This is true for anywhere outside of a select few Western countries, most of the world's population still identifies along ethnic lines. Actually many in the West do too although it isn't official policy in these countries and has become taboo to say it out loud. But a lot of people still think it nonetheless.
Anyway, it's not really Japan specific. I'm not sure why people always say this about Japan when other Asian countries have an even lower immigrant population. In Taiwan it's just over 1%. In Mainland China it's even much lower. Korea has slightly immigrants than Japan but it's no where near levels of Australia or the US. There's a weird obsession with Japan in Western countries and Japanese culture and politics often get stereotyped without people actually understanding much about it. The assumption that it's unusual for a country not to have (uncontrolled) mass immigration is in itself an amusing one to me.
Aside from the social situation, it's also extremely hard to naturalize as a legal process. It's possible but no small feat. One has to be fully fluent in Japanese, reside in Japan for at least a decade, adopt a Japanese-compatible name written in Japanese characters, renounce their other citizenships, and just generally fully assimilate.
Only a few thousand per year bother. There's actually hundreds of thousands of eligible long-term residents in Japan who could acquire citizenship on paper, but the criteria (particularly the renunciation of other citizenships) are burdensome enough that even some people born in Japan who have lived there their whole lives who could become citizens opt not to.
In particular, starting at 1m04s, the interviewer says "I hear it's hard to become Japanese". And the naturalized person answers, "the more and more I read about it on the English net, I realized there's so much misinformation about it that you really couldn't trust anything that was written English about naturalization."
He's talking about people like you. He spends the whole video in particular debunking almost every point you made.
We hear a lot about discrimination in America, but I have to wonder if it's even possible for the population of such a diverse country to be more discriminatory than the ones of very homogeneous countries. Perhaps at first glance but not on a closer look.
Because we Americans are told to be loudmouths and squeaky wheels :) . It's one thing we have to be proud of. Being discriminated against? Fuck you man, give me my rights. As it should be. Discrimination is still alive and well and you have to speak up about it. The magas are out there trying to take those rights so we all have to speak up.
IIRC the majority of foreigners in Japan are from other Asian countries and experience varying degrees of discrimination despite many of them being able to at least outwardly pass as Japanese. According to the latest info in Wikipedia, the top countries are China, Vietnam, Korea, Phillippines, and Brazil.
Brazil is an interesting one, because a significant number of "Brazilians" in Japan are supposedly descendants of Japanese who had immigrated to Brazil, but then came back. But even they experience degrees of discrimination despite being ethnically Japanese.
Anecdote, but my Japanese American friend (ethnically 100% Japanese but born and raised in the US, and pretty much culturally 90%+ American) went back to Japan. He too experienced discrimination.
I think they are well tolerated, but still you are always going to be American/French/Russian there. I've been to Japan and everyone was for the most part very nice, invited me to their homes, etc. However, it felt almost ceremonial (for lack of a better word). I was in Tokyo and surrounding area which I hear is very different from the more rural areas.
I’m no linguist or Japanese scholar, but it has long been interesting to me that the full word “gaikokujin” translates to “foreigner” (kanji for “outside,” “country,” “person”), while “gaijin” removes the “country” part, leaving something that could be read more fundamentally as simply “outsider”.
Nerds dramatically exaggerate the significance of this. Yes, if you just look at the kanji, "outsider" is possibly the more literal translation, but at the end of the day what matters is what is in people's heads when they use the word, and not the word itself.
"Gaijin" gets played up in weeby debates -- by people who are looking for reasons to be offended -- as some hugely significant cultural deviation, but it's honestly more like "foreigner" in practical usage. That word can be incredibly rude, or completely innocuous in different contexts. As can 外人. It's more accurate to say that both words mean "foreigner", but 外国人 is the PC version that renders you safe from criticism.
(The irony, of course, is that no matter where you go you'll hear plenty of borderline racist policy talk with the sweetest of language.)
That one is a transliteration/adoption, as it is literally just ハ-フ (pronounced as "ha-fu"). The actual word for a half (like in "half a minute") would be 半 (pronounced as "han")
my wife is half japanese,has citizenship and has been called a gaijin so yes. the guy was being an asshole so everyone doesn’t necessarily feel that way. but they kinda do
