Views on anti-discrimination – Greg Clark.

March 30, 2005

With the Otaru bathhouse people easing invective, can I be allowed to
summarise my own views on this debate?

I realise that those of us who do not condemn the Otaru bathhouse
owners as ruthless discriminators are indeed weak, compromising and
mealy-mouthed when compared with the stern, principled,  uncompromising
stand taken by the bathhouse moralists.

Indeed,  in the memorable words of someone who should know better, Yuki
Allyson Honjo in her Japan Review site, I am an ‘apologist for
discrimination in order to protect Japanese culture’   Jef Kingston
in the Japan Times said something similar.

Protecting Japanese culture?  As far as I am concerned I was simply
supporting the Japanese in Otaru who themselves were simply trying to
protect their bathhouses from being wrecked by drunken Russians. They
were also trying to protect themselves from further losses if continued
free entry for badly-behaved foreigners caused Japanese customers to go
elsewhere. It was for those ‘crimes’ that they were sued and one
was fined. Whew.

(Note:  ﾔApologistﾕ is often the last refuge of the academic
scoundrel. It is a magic word that automatically frees you from any
obligation to answer arguments. It is at the same level of pejorative
abuse as the use of the word ‘terrorist’ ﾐ a favorite weapon of
political scoundrels. Here too the magic word excuses you from having
to look at the motives of the other side. )

(But if culture is involved, yes, I do see Japan as an unusual example
of an advanced society that, thanks to past isolation and feudalism,
was able to retain and refine communalistic, ‘tribal’ values.)

(Northern European societies – Britain and Germany especially –
are, or rather were,  rather similar. So too are some Southeast Asian
societies)

(One aspect of the communal society is strong sensitivity to the
behavior of others, including bathtub behavior. They see identity and
values more at the level of people . More culturally developed
societies see identity and values more at the level of culture and
ideas, and are equally fussy at this level, eg the French ban on Muslim
students wearing head scarves.)

(In the West we see the latter move as reasonable but condemn the
former as discrimination.  In fact both have the same motivations.
Only the values are different. - and if we could get rid of our own
cultural arrogance we would realise that communal values have much to
offer, especially since we Anglosaxons also used to rely on them very
much in our heyday)

(What is surprising about Japan is that,  despite the natural fussiness
at the level of human relations,  overall great toleration is shown to
foreigners,  despite the many problems they cause here. Living in a
rather remote and conservative area of the Japanese countryside I see
examples of this toleration daily.)

 (But don’t tell that to the bathhouse moralists.  They have already
decided that Japan is a cesspit of anti-gaijin discrimination. They
have also decided that among my other sins I live in a Tokyo fat-cat
gaijin ghetto.)

So having admitted my sins might I be allowed to mention  that I too am
not entirely devoid of anti-discrimination zeal. For example:

Back in the 70’s when bathhouse moralists were in short supply (most
were in short pants, I guess) and anti-foreigner feeling in Japan was
much stronger than it is now (apart from anything else there were still
 memories of an unpleasant Occupation by foreigners) some of us had to
cope with much greater anti-foreigner discrimination than anything we
see today.

Anti-gaijin policemen were arbitrarily and un-politely stopping
foreigners, women especially, to check credentials and generally make a
nuisance of themselves. Some of us did what we could in the media and
elsewhere to change things.  And police attitudes did gradually change
– though thanks more to the kokusaika boom of the 80’s.

One of my own efforts is revealed in a story on my website in the
Number One Shimbun slot “The Passbook Law: South Africa is not
Alone”.

I realise now that my effort to make the Japanese police realise that
they were at only one level removed from the apartheid atrocities of
South Africa was quite puny in comparison with the courage displayed by
the bathhouse heroes, willing even to sacrifice their children on the
altar of anti-discrimination, that I should have had those policemen
arrested and charged. But I did my best, even to the point of getting
injured (any of the moralists gone that far?) Incidentally and
ironically, I was accused by other gaijin of failing to abide by
Japanese customs and sensibilities.

There was also a problem in those days with taxis refusing foreigners.
The drivers had their reasons (language problems, short rides) but even
so it was unpleasant – on a cold rainy night with children and
friends it was a lot more unpleasant than being refused a bath.

Once again, some of us did what we could to change things, though this
time bubble collapse and the taxi surplus did much more.  But the
moralists are right, we did not have the courage to drag errant
taxi-drivers through the courts, as no doubt we should have done
(though some of us did get a vicarious pleasure from kicking in their
fenders).

