Some Thoughts on Racial/Ethnic Hatred Sparked by Expatriates in Japan

Why do some American expatriates in Japan hate the Japanese so much?

If you're not familiar with this hate... it's some of the most virulent hatred I've ever seen in my life. I've witnessed some of it personally, as a bystander, and indirectly heard of much more.

This isn't all expatriates, of course. For example, my mother was an expatriate for a period of time, and she certainly wasn't like that. She has a lot of critical things to say about Japanese culture, but in a balanced way, in much the same proportion as she would criticize any other culture, including her own.

The most vocal expatriates are young white men on stints teaching English, and it's this group that also has the most evil reputation. But other expatriates types also exhibit this hatred sometimes.

Honestly, people like this are one reason I've never seriously considered going to Japan for any length of time longer than a couple weeks. A long time ago, when I was having a rocky time in college, my parents pressured me psychologically into applying for the JET program. I sabotaged my own application so that I could tell them honestly that I was denied. As someone who is not fluent in Japanese, and doesn't really belong to any community in Japan, I knew I would have to be in close contact with this type of expatriate, and I could not stomach the thought of that.

This hatred seems especially disturbing to me because I understand where it comes from. I've been treated badly by Japanese. The first time I was aware of race, and being racially different, was in Japanese kindergarten. In general, Japanese are not particularly friendly to me. To Japanese, I don't look Japanese, I don't dress Japanese, I don't even walk like a Japanese, and in Tokyo, I'm treated with distant politeness or ignored as if I don't exist. My own father sometimes casually insults my identity and accuses me of not being Japanese enough.

As a result, I often don't like Japanese. I enjoy having casual conversations with Japanese tourists in other countries about stuff like food, but I don't purposefully seek them out or go looking for deeper friendships with them. There are some exceptions, like my roommate in Mexico that I felt very close to. He was considering immigrating permanently to Mexico, and had different ideas about identity than the vast majority of Japanese.

But I don't hate Japanese. Based on my personal history I have some hang-ups and neuroticisms about Japanese that I wish I didn't have, but I do, so I compensate in practical ways. Otherwise, I just think of Japanese as human beings... flawed, complicated human beings, like all other groups of human beings.

I'm not going to provide lists and examples of bad expat behavior. You're either familiar with it or you're not, and if you're not, then you're lucky. But here's the basic arc:

Stage 1: I love Japan. Japan is so cool. It's so different over here. I can't wait to meet some samurai and geisha. I'm fulfilling my lifelong dream. This is going to be awesome.
Stage 2: Japan isn't what I thought, but it's still really cool. All these Japanese girls are having sex with me just because I'm an American. Sometimes I get the feeling people are looking down on me. Oh well, if I just smile a lot and speak Japanese better, I'm sure they'll accept me.
Stage 3: Culture shock, aching loneliness and deep depression
Stage 4: Retreating and retrenching in a safe womb-like environment with other expats
Stage 5: F%#@ these racist, xenophobic Japanese. Japanese women are manipulative stuck-up $%!@s. I wish we'd bombed ALL of Japan. I'm rude to them all the time now so I can get back at them for treating me like they do. And I can't wait to get home.
Stage 6: Now that I'm home, the bad memories of Japan are fading a bit, thank goodness. I have returned a much wiser person. I know all the weak spots of the Japanese now. In fact, I'm an expert on Asian culture. I explained this to an Asian-American once but they violently disagreed with me. Oh well, they're not a real Asian anyway.
(Alternate Stage: Stay in Japan, let hatred die down to a bilious rumbling with occasional explosions.  Post regularly on f*ckedgaijin.com).

Sexuality and misogyny and the legacy of imperialism are big parts of all of this. Imagine the expat arc as a dysfunctional romance, with Japan as the woman, and you could encapsulate most of those stages in the immortal words of Marion Barry: "Bitch set me up!"

The sex/imperialism is also an angle that's been covered by theorists quite extensively. I'd like to approach the issue from another angle, a more comparative and personal one, based on my experiences with born citizens and immigrants as well as expatriates.

Have I ever encountered the same level of hatred toward Americans? No, but I came close, once in Mexico, and once in the U.S.

When I was in Mexico, I met a lot of people who criticized the U.S. I largely agreed with the criticisms, and they were stated in a fair way. In fact, Mexican leftists who had problems with U.S. politics were always MORE charitable than U.S. leftists. They would often talk about aspects of the U.S. that they admired, such as our history of relatively fair elections. I never saw this criticism spill over into hate, though.

I also met a lot of Mexicans who were treated very badly in the U.S. and still didn't develop hatred. For example, I met a taxi driver in Guadalajara who told me that he risked his life to cross the desert to find work in Dallas, but the people there were so racist and unfriendly, it took him only three weeks to decide to go right back to Guadalajara. Maybe they're nicer in other parts of the U.S., he noted optimistically, though he had no further plans to ever leave Mexico again. Another Mexican I met spent six years in prison in Florida for a crime he claimed he didn't commit, and he still had a lot of good things to say about the U.S.

And I don't think that people leashed any hatred simply because they didn't want to offend me, an American tourist. If I was white, I might think that. But Mexicans often find it hard to believe I'm an American, even after I state it quite clearly. I don't "look American". It's a reaction I encounter frequently anywhere outside the U.S., and I've developed a pretty thick skin about it.

Anyway, one night while I was traveling in Mexico by myself, I ended up in a crowded taxicab going to a nightclub. Since we had to go a long way on a dirt road, and most of my fellow taxi goers had already had a few drinks, the conversation was heated and lively. There were a couple Mexicans and an Austrian tourist. The Austrian tourist, on hearing I was American, launched into a diatribe against American cultural imperialism. We made crappy movies, and crappy music, and crappy food, our American crap was drowning out everyone else's culture, all our entertainment was vulgar, and so on.

