EMBEDDED RACISM: 
JAPAN'S VISIBLE MINORITIES AND RACIAL DISCRIMINATION
SECOND EDITION, 2022
Fully Revised and Updated

By Debito Arudou, Ph.D.
(Lexington Books, a division of Rowman & Littlefield, Hardcover January 2022)

EXTENDED SUMMARY:

“We accept that you’re a Japanese citizen.  But you don’t LOOK Japanese.  So we refuse you service.”

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.  Public rallies advocate the disenfranchisement – even killing – of foreign residents born and living in Japan for generations.  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, Embedded Racism carefully analyses 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.

This augurs ill for Japan’s future.  With Japan’s low birthrate, aging society, and decreasing population, one hope for Japan’s revitalization, after more than two “lost decades” of economic stagnation, is immigration.  However, if people (including Japanese citizens) face phenotypical barriers to integration and acceptance, then Japan will not be able to reverse its demographic decline by creating “new Japanese”.  Thus, the systemic treatment of what the author calls Japan’s “Visible Minorities” is the “canary in the coal mine” for Japan’s future economic vitality and solvency.

ADVANCE REVIEWS FOR THE SECOND EDITION:

In this revised edition, Debito Arudou offers more trenchant explication of what it means to be able to identify as “Japanese” in today’s Japan—and not. Arudou's analysis underscores that even with the guise of “diversity,” Japanese government policies themselves undermine the future health of the nation. Contrary to expanding Japan’s future possibilities, the “embedded racism” sponsored by the country’s elite is leading only to Japan’s economic and social decay. -- Alexis Dudden, University of Connecticut

This is a valuable update that reinforces the author’s analysis of how racial discrimination is endemic and harmful not only in managing demographic problems but also Japan’s global relations. The author explains how wide the gulf is between Japan’s governing elite and global norms. Readers also learn how non-citizen residents have endured an intensified Othering during the pandemic that belies official preening on diversity. -- Jeffrey Kingston, Temple University Japan

Debito has made intellectual enemies in Japan, but they struggle to match his depth of understanding, erudition, and commitment. He brings those qualities to bear in the revised edition of his classic text Embedded Racism. The book is the summation of a life spent trying to understand the internal logic that justifies and embeds racism not just in Japan, but everywhere. -- David A. McNeill, University of the Sacred Heart, Tokyo

• The ultraconservative Abe Shinzö government (2012-2020) became Japan’s longest-running postwar administration, and with it the cementing of “status-quo politics” that imported even more foreign labor under exploitative visa statuses; yet Japan continues to avoid a clear immigration policy encouraging permanent settlement and naturalization.
• Carlos Ghosn, the high-profile CEO of car manufacturer Nissan, was arrested and perpetually detained without trial, leading to his daring escape from Japan, with much international attention drawn to Japan’s “hostage justice” system of criminal jurisprudence.
• The Japanese government conducted unprecedented surveys on discrimination nationwide, revealing concrete numbers on just how widespread racist practices are in scale and form. Meanwhile, hate speech laws went into effect, driving public displays of bigotry and calls for violence against foreigners further underground and online.
• The Alien Registration system that officially segregated foreigners from their Japanese families was shut down, but registered foreign residents continue to be racially profiled by police and excluded from Japan’s official population tallies.
• The COVID-19 pandemic devastated Japan’s booming tourist economy and led to a painful postponement of the 2020 Tokyo Olympics. In response, the government instituted racist policies that banned border re-entry not only to all foreign tourists but also registered foreign residents. (Japanese citizens re-entering under the same conditions, however, were allowed in.) As the disease spread regardless (imported by unquarantined Japanese citizens), government and media nevertheless targeted domestic “foreign clusters” as hotbeds of contagion. 
• The rise to prominence of Japan’s Visible Minorities included Miss Japan beauty queens and athletes, most notably world tennis champion Ōsaka Naomi. Yet local governments segregated children of international marriages into “low-IQ” classes in compulsory education, utilized terminology categorizing anyone with international connections (including Wajin Japanese) as “foreign citizens”, and continued to treat Japanese citizens with international roots as suspicious both in the political realm and the job market.
• Japan’s “lost decades” of economic doldrums since the economic bubble burst in 1993 officially became the “lost quarter century” in the 2020s as China further outdistanced Japan as Asia’s representative regional power.
• A brand-new concluding chapter that describes how Japan's long-ignored racism is in fact empowering white supremacists and ethnostatists worldwide.
  
• And much more, including updates and conclusions to cases mentioned in the First Edition.

"Recommended Reading" -- Dr. Jeff Kingston, Director of Asian Studies, Temple University Japan, writing in The Japan Times, December 19, 2015.

