vacuum here because there’s so little information about the Jews. We’re worried that these books may fill that void with negative stereotypes.”

The potential for exporting intolerance also worries Sandberg, who noted that the work of one of the most scurrilous anti-Semitic writers, Masami Uno, has been translated into Korean.

Questions also have been raised about employment practices of Japanese companies with operations abroad. Earlier this year, former employees of a U.S. subsidiary of Recruit Co., the job-placement firm of political bribery scandal fame, alleged that a secret code had been used to discriminate among applicants on the basis of race and sex. When a client wanted to hire a Japanese or a Latino, for example, the names “Mariko” or “Maria” were allegedly jotted on internal memos.

In an echo of former Prime Minister Nakasone’s slur about U.S. ethnic diversity, a significant number of Japanese--two out of five--believe that America’s major economic problem is that it has too many minorities, according to a recent Harris Poll cited in the magazine Business Week.

There are some encouraging signs of changing attitudes, however. Hajime Arita, a 10-year-old, and his parents started a family campaign to fight racism in Japan after reading about the “Little Black Sambo” controversy. They visited Washington in August to meet black leaders and promote better understanding.

Japanese booksellers have removed copies of the children’s book “Little Black Sambo” from their shelves, and several companies have joined Sanrio in phasing out products and designs featuring derogatory caricatures of blacks.

But the caricatures, essentially borrowed from the symbols of America’s own past, still proliferate on the Japanese landscape in signs and advertising images.

One such eyesore is the sign outside a tiny pub in Tokyo’s Ebisu neighborhood, which calls itself “Chibi Kuro Sambo”-- Japanese for Little Black Sambo. Inside is a log-cabin decor with comical black dolls displayed on the window sill. The Japanese waitress has her hair set in a style resembling African dreadlocks and wears a red gingham smock. Specialties on the menu are “little black fried chicken” and “little black potatoes.”

Owner Sachiko Sasaki does not see why there is such a fuss over the theme she chose for her pub nine years ago. She has no plans to change the name.

“This had nothing to do with racial prejudice or how I feel about black people,” Sasaki said. “I’ve always thought Little Black Sambo was cute.”

Tokyo Bureau research assistant Takeshi Yabe also contributed to this story.