An article from someone who lives in Japan about the presence of black people in Japan and how Japanese culture perceives black people (if it does). I was curious about this topic because...
An article from someone who lives in Japan about the presence of black people in Japan and how Japanese culture perceives black people (if it does). I was curious about this topic because sometimes I think about how (to my limited knowledge) Anime tends to feature far more characters who have brown skin because they like to sun-tan as extroverted beach girls or Gyaru or whatever as opposed to just being black and I stumbled upon this blog trying to figure out why.
The opinion of the guy who wrote this is basically that race/skin color in specific isn't really too in Japan, with blunt demographic realities exemplifying why:
In a biological sense, there obviously are. In this sense, black people are people with very dark skin, of African ancestry. There aren’t very many; looking at the statistics from the Ministry of Justice, and making some estimates, it looks like there might be about 25,000, or about 0.02% of the population. That could get up as high as 0.05%, I think, but not much higher than that. (Foreigners as a whole are only 2% of the population, and the great majority are Asian.) By comparison, the Amish are about 0.07% of the US population, if Wikipedia’s statistics are accurate.
And general lack of a history between Japan and any black regions:
First, and most obviously, Japan does not have a history of enslaving sub-Saharan Africans or colonising Africa. Black people living in Japan are not living in a culture with that historical background. [...]
[...] There is nothing in Japanese history that suggests that “black” would be politically constructed as a racial category here.
I'm not sure if I fully agree with this (by virtue of taking a lot of culture from the USA you end up consuming Western Race Relations in media, and general xenophobia would probably port over to racism as well), but I found this blog interesting and informative.
Yes, there definitely seems to be a big gap in his knowledge or acknowledgment of the history of Japan on the part of the author. No Japanese were involved in the slave trade?? Tell that to Korea,...
Yes, there definitely seems to be a big gap in his knowledge or acknowledgment of the history of Japan on the part of the author.
To put this most starkly, the Japanese have less historical responsibility for the enslavement of black people than black people do, because some black people were involved in the slave trade, and no Japanese were. The history of the USA is not the history of Japan, and Japan has an entirely different historical legacy to deal with. There is nothing in Japanese history that suggests that “black” would be politically constructed as a racial category here.
No Japanese were involved in the slave trade?? Tell that to Korea, China, Taiwan,...
Unless the author is referring to the slave trade as only the American slave trade as though it existed only on its own and separate from the rest of the world's slave trade. Japan has a history of kidnapping and forced labor, but also just outright killing any non-Japanese. I would argue if anything, Japan's slave trade just didn't really try to group the people it captured - it was just that people were either Japanese or non-Japanese.
I think it is pretty obvious that they speaking specifically about the black slave trade and the impact on race relations vis-à-vis black people in Japan. They are still basically wrong though…...
I think it is pretty obvious that they speaking specifically about the black slave trade and the impact on race relations vis-à-vis black people in Japan. They are still basically wrong though…
Finally, “black person†and “white person†are not terms that get used much in Japan. That is, people do not actually use “black” as a racial category.
Obviously not true, so I don’t know why they would say that if they themselves live in Japan.
The first I've heard about black people in Japan was when I saw the movie Stray Cat Rock: Sex Hunter (1970) were a girl gang is pitted against racist gangsters.
The first I've heard about black people in Japan was when I saw the movie Stray Cat Rock: Sex Hunter (1970) were a girl gang is pitted against racist gangsters.
An article from someone who lives in Japan about the presence of black people in Japan and how Japanese culture perceives black people (if it does). I was curious about this topic because sometimes I think about how (to my limited knowledge) Anime tends to feature far more characters who have brown skin because they like to sun-tan as extroverted beach girls or Gyaru or whatever as opposed to just being black and I stumbled upon this blog trying to figure out why.
The opinion of the guy who wrote this is basically that race/skin color in specific isn't really too in Japan, with blunt demographic realities exemplifying why:
And general lack of a history between Japan and any black regions:
I'm not sure if I fully agree with this (by virtue of taking a lot of culture from the USA you end up consuming Western Race Relations in media, and general xenophobia would probably port over to racism as well), but I found this blog interesting and informative.
Yes, there definitely seems to be a big gap in his knowledge or acknowledgment of the history of Japan on the part of the author.
No Japanese were involved in the slave trade?? Tell that to Korea, China, Taiwan,...
Unless the author is referring to the slave trade as only the American slave trade as though it existed only on its own and separate from the rest of the world's slave trade. Japan has a history of kidnapping and forced labor, but also just outright killing any non-Japanese. I would argue if anything, Japan's slave trade just didn't really try to group the people it captured - it was just that people were either Japanese or non-Japanese.
I think it is pretty obvious that they speaking specifically about the black slave trade and the impact on race relations vis-à-vis black people in Japan. They are still basically wrong though…
Obviously not true, so I don’t know why they would say that if they themselves live in Japan.
The first I've heard about black people in Japan was when I saw the movie Stray Cat Rock: Sex Hunter (1970) were a girl gang is pitted against racist gangsters.