In short, and compared with the heroism of today’s bathhouse
moralists, I realise that we were all sadly deficient. True,  on the
lecture circuit I would recite list of Japanese exclusionary policies
– reluctance to take foreign workers or asylum seekers, denial of
permanent positions to foreigners at national universities, visa
problems for foreign students, restrictions on foreign lawyers,
difficulties in gaining Japanese citizenship and the demand to take a
Japanese name (details available to anyone who bothered to check the
content of those speeches, but don’t expect our one-tracked moralists
to go to that kind of trouble ).

 Besides,  all that was in the context of comparing Japanese
restrictive attitudes to foreign people with the unrestricted entry of
foreign cultures,  and trying to draw conclusions that were not
entirely derogatory to the Japanese (i.e. to prove that the Japanese
indeed did see identity more at the people rather than the culture
level). I lacked the crystalline conviction of the bathhouse moralists
that says Japan has no saving graces.

Even so, I do feel that the fact of being condemned today by the
bathhouse and other moralists as an ‘apologist’  for Japanese
racism, discrimination etc is rather offensive, as is the posting of
blatantly false material about my life and history.

(For example, I was alleged to have been 'run out' of government
service for opposing the Vietnam intervention.  In fact, I left of my
own accord and in the process turned down a request to be Australian
representative to the UN Disarmament Commission in New York.  At the
time I was age 28.)

(It was said that my job at Sophia University was teaching Japanese to
foreigners. In fact I had had a dual appointment as Professor in the
Departments of Economics and Comparative Culture. The basis of the
'teaching Japanese' claim was the fact that one of the many courses I
ran was advanced readings in Japanese economics.)

(It was said that I was upset because I was not made ambassador to
Japan.  In fact I had worked hard to help by good friend and mentor,
John Menadue, appointed.I myself had been given the far more
interesting job as policy consultant in the Department of Prime
Minister and Cabinet)

(And so on.  As I said in an earlier post,  I was not surprised to find
the bathhouse moralists sink to using a Murdoch Press gutter story to
attack someone who disagreed with their fanatical views.

Ironically, even as the bathhouse moralists were accusing me of being
on the level of apartheid South Africa,  myself and one or two Japanese
progressives happened to be sitting on the Justice Ministry’s
Immigration Control Policy committee trying to improve things here for
foreigners.

True,  there was little we could do to change overall policies. But we
did manage to moderate some of the policies to asylum seekers and visa
over-stayers, and to ease visa restrictions for foreigners working in
Japan. This alleged apologist for Japanese racism even managed to force
through a change in wording in the final report, so that visa
over-stayers were not automatically labeled as contributing to the very
real foreign crime problem here (most of those crimes were being
committed by people with seemingly valid visas).

 (For proof of the wording change, check the initial draft with the
final document,  if any of the moralists are interested, which is
unlikely, given their arrogance, .and the fact that many of them
probably canﾕt read official Japanese anyway.)

We also tried to do something about the one area where official
attitudes do begin to verge on racist dislike, namely the intense visa
restrictions on even obviously respectable Chinese students. But for
the moment let me concentrate on the bathhouse problem.

 Sometime back in the late nineties we began to see some Internet posts
from various foreigners here claiming widespread anti-gaijin
discrimination - Japanese refusing to sit next to foreigners in trains,
being ignored in restaurants etc etc.

In particular there were extraordinary posts from someone who later
emerged as chief bathhouse moralist - a weird American who later made a
big fguss about his taking Japanese nationality -   filled with seeming
contempt for the Japanese as a nation and calling for
‘Machiavellian’  attitudes to force the Japanese to abide by his
standards of behavior.

Any and every problem faced by whining foreign academics here was
escalated into definitive proof of alleged Japanese exclusivity (Note:
if you decide to get involved with the messed-up  Japanese education
system and get messed up yourself, then blame yourself and not the
system. Needless to say, there was no mention of the many foreign
academics who have thrived here thanks to the many loopholes in the
same system.)

At a time, the Japanese had every reason to be concerned about the
growing rash of foreigner crime, mainly by Chinese and Korean gangs
coming to Japan to take advantage of Japan’s weakness to violent and
calculated crime. But our moralist friends were dismissing that concern
also as yet another proof of anti-foreigner bias and hatred.  (Even
today we find this strange refusal among the moralists to admit that
there is a foreign crime problem.  For an example of how seriously some
Japanese see the problem, particularly the willingness of Chinese
thugs, unlike most Japanese thugs,  to use heavy violence even in petty
crimes, see the Mainichi article below*).