I got angry. I was prepared to hear this sort of thing from a Mexican, but not from an Austrian. Most Europeans have enough money and power to consume their own crap if they want; they happen to CHOOSE to consume ours. I tried to argue back, but he kept interrupting me. So I dropped the bomb. "Well what's your native way of having fun on the weekend in Austria? Burning Jews?" The Mexicans all gasped. The Austrian visibly wilted, and said in a small voice, "that was a long time ago". The conversation shifted. We'd put on a good show for the Mexicans, though: they looked like they were really enjoying the argument from the sidelines.

To this day I feel a little bad for cutting down the Austrian like that. But only a little.

Although I said I was prepared to hear this kind of diatribe from a Mexican, I never did. My overall impression was that Mexicans were rather light on the criticism when it came to the U.S. For every thing they hated, they knew something that they loved. Sadness, disappointment, anxiety, yes; hatred, no.

When I lived in Miami, I worked in a series of restaurants and bars. There was an informal but very powerful racial/ethnic hierarchy pretty much everywhere I worked in the service industry. White Anglos, upper-class Cuban-Americans and diverse upper-class immigrants/expatriates (usually European) were at the top. They were the owners and managers. The middle was composed of more Cuban-Americans and Anglos. Halfway between the middle and bottom were native African-Americans and whiter-looking Latinos. On the very bottom, recently arrived Carribean black people (Haitian, Jamaican) and other Latinos (such as Central Americans). Your place in the hierarchy was determined by 1) money 2) degree of whiteness 3) degree of blackness 4) kind of English spoken 5) kind of Spanish spoken 6) citizenship and documentation status. Since Miami is such a diverse and chaotic environment, new arrivals often weren't quite sure where they fit in the hierarchy. I know I was never sure, myself.

One day, I was outside my restaurant having a smoke break with the Jamaican janitor/busser. We struck up a conversation that quickly took a disturbing turn. She started on a rant about how the American black people were all thieves, liars, drug abusers, could not be trusted, made her people look bad, and so on. I just told her I didn't think that was a fair thing to say, but I didn't want to get in an argument with her. I felt sorry for her because she was facing a horrendous level of racism from the manager, a white Frenchman who was racist against everyone who worked there, but picked on her the most.

I wondered later, why did she hate African-Americans so much? Why not hate white people or white Europeans? After all, the manager truly was an evil worm of a person (full story of his evilness here).

One reason is that it's not very common to hate upwards. It's more common to fear the people who have power over you. If you can't separate from those people (people with separatist ideologies can hate in any direction), you have to learn how to get along with them.  And you don't have the energy to spare for hate.

When I was dealing with racist abuse in school in the U.S., I felt the same way. I didn't have time to hate the people who abused me. All my emotional energy was wrapped up in trying to answer two questions: "Why are they doing this to me?" and "How can I make them stop?" In order to try and stop the abuse I had to think like my abusers, I had to put myself in their shoes, I had to imagine how they saw me, I had to imagine how they would react if I did certain things as opposed to doing other things.

I could not afford to hate them.

I think it's much more common to hate downwards. And a subset of hating downwards is hating sideways. My Jamaican coworker was financially on a lower level of the hierarchy than African-Americans, but she also realized she was on a higher level when it came to stereotypes of morality and culture. That is, she observed that there were more negative sentiments against African-Americans than there were against Jamaicans. So hating African-Americans was a way to claim a higher position in the hierarchy, a way to claim that no, she was not on the same level or lower, she was really on a higher level.

Whenever someone is insecure about their position in a hierarchy, a way to stabilize your position is 1) find someone who is on the same level or slightly lower 2) hate them.

I think this works in the area of class, as well. Often, the people who say they hate the poor the most are the people who have escaped poverty, or who are lower-middle-class and almost in poverty. Really rich people rarely hate the poor. They can ignore them and/or exploit them without going through the bother of hating them.

An expatriate in Japan, once they hit the culture shock stage, becomes incredibly confused about their place in the hierarchy. This confusion is compounded by the fact that they don't even understand, on a visceral level, that the hierarchy even exists. The ideal of egalitarianism is very strong in the U.S. When that egalitarianism actually works, I love it. It's what makes my country great. But it's an ideal, not a reality. If you believe it's already a reality, you become blind to the existence of totally real hierarchies lying underneath the mask of egalitarianism.

People from countries with more formalized race, caste and/or class systems have more experience, more cynicism and more ability to notice parallel structures in foreign countries. They'll have a more practical attitude. "OK, I've landed. Where am I? Near the bottom... darn. Can I work my way up? Oh, it looks like this system is really rigid. Only a few rungs? What about my kids? Well, I'll adjust my expectations and see if it's worth the trade-off."

The Japan-hating expatriate has huge privilege from being some combination of white, American and male. Japanese give them a lot of room. When they act badly, Japanese will simply ignore it. The expatriate senses weakness. "They let me get away with bad behavior - that means I am better and stronger than them - I hate them because I am better than them - I am better than them because I hate them." But the expatriate also starts to understand that the Japanese don't really need them. Japan is pretty much the richest non-white country in the world when it comes to economic power and median living standards. The expatriate may start penning angry rants about Japan, but there is nothing they can really do to get any kind of meaningful revenge in a collective sense. Though they can be very cruel to individual Japanese, and then later, to Asian-Americans.

They realize the sheer uselessness of their hate, and it makes them hate even more.

I wish I had a better note on which to end this piece!