For a period of time while I was on active duty, I had occasion to travel to Japan every month for meetings at Camp Zama and occasional meetings with the Japanese military, law enforcement and intelligence. I can honestly say that, at least on the island of Hokkaido, Japan is the quintessential example of systemic, culturally-entrenched racism.
I lived in Japan for a couple of years as a kid, and the entire place gave me culture shock! I was nine when we moved there (my dad was Navy) and everything was so oddly foreign.
The three wheeled trucks. All the school kids in their uniforms wearing masks. The benjos that were simply a ceramic hole in the floor. The open sewers, the omnipresent smell of fish, sewage, and diesel exhaust. The Pachinco Ball parlors.
I found them to be fascinating, outwardly friendly, and very polite, though even then I knew, this was more part of their culture than reality. I was told they are just as mean and nasty as anyone else, but their culture prevents them from outwardly being that way.
When I moved to the Philippines after that, I read a great thick comprehensive book on the experience of Allied POW’s held by the Japanese, and I was stunned by the open and sadistic brutality. I had difficulty squaring that hole for a while. But the Bataan Death March was no fable, and the bleached white markers put up along the route (which my Boy Scout troop marched every year) was a testament. And the Filipinos disliked the Japanese intensely, even then.
But I liked the Japanese, and found them fascinating. We had a maid, Meikosan, who was an absolutely stunning, beautiful young woman in her twenties, and she taught my mother everything she would need to know to entertain, including the tea ceremony. They apparently became quite close, and she and my mother would go everywhere. We worshiped Meikosan, and she treated us as if we were hers. There was no faking it, and when we finally parted, there were real tears all around.
Whenever a US Navy vessel entered Yokosuka that was either nuclear powered or suspected of having nuclear weapons, there would be large, well organized demonstrations outside the main gate of the base. Thousands of people carrying banners and signs, huge megaphones and loudspeakers blaring out unintelligible things, and on our side of the fence, hundreds of black dressed, fully equipped Japanese riot police with their body armor, face shields, and billy clubs there, standing motionless in lines, behind them several fire trucks at the ready.
Like giant Kabuki theater, the crowd would get louder, more unruly, and people would begin scaling the fence. The fire trucks moved in closer, sprayed fire hoses at them to knock them off the fence, then everyone would pack up in an orderly fashion and go home. It always looked like it would get out of control, but I came to understand it wasn’t even close to that. It was all theater.
After one of those, we had hundreds of Japanese riot police sitting for hours at a parade ground across the street from my house, and my brother and I went over and were walking amongst them. It appeared they were going to be there for several more hours waiting to be let go, and we invited three of them to come back to our house, where we set up an American “feast” for them...canned corn which we emptied into little bowls, that kind of thing. They didn’t speak English, and we had all these cans open and were serving, and my Mom came in. She took it in and hurriedly kicked them all out! I think I was 11 and my brother was 12 at the time...:)
One of my favorite stories was told to me by a former boss, that illustrated things perfectly. He had lived and worked in Japan as a businessman for 5-10 years, spoke Japanese fluently, and was the stereotype of a gajin. Big guy, black hair, very blue eyes. He went to a Japanese baseball game, and while he was sitting in the stands, two younger Japanese men in their twenties were baldly and obnoxiously badmouthing him in Japanese, making the assumption he didn’t speak the language.
At one point, he turned to look at them with his big blue eyes, and said, very submissively and non-offensively in perfectly accented Japanese: “I am very sorry my presence here has insulted you and interfered with your enjoyment of the game. I would be very happy to move my seat if you wish.”
He said the two men just looked at him with their mouths open, and simply got up in unison and left without saying a word to him or to each other, they were so shocked he understood him and so embarrassed at their own behavior.
I found the dichotomy of this country puzzling. They were capable of appreciating sensitive beauty, nature, things like that, but were also apparently capable of inhuman brutality. An officer aboard the USS Astoria found this same dichotomy when his cruiser made a special journey to Japan (carrying the ashes of a well regarded Japanese diplomat in 1939 who had died while serving in the US Embassy in Washington DC) and was heard to say: I can’t understand how a country that produces such beautiful and gentle women produces such mean sons of bitches in their men.”