White people don’t have a monopoly on racism

This piece titled “Once a ‘gaijin,’ always a ‘gaijin’” makes for an interesting read. I can just see the bitterness dripping off my computer screen, and equating gaijin to the n-word is overdoing it, but he does make some good points.

Technically, 外人 (gaijin) just means “outsider.” Those 2 characters literally spell out “outside person.” So in a way, it really does just mean “foreigner.” Here in the U.S., we might talk about “foreigners,” “foreign countries,” or “foreign languages” (except for the PC way in which my high school had the “world languages” department) and it’s generally not considered discriminatory.

The problem with gaijin arises in its actual usage. It’s bothered me since I was a small child. I’ve definitely had the occasion to cringe when Japanese people would blanketly refer to the Americans as gaijin while here in the United States. It’s just patently ethnocentric to call everyone else a “foreigner” while you are in their country.

Something the “Once a ‘gaijin,’ always a ‘gaijin’” column also touches on is this binary view of the world. When my Japanese relatives would ask me questions about my life in the U.S., they would often ask me about what gaijin are like, as if I was the ambassador in this amorphous non-Japan world and I could shed light on how “they” (everybody not Japanese) are different from “us” (Japanese). I know that what they were really asking me was what Americans are like and not what, say, French people or Russian people are like, but they’re all gaijin anyway, right? (Similarly, my grandmother referred to the U.S. as 向こうの国(the country over there)).

Of course in most any case, they don’t “mean anything by it.” Gaijin isn’t used as an insult so much as a casual way to refer to people who are “not Japanese.” But this casual, implicit racism is perhaps even more dangerous, as it means its usage is more widespread and any criticisms to it can be easily dismissed.

I wonder what exactly my own status is in Japan. As I’ve been alerting family to my new U.S. citizenship, I’ve jokingly been saying that I’ll now be a gaijin next time I go to Japan. Of course, I’ve essentially been one this whole time. Or does the fact that I can look and talk Japanese and I’m familiar with the country enough mean that I can still pass as a nihonjin(Japanese)?

Well, if the state of Japanese-Brazilians that have returned to Japan is any indication (or is it?), it doesn’t look so good for me. But that’s a separate post.