Interesting that the Japanese rising sun flag is mentioned alongside the swastika and the stars and bars; the rising sun flag remains in contemporary use by the Japanese Maritime Self Defense Force.
At the risk of being controversial... I'm going to go ahead and say that Japan doesn't care about racism like America does. Japanese people are extremely racist, but you just don't know it because Japan is 99+% Japanese with <1% being ethnic minorities.
But the ethnic minorities that _do_ live there live in segregated apartment complexes, etc. to prevent "mixing with the natives".
The Dekasegi is an interesting piece to add to the discussion. Many are unaware that Brazil is home to the largest Japanese population outside Japan.
> During the 1980s, the Japanese economic situation improved and achieved stability. Many Japanese Brazilians went to Japan as contract workers due to economic and political problems in Brazil, and they were termed "Dekasegi". Working visas were offered to Brazilian Dekasegis in 1990, encouraging more immigration from Brazil.
> In 1990, the Japanese government authorized the legal entry of Japanese and their descendants until the third generation in Japan. At that time, Japan was receiving a large number of illegal immigrants from Pakistan, Bangladesh, China, and Thailand. The legislation of 1990 was intended to select immigrants who entered Japan, giving a clear preference for Japanese descendants from South America, especially Brazil.
> Because of their Japanese ancestry, the Japanese Government believed that Brazilians would be more easily integrated into Japanese society. In fact, this easy integration did not happen, since Japanese Brazilians and their children born in Japan are treated as foreigners by native Japanese.[42][43] This apparent contradiction between being and seeming causes conflicts of adaptation for the migrants and their acceptance by the natives.[44]
> but you just don't know it because Japan is 99+% Japanese with <1% being ethnic minorities.
Racism is discussed on Japanese SNS quite often. There are also frequent demonstrations both for racism and against racism. I think the reason people don't really know because it's wasn't actively reported, even on Japanese media.
Additionally, there are 2.93 millions foreigners in Japan [0]. Japan population is 127 millions. That's already 2.3%, and not even counting Ainu and Ryukyuans. It's not large, but it's much larger than <1% you claimed.
> But the ethnic minorities that _do_ live there live in segregated apartment complexes, etc. to prevent "mixing with the natives".
source for this?
my experience: my wife is Japanese, i have visited JP many times, we know a ton of non-Japanese immigrants living in Japan and they all live wherever the heck they want to live.
i've never heard of non-native minorities being segregated either officially (government) or privately (landlord collusion) other than perhaps stories of illegal immigrants being packed together in the seedier parts of town. is that what you're referring to?
wow! this is indeed quite eye-opening! while i was aware of non-native discrimination in Japan in terms of employment, i had not heard of housing-specific discrimination! i asked for receipts and boy, you delivered!!!
thank you for opening my eyes. will read and discuss w/our family :)
To be honest, it's not really to the 'segregated' level. It's not like one building for foreigner and the other for Japanese.
Officially, it's illegal to deny rental based on nationality. In reality, you don't want to live in an apartment if the owner doesn't want you there anyway, even though you could push for it in the court.
The commenter you replied to may have been describing the discrimination faced by people such as the Ainu, Ryukyuans, and others who are not considered part of the majority ethnic Japanese group.
Well the motivations are completely different. Xenophobia is a pretty normal human condition, and very reasonable as well (“strangers” carry germs, which is being amptly demonstrates right now). It could also be motivated be preservation of culture, nation, etc. - basically same reasoning as makes you prefer your children vs other children, just extended a bit to the whole nation.
The reason you prefer your children is that they are much more likely to contain your genes than other children, and your main purpose in life is, to some extent, to ensure that those genes may propagate to later generations.
No one cares about the literal definition of words anymore, it’s all about feelings and implied context now. The word “racism” is a perfect example. You’ll rarely see anyone using it literally as in “prejudice based on race” which is a shame. We’ve lost a lot of the ability to reason about _why_ these things are bad, now it’s just “I feel like it’s bad, I’m scared of someone doing something bad to me.”
> Interesting that the Japanese rising sun flag is mentioned alongside the swastika and the stars and bars;
The stars and bars, while also a Confederate symbol, is not really a notorious hate symbol; the Confederate flags that are notorious hate symbols are the “battle flag” (flag of the Army of Northern Virginia, also used as the union of the second and third national flags; square), and the second Confederate Naval Jack (a similar design, but with a different aspect ratio). The Stars and Bars (the first national flag) never got revived by Jim Crow era racists the way the other two flags did.