• In an anti-globalist era of Trump and ‘Brexit’ there will be many who argue that Japan is right to severely restrict immigration and preserve as much as possible that is unique about its national character. If those who do not ‘look Japanese’ have to suffer some discrimination, then that is just the price that has to be paid. There are also many who believe that the best antidote to racism is to have a nation state where as few people as possible look out of place. Arudou’s reply to this point of view, which acts simultaneously as a challenge to Japan’s leaders, is that if this national narrative is allowed to prevail, it will not only condemn Japan’s aging population to an ever-worsening demographic crisis, it will also have a ‘suffocating and self-strangulating’ effect on society (p. 303).  There are important academic contributions to the study of racism in Japan in this book, but it is as a must-read text on the crisis facing the shrinking Japanese population and its leaders that it really leaves its mark. Embedded Racism is highly recommended reading to anyone—whether they self-identify as Japanese or foreign or both—who is interested in Japan’s future.  (Dr. Robert Aspinall, Social Science Journal Japan, July 15, 2017.  read more)
• [Embedded Racism] is a brave critique of Japanese society and its failure to look outward in its demographic and economic development. The book will, no doubt, add to a lively discussion already afoot in Japanese studies, critical race studies, and critical mixed race studies of racism in Japan.  [...] The strongest part of the book, in my view, is chapter 5, which illustrates how "Japaneseness" is enforced through legal and extralegal means. The examples of visa regimes and even exclusion from sports and other contests through educational institutions show how everyday racism leaks into larger organizational practices, often without challenge.  [...] The book is clearly written and seems to be aimed primarily at undergraduate students, as it makes an important contribution for those wishing to understand racism in Japan better, and it compiles interesting documentary legal data about the history of cases of discrimination in Japan. The book would easily suit courses that address global conceptions of race and ethnicity and how these are changing in Japan at both the micro and macro levels because of globalization. 
  (Dr. Rebecca Chiyoko King-O’Riain, Sociology of Race and Ethnicity, an imprint of the American Sociological Association, August 14, 2017.  read more)
• Arudou’s book is a timely and important contribution to social and scholarly debates about racial discrimination in Japan...  (Pacific Affairs journal) (read full review)
  
• This book, though, is more than a narrative of instances of discrimination and campaigns for redress. The author also seeks to explore the roots of the problem, which he locates in the legal apparatus of nationality, the workings of the court system, the lack of serious official mechanisms to combat discrimination, and stereotypes perpetuated by the mass media.... This book is an important addition to the literature on problems of citizenship and minorities in Japan, particularly because it highlights the distinctive problems of visible minorities, rather than focusing on the large ‘invisible minorities’ (Zainichi Koreans and Chinese, etc.) who have been the subject of much existing research.... This is an important, courageous and challenging book, and it casts a sharp light on problems which are often ignored or veiled, but which have profound consequences for the present and future of Japanese society. (Dr. Tessa Morris-Suzuki, Australian National University; Japanese Studies journal) (read full review)
  
• Debito Arudou demonstrates that racism is pervasive in Japan and that many individuals and institutions deny this reality. He also shows that racism augurs ill for a society that will shrink for decades to come unless it changes how it treats visible minorities. People who care about the future of Japan need to engage with this pellucid and provocative account of one of the country’s most urgent but neglected problems. (Dr. David T. Johnson, University of Hawaii)
• In this important and insightful book, and based on a long personal experience, Debito Arudou offers a sophisticated critical analysis of the way visible minorities are treated in contemporary Japan. As immigration of work seekers to wealthy countries is on the rise, the issues treated here have wider relevance not only to the conduct and future of the Japanese society, but also to many other societies in the West and beyond. Highly recommended! (Dr. Rotem Kowner, University of Haifa)
• Hats off to Arudou for breaking once and for all the Silence Barrier that has permitted Japan’s profound racial discrimination to purr along undisturbed well into the 21st century. Exposing at long last the definitional acrobatics of Japanese and foreign Japan Studies experts—who have argued that since there is nothing we could call racist attitudes in Japan it follows that there can be no systemic racial discrimination either—Arudou lays out voluminous evidence to the contrary showing how Japan actually operates in its laws, public policy, media messages, and social ordering. (Dr. Ivan P. Hall, author of Bamboozled: How America Loses the Intellectual Game with Japan and its Implications for Our Future in Asia)
• From the immigration crisis in Europe to the growing tensions around racism and law enforcement in the United States, discussion of institutionalized racism, exclusionary rhetoric in the media, and legal barriers to equality seems essential now more than ever.  In his most recent book […] cultural critic, activist, and scholar Debito Arudou attempts to spark just such a discussion.  A critical analysis of Japan’s treatment of visible minorities (people living in japan who do not display phenotypical Japanese traits) and the legal, political, and social mechanisms that perpetuate the exclusion of such minorities from various aspects of Japanese society, Embedded Racism is extremely well timed.  Arguing that racism operating through various institutions in Japan is akin to experiences of racism in the United States, Europe, and elsewhere, Arudou’s carefully constructed work attempts to debunk the dominant narrative of Japanese exceptionalism, which he claims provides an escape from accountability to the rest of the world.  Describing how structural racism behind institutional, legal, social, and media narratives influences the degree to which “outsiders” are constructed and consequently excluded from essential social and legal protections, Embedded Racism is an important contribution to the fields of geography, cultural, and area studies... (Japan Studies Association of Canada (JSAC) Newsletter, Fall 2016) (read full review)
  

• Professors:  Obtain an inspection copy and/or ebook from publisher at https://rowman.com/Page/Professors.
  
• International orders (i.e., outside of North America or the UK) can also order directly via orders@nbninternational.com and give the same promo code as above in the email.  This will get you the hardcover version to Japan, for example, for about $110 including SAL postage within one week.
  
• Preview on Amazon.com (hardcover and Kindle) as well as other Amazon international outlets -- see preview of Chapter One (click "Look Inside")