>>3225883I don't mean to say the whole country is entirely racist, but there is a definite problem. It happens with Caucasian people and Middle-eastern people as well, anyone that doesn't look East Asian. They just avoid looking at or talking to foreigners a lot of the time, sometimes like imagining they aren't there and answering to the person with them that looks Japanese.
My friend has said that since he learned Japanese he hears people call him derogatory names while they are standing right next to him almost every time he went somewhere in public. Other time he heard people talk about how his wife shouldn't have married a black man, and that she must have been desperate or something. The word gaijin (foreign person) isn't exactly a racist word, but it can be used in racist context a lot, and it often is. But he has said he has been called multiple other things like "mud-person" or "dirt-human", describing his skin color as "shit" even standing right next to him, he says his wife gets called things just as bad sometimes.
But he said the thing that bothers him the most is, in all his time in Japan he either gets treated one of two ways. Gets blatantly ignored, or given super special treatment that draws excessive and unnecessary attention to the fact he looks different (including being called names and derogatory terms often). It probably has a lot to due with xenophobia in Japan, after all only 1.5% of people in Japan are foreigners.
