| Wo bu shi bu-bu-hao da-bizi waguoren...
( I'm not THAT much of a big-nosed barbarian! )
Anyway, I think it's obvious to anybody with any experiance that most places and cultures are, to greater or lesser degrees, racist. A lot of it has to do with how racially-integrated the mainstream culture is. In the US, we still have racism; but mainstream US culture is very multiracial, so our home-grown racism tends to be much more subtle, understated, and less frequently articulated. China has 97 ( official ) Ethnicities, but the population is 90%-plus Han, and other ethnic groups are generally seen as being far, far removed from the Han mainstream. Non-Chinese are seen as being pregressively less civilized, with Gwailuo ( Westerners ) and Nyegwei ( Black Animals ) being about as far down the "civilizational food-chain" as one can get.
Japan is even more mono-ethnic, with the very small population of Ainu on the northern islands being their only home-grown minority population. As a result, their attitudes are tend to be even more pronounced than the Chinese; Koreans get it the worst by FAR. The one curious gap in such things seems to be the Japanese attitude towards Americans...possibly as a result of having two cities vaporized, the Japanese seem to have a much different attitude towards Americans than towards other Gaijin, although the older generation still doesn't think much of us. Other groups, however, are subject to all matter of abuse, ESPECIALLY foreign women. Beatings and rapes are quite common, and the Yakuza crime-gangs have an extremely strong and overt racist element.
This report really is a case of "Thank you, Captain Obvious!" |