alt Hacker NewsIt has nothing to do with race. It’s about keeping our foreign cultural and social norms. If you showed me a community of Bangladeshis who behaved exactly like Japanese people but weren’t accepted, then you’d have a point. But that’s not the case.
All of your handwaving is irrelevant to a Japanese person in 2026. What matters is that democratic societies are entitled to use the levers of government to create the kind of society they want to live in. I visit Japan regularly, and the last time I went with my kids it was very apparent that my rowdy Bangladeshi-American kids were inconveniencing people. In a country where I see people walk blocks out of the way to cross at a crosswalk, instead of crossing in the middle of the street, I can understand and accept our permanent presence there would be unwelcome. Japanese people shouldn’t have to welcome American or Bangladeshi or any other foreign social and cultural norms into their community.
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As it turns out, I'm also of a very similar background to your kids, a South Asian American that is, and one who would be accepted in Japan just fine (I already have highly educated and well off relatives living there permanently). Frankly, I have to say, you sound like a typical self-hating (if you're also desi) brown person who is thoroughly convinced of his/her own ethnic/racial inferiority and looking up to the great Japanese people; you probably have a similar perception of America/Canada and western Europe. I would hate to have my parents think of my race/culture that way (if only your kids are desi but not you).
Also, what exactly are you asking me to do here? See people rejected by the enactment of a law that just recently passed and in all likelihood is just barely beginning to impact people's lives? Are you actually thinking before writing your comments? You seem fine as long as you're allowed to visit and ogle at their society, but oh no, how can we/those brown people from the same place/background as me or my kids be allowed on this holy land permanently when we/they don't know how to behave!? To be honest, I don't even disagree that a lot of people of South Asian origin are hard to get along with, I struggle sometimes myself, but I would never think that I had any right to think of myself as their better because the circumstances of my life led me to be richer or more "cultured" than them. I believe this is what some circles consider a "colonized" mindset, but funny thing is your mind is colonized by the western perception of glorious Japan and you're not even remotely Japanese.
Funny you call my questions handwaving but attempt no answer to them and just declare "it has nothing to do with race." I expected as much. It's all about 2026 now ("it's CURRENT YEAR don't ya know?!"), not even recent history matters nor future contingents. This is not even an argument, put the keyboard down man, you're drunk.
If you showed me a community of Bangladeshis who behaved exactly like Japanese people but weren’t accepted
Koreans fit that bill; there's a lot of ethnically Korean people whose families have been in Japan multiple generations (not just assimilated as first-gen immigrants) but there's still significant social prejudice against them; life people of Chinese/Vietnamese/Thai descent who've grown up in Japan as opposed to being recent arrivals. If you haunt Japanese nationalist online communities you can see this on a daily basis.