世論 What Japan Thinks

As a change for today, I’ll have a look at the recent report (note: Microsoft Word document) released by the UN’s Special Rapporteur on contemporary forms of racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and related intolerance, Doudou Diène, on his mission to Japan, casting my eye in particular over some of the statistics that appear in this report. This seems to be a draft, so hopefully it gets rewritten before the official release.

Note that of course I am in favour of Japanese legislation against most forms of racial discrimination, but I am a bit sceptical of some of the methods employed by some of the activists, and I can see in this document hints of these tactics that I dislike.

Note also that I am a white guy with a full-time 正社員, seishain post at a major Japanese firm and a Permenant Residency permit, so feel free to take that into account when reading my position.

Finally note that calling into doubt the exact scale or shape of various forms of discrimination does not mean I am denying that it exists at all or that it is a problem. In particular, the description of the Koreans’ living conditions in Utoro is shocking!
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Searching around looking for a quote or two to bung up in that box on the top-left there (assuming you’re not reading this through the RSS feed, of course), I found that Jonathan Swift had once written “It is the folly of too many to mistake the echo of a London coffee-house for the voice of the kingdom.” One could perhaps easily substitute “San Francisco Starbucks” to bring it right up to date, but I think it is even more apt to use “the Blogosphere” instead. This online echo chamber effect has got both defenders like Joi Ito and detractors like El Reg (and, for the sake of disclosure, me).

This site is trying to be a foam baffle in a Tokyo coffee-shop, to help the voice of the empire be heard above the petty squabbling of the Japanophiles and the Japanophobics.

The one complaint I most often hear about polls is from people who, because they weren’t asked their own opinion, believe the poll to be fatally flawed. However, statistics tells us that small sample sizes can give reasonably accurate results even for very large populations; therefore, the usual sample size of 1,000 or 2,000 for predicting the opinion of the whole country of Japan is sufficient, assuming the 2,000 are picked in a reasonably random fashion.

The second most common complaint is that internet polls are fatally flawed: many of the polls I translate here are carried out “on the internet”, but the most common type of internet poll I translate are the ones from closed monitor groups: these ads you see (probably in this story too!) for “Get Paid to Take Surveys” are from companies inviting you to join monitor groups, which you can usually do for free anyway, so please don’t part with any money in reply to these ads!

However, open internet surveys are usually hopelessly inaccurate, but I try to avoid these whereever possible, or at least make clear to the reader that there is a high degree of probability that the figures are totally inaccurate.

One of the reasons for this blog is to provide sets of data that perhaps refute popular notions people hold about Japan. As the primary language of this blog in English, I mostly address the foreigner population. However, in Japan there is a popular genre of … I want to write fiction, but I should say opinion so as not to appear too biased, called Nihonjinron, basically the premise that Japan and the Japanese are some not just unique, but the most unique (yes, that’s deliberately semantically incorrect) nation, with the implicit race equals nationality undertones. This fuels a huge book industry (putting the term into Amazon.jp gives me 2,065 hits), reinforcing this perceived uniqueness that the (usually Western) traveller to Japan soon encounters. The unique four seasons (let’s ignore the rainy season), intestines being three times longer, penises are shorter but thicker (the first part of this last one at least is true); or, since the Japanese often view themselves as a whole, they also assume all Westerners are alike, so we can’t use chopsticks, dislike adzuki bean paste, and can’t learn Japanese fully.

It seems, according to an article the NPR forum, that there is a plan underway to write a book exploding the myths of Nihonjinron, which I hope is being written in Japanese. It would also be worthwhile, I think, producing an English anthology of some of the more bonkers Nihonjinron arguments.

A slight departure from my usual themes, but I found news of a class action lawsuit against the Japanese government regarding the lack of a specific law outlawing racial discrimination in Japan. Naturally, I support the idea of a bill being passed into law that will make such behaviour punishable, but it’s the approach (and the person doing the approach too, I suppose) that grates on me. Arudodebito Sugiwara, seems to represent the constituency of disgruntled English teachers. That’s a gross over-simplification of his position, of course, but it is a criticism that is easy to make.

Reading the statement outlining the proposed lawsuit, the text, on the whole, is commendable, and looking at the description of the planned second wave of more complex cases there is a lot to be said for this portion of the strategy, I think. However, I have issues with the proposed first wave. Putting on my statistical hat, it says:

Although our efforts have not gone ignored, the fact is that overt racial discrimination in Japan, evident in the increase in the number of businesses overtly displaying “No Foreigners Allowed” signs, is getting worse.

I wonder how he has determined that there is an increase in the number of businesses with discriminatory signs? Can we see the survey evidence that show the change in the number of signs over the years? I’m sure his collection of signs has increased over the years, but that may be just as much to do with more people photographing them, of course. (It is also interesting to note that many of the signs pictured on his web site are from places that look like dodgy hostess bars or snacks.) There may have been a spike for the World Cup in 2002, but is there any evidence of this?

Next, the claim that overt discrimination is getting worse. How has that been determined? Is it really increasing, or is it just more people reporting it to Debito (the mailing list he runs with others, for instance, constantly grows in membership), or just more people being over-sensitive and mistaking (or attributing) dislike for someone’s personality for dislike of someone’s origin? I personally have seen friends being bulls in china shops and getting offended when this behaviour has rubbed the locals up the wrong way. In addition, even if it could be demonstrated numerically that overt discrimination is increasing, the absolute number of discriminators could actually be decreasing; for instance, as the population of foreigners increases and more people have encounters with foreigners, they have opportunities to display their racist tendencies, but if at the same time some of these people change their minds, both the number of overt racists and the number of overt non-racists can increase.

Finally, the “Japanese Only” signs have been, in at least one case I know of (what percentage are so, I don’t know), trying to express that the staff only speak Japanese rather than trying to specifically exclude other nationalities.

This Japan Times article (well, it’s just a translation, the original weekly tabloid is more to blame) on kiddie fiddling teachers features the following frustratingly incomplete statistic.

Of the 166 cases, 46.4% of the victims were students, while 2.4% were graduates.

Eh? What happened to the other 51.2%? Do they mean that 46.4% were current students of the kiddy fiddling teacher? This sort of hopelessly incomplete datum point just leaves me all hanging in the air!