In one of his posts, as I recall, said chief moralist set out to
condemn the Miwa Lock company as racist for advertising a new kind of
lock as a defense against skilled foreign lock-pickers - this at a time
when there were almost daily reports of skilled Chinese gangs picking
the highly pickable locks then in current Japanese use. (If my memory
serves, there may even have been a call to sue Miwa.) How wacky can you
get?

Said moralist then went on to tell us how he had visited an Otaru
bathhouse.  The place had suffered 800,000 yen of damage to an
expensive heater and to its walls from drunken Russian seamen, but he
was going to try to sue it anyway for trying to ban foreigners.

Later we heard how he and his friends had not only taken legal action
against an Otaru bathhouse and the entire Otaru city  for No Foreigner
signs but were even boasting about it in a book. This after the
boasting over legal action against an anti-Brazilian jeweler in
Hamamatsu who had suffered shoplifting and other harm from Brazilian
customers,   I began to wonder what was going on.

But first let me make one thing clear. I am probably even more
concerned about No Foreigner signs than are the moralists. I know only
too well how volatile and copycat the Japanese can be – that despite
the veneer of kokusaika,  attitudes here can easily change. Just one No
Foreigner sign could easily trigger a rash of such signs elsewhere.

Legal action to stop that kind of rot in an area where foreigners were
never any particular nuisance  would not bother me greatly, though I
would prefer other measures.

But if foreigners are a nuisance, or worse - if they are creating
damage or involved in theft and other criminal activities - then things
are very different. Particularly in Japan where it is generally taken
for granted that people will obey the rules  and behave with restraint,
 and precautions against crime, furyo people etc. are few. Here some
kind of discriminatory action against offending foreigners is
inevitable since the Japanese do not have our standard Western defenses
against such behaviour  (bouncers, unbreakable double locks, hidden
cameras, armed guards, go-go police etc).

It is in this context that I see the use of vague UN
anti-discrimination convention to take legal action against much-needed
efforts to bar badly-behaved foreigners as a nonsense – particularly
since many nations in their visa policies, segregation (separation)
policies and affirmative action polices are clearly in breach of the
convention.

 That some provincial Japanese judges keen to prove progressive
credentials went along with this UN motherhood talk says more about
Japan’s wishy-washy judicial system than it says about discrimination
.

Moralist suggestions that the Otaru Russians could have been educated
to behave themselves, or that badly behaved Russians should be barred
at the door,  or that police should be called in to arrest them if they
misbehaved (i.e. drag them naked from the bathtubs?),  are so
unrealistic as to make one wonder whether the moralists really have
graduated from those short pants.

I checked the situation in Otaru several times and talked directly with
the Russians in their own language (can any of the moralists can claim
similar efforts?) It was obvious that if the Russians were to have the
bath they wanted (and needed after their long unwashed stays on rust
bucket ships) then someone should build it for them.

At the very least there should have been something like the seamen’s
clubs found in most large ports,  rather than have them wandering
around a provincial town quite unable to relate to a culture very
different from their own.  That this was not done was the direct cause
of the subsequent trouble.

In other Hokkaido ports – Wakkanai for example - there were similar
problems. In some,  the shop-lifting problem was getting out of control
, and not surprisingly.

Visit Sakhalin, where most of those Russians come from, and you will
find out why.  There,  shop-lifting is a way of life.  Draconian
precautions – thuggish guards, compulsory lockers for all bags -
operate even in local stores. Is that what those Wakkanai stores should
have done too?

In Hamamatsu, which I visited often on the lecture circuit, I also
found very real problems - mainly of shop-lifting and excessive window
shopping by the poorly assimilated underclass Nikkei Brazilians which
Japan has left to fend for themselves is a fairly inhospitable
environment. Here too No Brazilian signs were the only, if rather
crude, answer.

At the very least, and as at Hamamatsu (and at Ota in Gumma where there
are also serious Brazilian crime and dropout problems) , the moralists
could have joined in the friendship societies where internationally
minded Japanese try hard to welcome and educate the foreigners in their
midst.

Do any of the moralists condescend do this kind of thing?  Of course
not.  They see such organisations as whitewash operations, where they
would have to associate with Japanese whose good intentions
contradicted their own Orwellian view of Japanese society. They find it
much easier to stand back and to indulge their Western egos by
resorting to Western legalistic rules to force a solution to problems
of their own Western cultural making .

