A Blindness to Bigotry : As beneficiaries of the civil-rights movement, Japanese-Americans abhor racist remarks by Japanese officials.

Late last month, the Japanese minister of justice, Seiroku Kajiyama, compared prostitution in Tokyo to black people moving into white neighborhoods in America. Both, he said, “ruin the atmosphere.”

Obviously, the rulers of Japan have learned nothing from similar remarks that embarrassed their nation. In 1986, then-Prime Minister Yasuhiro Nakasone evoked an international outcry when he declared that “the level of knowledge in the United States is lower than in Japan due to the considerable number of blacks, Puerto Ricans and Mexicans.” Two years ago, the policy chief for Japan’s ruling Liberal Democratic Party, Michio Watanabe, said that American blacks have few qualms about defaulting on debts.

Such remarks are consistent with Japan’s mistreatment of its own minorities. Koreans born in Japan, who speak only Japanese and know no other country, suffer discrimination, including the degrading requirement that they be fingerprinted as aliens. The burakumin , or lowest class, about 2 million people, are ethnically indistinguishable from other Japanese, yet are social outcasts. Japanese officials cling to the myth that Japan is a homogenous society. They see no problem with Japan’s minorities because to them the minorities are invisible.

Many Asian-Americans find the attitude of Japanese leaders toward minorities, both in Japan and the United States, particularly galling. The arrogance of Japanese politicians intensifies hostility toward Japan due to trade tensions. Japan bashing in the United States has resulted in racist insults and attacks on Americans of Asian ancestry. Harassment of Asians is among the fastest-growing categories of hate crimes in Southern California.

Despite Japan’s international commercial triumphs and ability to absorb Western popular culture, it remains isolated from and ignorant of the world in which it plays an increasingly important role. This ignorance even appears to extend to knowledge about Americans of Japanese ancestry, also regarded as inferiors by some in Japan. The irony is that Japanese-American progress in politics and education could not have occurred without the civil-rights movement led by African-Americans.

The most heinous single civil-liberties violation inflicted by the U.S. government in this century was the incarceration of 120,000 Japanese-Americans in World War II concentration camps. On Tuesday, after bipartisan legislation authorizing a measure of compensation for the living survivors of that racial injustice, the government made its first redress payment.

In the decades between the concentration camps and today, the black-led movement against segregation altered America’s attitude toward racial bigotry. Members of the Congressional Black Caucus were the first to support reparations. Japanese-Americans have Rosa Parks and Malcolm X to thank for winning redress.

Japan’s economic power bestows a responsibility to be more knowledgeable of and sensitive to the history and diversity of people to whom it sells and from whom it buys. This is particularly true in California, a rich market for Japanese businesses, with an increasingly diverse population.

Japan is part of a world that imposed sanctions on South Africa, thus contributing to Nelson Mandela’s freedom and the first steps toward dismantling apartheid. But Japan was a conspicuously weak link. If Japan continues its blind eye toward racial inequality, not to speak of the bigoted remarks of its politicians, it may find itself similarly ostracized by a world of which it needs to be a part.