Latest Restriction on Foreigners' Rights in Japan

If you're reading this blog, chances are the government of Japan think you're a criminal.

As Japanese public opinion moves ever further to the populist, isolationist right, as Japan brashly alienates itself even further in Asia, as the bellowing black vans with their tin-pot thugs become noisier and more frequent, the official xenophobia continues at its accelerated, reactionary post-September 11 pace. Small past victories are being erased as the liberal voices huddle in corners, hoping only that the deluge will pass.

There's a real feeling of dark clouds descending over this country these days, a sense of an ugly impending storm. It's a bad time to be a minority anywhere in the world, but is it any wonder long-term expats in Japan feel uneasy, certainly not protected, and often end up hating the place? Life here would become all but impossible for a foreigner if ever a terrorist attack, or the long-overdue big earthquake, does take place.

My feeling is that nothing is changing here. Japan is just reverting back to past, never-lost insecurities. The corridors of power are filled with the same old dinosaurs. They articulate the same old insecurities felt deeply by most of the population. The young are learning from the old. The newer generation is more reactionary than the ones that came before. Japan is a nation that doesn't really trust anyone else. It's a nation with a profound identity crisis. And so it swings, like the stages of salaryman drunkenness, from belligerence to self-pity, politeness to ignorance, nice words to harsh acts, strong rhetoric to nervous laughter. All the while, it clings uneasily for protection, like the favoured child, to the coattails of a country it both admires and despises. It looks back at the past and feels defiant and aggrieved, a victim, at the very least of double standards. Not much has changed since the first black boats of foreign barbarians disturbed paradise all those years ago. Japan remains suspicious of the rest of the world, wondering how does it fit in and why it's not getting the respect it innately deserves.

And its expats, who once had, and even still have, so much love for the place, continue to feel barely tolerated, routinely degraded. Things stop becoming surprising in the Groundhog Day world of the Japanese cocoon, until you slap your cheeks to wake yourself and think.

I may be being overdramatic here. I may be being unnecessary gloomy. I may be blowing things well out of proportion. I may be unfairly generalizing. I may be blurring the borders between the personal and political. I may even be projecting. But whatever the case, the feelings behind this rant are honest and without agenda, and I make no apologies. I rarely write about politics anymore, but I feel like doing so today.

The real danger to the psyche of thinking long-term expats in Japan comes when they let these constant, steady drops of age-old distrust erode the rocks of their perspective, to the point where they succumb to biased hatred, disconnected cynicism, or watery shou ga nai.

via Cosmic Buddha

Posted by Setsunai at November 25, 2005 2:31 PM