One final point:  Why do the moralists constantly want to drag ‘skin
color’ into the discrimination debate?

Let’s go over all the points again.

One, people are entitled to discriminate for and against people on the
basis of personal characteristics.  We do that every day in our choices
of friends and business partners.

Sometimes the only way to judge whether people have those desirable or
undesirable characteristics is on the basis of race/ethnicity.  It is a
very crude basis for judgment. But I repeat, sometimes it is the only
way.

Moralists make a big deal of whether or not the discrimination criteria
can be changed – for example skin color cannot be changed but tattoos
can be chosen or removed,  long hair and baggy pants can be  cut, a
foreigner in Japan can claim Japanese nationality.

But usually such changes are irrelevant. The basic nature of the
individual remains the same. The trouble-making foreigner will still
want to cause trouble to Japan even if he does claim Japanese
nationality. The people who have to suffer trouble from these people
are still entitled to try to keep them at bay, either way.

But to come back to so-called skin color, i.e. race/ethnicity.
Many quite legitimate discriminations are made on this basis, for
example US  affirmative action policies. They are often arbitrary and
sometimes cruel. But many feel they are needed anyway.

There is also quite legitimate separative action (e.g. moves in the US
to provide separate but equal education facilities for women and
minorities.)

 Malaysia’s discrimination against the local Chinese was a form of
affirmative action.  Most would agree that its results were also quite
reasonable, particularly since it forced the Chinese to use their
talents in directions other than exploiting the Malay majority.

Nationality is another very arbitrary form of discrimination.
Personally I would feel much more sympathy for a deserving Chinese
student denied entry to Japan because of the color of his or her
passport (also unchangeable) than I would feel for a gaijin denied
entry to a bathhouse or hotel on the basis of skin color.

But many nations also feel passport color discrimination is also
needed, and sometimes rightly.

(Come to think of it, Japan is now into separation polices with train
cars reserved from women. We men are being discriminated against
simply because we look like men and because a few other people with
similar appearance to ourselves,  i.e. other men, like to grope women.
Didn’t that motherhood UN convention have something to say about
discrimination on the basis of sex too. )

(Nor is it relevant that the excluded men can go and sit in another
train car.  If you are excluded from one bathhouse you can always go to
another bathhouse too. The case put forward by the bathhouse moralists
lay in the discrimination of being excluded from one particular
bathhouse.)

If moralists do not like these kinds of discrimination, then they have
two choices. One is to insist that the allegedly harmful qualities
associated with nationality/appearance do not exist,  or that they are
not harmful. For example, that the Chinese do not abuse visas, or that
even if there is abuse this does not harm the recipient country.

Or that US blacks and Hispanics do not need separate schools or better
job opportunities to match whites, or that even if they cannot match
whites society suffers no harm.  (Or that no men are gropers, or that
groping is not harmful to women.)

 The other move is to find ways other than nationality and/or
appearance to separate out those who have the undesirable qualities
from those who do not have them. A language test at the door could be
one way to separate out good gaijin from bad gaijin in Japan, but it
would be very crude and for some very insulting.

But in most cases such separation is impossible (in the case of
Malaysia, separate out dumb Chinese from smart Chinese? Over visas,
separate out visa absuing Chinese from non-abusing Chinese? Over train
cars,  find ways to distinguish the gropers from the non-gropers as
they pass through the sliding doors?)

If you fail to do one or other of these two things, then accept that
there is no alternative to across the board discrimination on the basis
of appearance/nationality.  In other words, if you are a man accept
quietly that you cannot get into the women-only train car, and if you
are a Russian seaman, and there is no way for the owner and the
customers to tell whether you are well behaved  or not,  then go off
and find another bathtub, or even better, build your own bathtub.

In any case, please stop ranting on about skin color discrimination.

More than anything else, it is this refusal to enter into serious
debate on a very serious question that makes one wonder about the
motives, or even worse, the maturity of the moralists.

GC

＊Dr Clark

Have to admit that the organized attacks on you by the self-appointed
PC vigalantes of the Internet is a bit disturbing -- if not downright
wacky.

Wonder what they'd make of the following article in the Mainichi
online?

Regards,

Foreigners in Crime:
The Christmas present of death

Mainichi Shimbun

March 7, 2005

Since that fateful January day, wandering from street to street has
become a daily activity for 75-year-old Sumiko. When she sits at the
window in her favorite coffee shop her mind is filled with the
conversations she had with her husband Tsuyoshi had before his life
was snatched from him.