> the rising sun flag remains in contemporary use by the Japanese Maritime Self Defense Force.
It's a slightly different flag, and while there might be some contexts where banning the present JMSDF naval ensign would be problematic, I don't really see how it is in a racing game.
Well, the Confederate Flag refers to that and later national flags (the Stars and Bars is the first Confederate national flag, the Stainless Banner—with the battle flag in the union and a solid white field—and the Bloodstained Banner—adding a broad vertical red stripe to the Stainless Banner) were the second and third.
Not merely pedantic, it's worth noting that the Battle Flag is a key element of the later national flags, though not itself one of them. (Though what is often flown as the “Confederate flag” isn't the square battle flag, either, but closer to, if not exactly, the Naval Jack.)
Wow, rising sun flag is used in many games, since Japan is huge on games. First one that comes to mind is Street Fighter (E. Honda/Ryu stages and designs). This gon be interesting.
This is what I thought about too. I recently played sf2turbo via the 25th anniversary collection on the switch.
Seeing the rising sun flag as a big part of the stage background did legitimately make me feel uncomfortable, knowing the atrocities committed under that flag.
For that matter, the swastika was still used by the Finnish Air Force until quite recently. I thought to double check this before posting and discovered news articles about the change posted within the past hour.
This one always seemed odd considering the Finnish military had particularly strong reasons to drop the symbol having ended up both fighting for and owing reparations to the Allies, and without any lingering affection for their alliance of convenience with Germany or sympathy with Nazi thought. If the Air Force didn't like the symbols the Defence Force switched to in 1945, substituting the Tursaansydän for the original swastika would have been an easy change to make...
Not really. The rising sun flag is the flag of the imperial Japanese army, the one that allied with Nazi Germany. They were brutal and deserve to be regarded in a similar manner to Nazi Germany.
The Japanese Maritime Self Defense Force flag is problematic. It's like Mississippi or Georgia's state flags before 2020, it's a call back to things that should be left in the history books.
The rising sun flag was adopted before the turn of the century many years before the war. The confederate and nazi flags were used explicitly for those hateful movements (post civil war racism and nazis). These are quite different.
While it's true that it was adopted in 1870, it was adopted as the war flag of the Imperial Japanese Army. The same one that committed horrific atrocities to Korea and China. Then it stopped being used after Japan surrendered in WWII.
To many Koreans (and likely Chinese) the wartime version of the rising sun flag is exactly the same as the Nazi flag if not worse. The anglosphere tends to gloss over the brutal behavior of Japan during this time, under this flag.
The difference with Germany is that they took responsibility and passed laws to regulate usage of the nazi flag, etc. Japan did not, and lied to the Korean government about things like the comfort women.
> were used explicitly for those hateful movements
Do you honestly believe the rising sun flag was not a part of a hateful movement? Is the fact that Korea was annexed and Koreans were treated awfully under this flag just a coincidence?
It's a question of how narrowly the flag is tied to the hateful movement.
Should the UK retire the Union Jack because of what they did in India? The Nazi imagery is very closely associated with the specific group that committed the atrocities rather than Germany in general. The UK flag is less so. IMO, the rising sun flag is somewhere in-between, having been in use over a slightly more heterogenous time than the Nazi symbols, bit less so than the Union Jack.
The swastika was a very popular symbol, and remains popular outside nazis. The swastika shouldn't (and really can't) be banned, but the Nazi usage of it should be.
The confederate flag had a bunch of variants and the popular version seen today was only used after as a symbol of hate. Should be banned.
The rising sun flag is just one variation of a couple themes used throughout Japanese history and it was used in a non-imperialist setting for hundreds of years since the Edo period. Its in the fuzzy place where most flags lie.
You can argue for the banning of that flag for those atrocities, but why stop there? Are you going to ignore the countless indigenous peoples who suffered under the American flag or all the colonialism done under the union jack? What about the Turkish flag which flew during the genocide they committed and still flies today. What you're essentially arguing for is banning all flags related to some kind of atrocity. That's most flags.
If you take a group of people and ask them what the rising sun flag represents, the majority response will be about WWII imperialist Japan. Which makes sense as they changed it immediately after their surrender in WWII. It legitimately is viewed like the nazi flag by the various Korean people I've talked to in Korea.