At about 10:50 p.m. on Jan. 5, 2003, a gang of three men picked their
way into the elderly couple's home in Yokosuka, Kanagawa Prefecture.
After finishing writing replies to the New Year's postcards she had
received, Sumiko got up to go to the bathroom -- and ran straight into
the intruders.

The men hit her, bound her hands and legs and stuffed a towel into her
mouth. As she faded out of consciousness, she heard the cries of her
husband above angry Chinese voices.

When she returned to consciousness just under an hour later, she
struggled into the bedroom of her home, still tied up. On the bed was
the cold body of her husband. His face had been forced into the futon,
and the oxygen tubes that had been in his nose had come out. Tsuyoshi,
who had suffered from a lung condition, had died of suffocation.

Sumiko managed to pull the towel out of her mouth. When she did, blood
spurted out from the back of her throat.

Missing from the home was 56,000 yen that the couple had kept in a
draw, and 46 items -- including a necklace that Tsuyoshi had given his
wife -- with a current market price of about 1.4 million yen.

Three months after the killing, two Chinese men, Chen Houzhong, 54,
and Chen Caifu, 42, were arrested by Kanagawa Prefectural Police. The
whereabouts of the third man remains unclear. Houzhong was marked as
the main figure in the crime -- and Sumiko knew him.

For about 40 years, Tsuyoshi had worked as a teacher at an elementary
school in Kanagawa Prefecture. He also served as the principal of a
school for Japanese students in Australia. After retiring he had
taught exchange students about Japanese culture. "All of mankind are
friends," he had often said.

lived in to protect them from a landslide. Several Chinese men were
among the members of the construction team. Frequently the couple gave
them tea and mandarins. In return, the Chinese men would help Sumiko
carry her shopping bags, and even put her rubbish out. One of the men
was Houzhong.

On Christmas Eve, the men were working. Tsuyoshi had a good idea. He
wrapped 2,000 yen around several flat rice cakes, and presented them
as Christmas gifts to each of the workers.

"I can still remember the happy look on Houzhong's face as he received
that gift," Sumiko recalls.

But behind Houzhong's smile hid a thought: "Those people are rich." It
was at this time that he decided on his target for a robbery.

Houzhong, whose dream was to build his own home, left his wife and
four children behind when he came to Japan in May 1999. He entered the
country using a fake passport. At the time of his illegal entry, he
had debts of about 3 million yen, and felt the loneliness of being by
himself in a foreign country. It was not long before he became a
regular visitor in a mahjong parlor where other Chinese nationals hung
out.

During his visits, Houzhong borrowed 200,000 yen from the Chinese
operator of the parlor. It was at about this time that he stopped
sending money to his family. It was a loan that he needed to pay back.
Feeling the pressure, he turned to robbery.

Caifu, another member who participated in the fatal robbery, paid a
broker 1.3 million yen to smuggle him into Japan by boat. He was
persuaded to join the robbery after Christmas Eve, while talking with
Houzhong.

"I was drinking on the night of the incident and I lost perspective,"
he said. Now he says there are nights he can't sleep when he thinks of
Tsuyoshi's dead body.

During the first hearing in the trial Houzhong told the court he
regretted what he had done. "We only got a little bit of money. We
shouldn't have done it," he said. He was not asked about his feelings
toward the victim, but a lawyer spoke on his behalf.

"He can't even read or write Chinese. Even if he had wanted to
apologize, he wouldn't have been able to express himself well."

Both Houzhong and Caifu appealed against the life sentences the court
handed them, saying that a sentence of life imprisonment was unfair.
The Tokyo High Court rejected their appeal in July this year. Caifu
appealed to the Supreme Court, but Houzhong didn't and his sentence
was settled.

A Christmas present that Tsuyoshi presented as a gift of kindness was
repaid with death. A wall of language problems blocked the attacker
and the victim from communicating. This hurt the victim even more.

Sumiko, who attended the court hearings, heard how Houzhou and Caifu
had suffered from poverty. "How sad," she said as she looked down and
searched for further words to say. "But I hate them. And I am angry
with the Japanese government for abandoning the Chinese who illegally
entered the country." Tsuyoshi's final cries still ring in her ears.

Gregory Clark
Head, Research Japan Office
S603 Ark Hills Executive Tower
1-14-5 Akasaka
Minato-ku, Tokyo
107-0052
Tel: 03-3586-4147
Fax: 03-3586-4148
www.gregoryclark.net
www.gregoryclark.net/nakadaki