The context also matters. Korea has plenty of swastikas. Specifically at shrines/temples and on the ground; not being flown as part of flags.
"What about Y" is a weak argument to keep X flag. You could make that argument for basically any flag. To answer though, it's likely the US flag will be seen in a similar light once it's no longer a powerful hegemony. If the US had a flag that was only used during its "imperialist era" and a different modern one, one would have a stronger argument.
Seems rather disrespectful to be making this kind of argument considering the scale involved. Roughly 22 million people died in Asia as a result of the Japanese occupation preceding and during the Second World War. That's just shy of triple the dead of the Holocaust and 4.5 times the number of slaves in the US in 1860.
>The rising sun flag is the flag of the imperial Japanese army, the one that allied with Nazi Germany.
>The Japanese Maritime Self Defense Force flag is problematic.
The flag of the National Republican Army is the Italian flag with a bird on it. Is the Italian flag also problematic due to its close relationship with the Axis?
Swastika is a sacred symbol in Hinduism. The original inspiration for Hitler was hooked cross. You will commonly find swastika painted across homes in India.
> Swastika is a sacred symbol in Hinduism. The original inspiration for Hitler was hooked cross.
No, the inspiration was the Indian swastika. Same reason he wanted to call himself "Aryan".
(The swastika is also a sacred symbol in Buddhism, for reference. One day someone will petition to have 卐 removed from the relevant Chinese Unicode block.)
The swastika was also in use in the west in the early 20th century before the Nazis came to power. One example of this can be seen painted on the inside of the nosecone of the Spirit of Saint Louis: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Spirit_of_St._Louis_Nose_...
(It should probably be noted that the Spirit of Saint Louis was flown by Charles Lindbergh, who is generally thought to have been a Nazi sympathizer a bit later in life. But I think it's unlikely this particular swastika from 1927 was painted with the Nazis in mind. Particularly, it wasn't painted by Lindbergh.)
Yeah, I don't really understand that. Would they also ban anyone for adding the insignia for United States Army Air Forces? What about writing "Enola Gay" on the side of a car?
Imperial Japan was extremely cruel to the people in the places it invaded - which was a lot. Human experimentation, massacring civilians, torture, comfort women. They were basically the Nazis of Asia. They also didn't apologize for it, still glorify their brutal heroes and teach disinformation about it to their schoolkids. Chinese people still have a strong anti-Japanese feeling.
I don't exactly consider dropping two atomic bombs on top of hundreds of thousands of civilians an act of kindness. Americans also don't exactly apologize for their acts, still glorify their brutal heroes (and even people who fought against their own country). There's probably a whole laundry list of war crimes (and things that really should be war crimes) that the US has committed. And there are a lot of anti-American feelings across the globe.
So maybe we ban all references to nations of individuals that have in the past committed war crimes? Even the limited to recent history, the list is sort of long[1], but African nations seem to be well represented. As a convenient shorthand, maybe we just ban the African continent altogether?
I don't exactly consider dropping two atomic bombs on top of hundreds of thousands of civilians an act of kindness.
War used to be extremely brutal. Genghis Khan used to execute entire cities...even after they had surrendered. Hell, prior to WWII, civilian populations were still legally legitimate targets for military actions. It's a very modern development for war to be fought purely between recognized armed forces.
That being said, dropping two atomic bombs is estimated to have saved millions of Japanese civilian lives that would have been lost if the Japanese Emperor had waged a city-by-city resistance as they originally planned.
Americans also don't exactly apologize for their acts, still glorify their brutal heroes (and even people who fought against their own country).
This is not true, at all. The US Government is constantly apologizing for its past acts. We don't just apologize for them, we set up memorials to our own bad acts as a nation so that we can't erase them from memory or hide from them. And after the atomic bombs, the US paid for the surgeries and medical treatments of numerous survivors. Similarly, after Vietnam, the US has made significant efforts to make up for the damage inflicted on the Vietnamese people during the war.
To be frank, Japanese people(myself included) is somehow extremely cruel by default to anyone, and there’s an aspect that those defaults compounded in the war rather than those soldiers became cruel.
Like we still torture young subordinates in workplace to death and laugh at them, today, like pouring beer into an Italian shoe and get the new girl to swallow it, I never had to come across such things but some of us still do, just not as obscenely atrocious as treating completely innocent and defenseless local residents like a dog playing with plushes.
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