The people defending this as ‘not racism’… way to miss the point. If this was some BBQ joint in Texas with a sign that says closed in Spanish but open in English you wouldn’t be posting these comments
Its called Xenophobia.
Xenophobia and racism are distinct forms of prejudice: xenophobia is the fear or hatred of foreigners, while racism is the belief in racial superiority and systemic oppression based on race. Though they overlap, they target people for different reasons.
I mean, it’s also racism. Those people are just stupid.
It literally isn’t racism though. You can disagree with it and think it should be banned, but there is no interpretation that it can realistically be called racism
I lived in Japan for a while. I’ve seen a couple places with a sign like this. In my experience every place like this is perfectly willing to have foreigners that speak Japanese. They simply don’t want to deal with the hassle of a language barrier
I should also note these places were always in touristy areas. If they don’t have a sign like that, they’ll end up with majority English speaking customers, because Japanese customers prefer places without rowdy tourists that can’t speak the local language. I did too. Going out for an after work beer, you want an entirely different atmosphere from tourists getting hammered
If an American moves to Europe and doesn’t attempt to learn the local language, then by a few months to a year in with zero effort people will say they’re in the wrong for not making an effort to integrate and expecting everyone to speak English for them.
Clearly “Americans expecting foreigners to speak English” is different from “Other countries expecting Americans to speak the local language” from a moral point of view. So why is Japan then lumped in with America as the “Local people must accept and accommodate foreigners who can’t communicate in the local language” bucket, when anywhere else it’s “If you’re traveling there and you didn’t even try learning the language, then you’re ignorant and entitled.”?
If an American moves to Europe and doesn’t attempt to learn the local language, then by a few months to a year in with zero effort people will say they’re in the wrong for not making an effort to integrate and expecting everyone to speak English for them.
My American cousin lived and worked in France as an engineer for several years. This is absolutely not true. He did make an effort to learn some French, but it wasn’t because of any pressure. He just wanted to.
The odds of a Texas BBQ joint not having any Spanish speaking employees is exceedingly small.
lol what? Have you ever been to Texas?I misread the comment 🙃
Have you‽ I was born in Texas. Lived here the last 24 years, and 32 of the last 34. Even asian restaurants here have kitchens full of Spanish speaking people.
A couple of thoughts:
Yes, I’ve heard before, even from people living in Japan, that they are quite xenophobic.
Now, why is this not condemned from the west ? (I know Chinese people and they do remember WW2)
As everything several reasons:
Japan has a great propaganda machine to make their culture look cool AF: anime/manga, the mythology around temples, samurais, ninjas…
The good parts of their culture, specially in contrast to the west: the extreme politeness, how clean and organized they are, civility/safety, super good and maintained public services such transport…
The “pretend WW2 didn’t happen”. They were absolute monsters on WW2, way beyond the nazis, but the combination of doing a 180 towards the west and the atomic bombs made it so the west was comfortable with looking the other way while Japan conveniently forgets his war crimes (for anyone unaware search for Nanjing, be warned is a hard read, but is important not to forget)
The “pacifist xenophobia”. When you go to japan their way of practicing xenophobia is quite passive, like, let’s be clear, you are loud and disgusting for them, but they will never tell you that, and you are probably never going to be in danger. At least as a tourist this is 100% like this, they might even just feel introverted rather than xenophobic. From what I’ve heard from people living there, it gets more clear when you live, but didn’t get any “I’m in danger” feeling from them, so I guess that low key discrimination is like that.
Now, not saying any of that makes it good, but I can understand why there is a different level of pushback than to the USA for example, where if you are brown and meet an angry cop or redneck (or both), you might end up dead.
I know for the fucking internet there is no such thing as grey, is either black or white, but I think the world is more nuanced than that.
BTW, for their work culture alone I would never live there, and while I like an anime or two, I’m not an otaku by any means. I did enjoy my vacation on Japan several years ago, but not more than the one on China or other Asian countries.
Due to their propaganda machine they have alot of soft power (and mainly cause of the “Cool Japan” thing like the post title references)
Google Lens tells me that the description is accurate. Even though i love japanese culture, they are racist as fuck, so i am not ever surprised.
On Okinawa, the red light area routinely used to refuse “chocolate men” for being “too strong”
Still racist
I mean, genuinely, how? It’s not saying you need to be Japanese to enter, just that you need to be able to read Japanese. IMO, learning the local language of a country you plan to visit is a basic courtesy that too many people don’t bother with.Okay, I take it back. I was thinking too much from the perspective of an American who’s been scolded for not spending enough time learning the language of places I visited. Thank you to the people who pointed out that what I said was ignorant without just piling on insults, I’ll try to be more thoughtful in the future.
“I’m tired of all these immigrants coming over here and not even being able to speak the language. This is [country] and we speak [language] here!”
That’s what you sound like.
“This is [Barcelona] and we speak [Catalan] here!”
Is this suddenly a different situation?
It’s their country. Aren’t they entitled to make rules?
If you tie the availability of housing to whatever language someone speaks instead of something tangible related to the respective person, it’s racism.
I used Google Lens to translate the bottom text. Do you think that if i would go in there using my phone to translate i would get a room for the night?
Ah, yes, everyone whould spend months to learn the language of every country they visit even though they might be there for only a few days.
How are you this dumb? I highly doubt you’ve ever been outside the country you were born in, and if you have you certainly didn’t follow your own thought here.
“No Blacks, No Dogs, No Irish”
Guess who’s reading this, lol
Anyway, this is blatantly
racismxenophobia and don’t give me the “yes but what if they don’t have anyone who speaks english or chinese?” That’s fair but in that case you put something that says “sorry we don’t have any english speaking staff” or tell me directly but anyway, it shouldn’t be that hard to order tbh, yeah i can’t talk but we are in 2026 with such translation tools, i can scan, look at what it says and then point at the various menu entries with my finger, to pay i can just look at the numbers lmaoEdit: corrected racism in to xenophobia
Important to note that English is the global lingua franca.
So tourists from Mexico, Nicaragua, Sweden, Adygea, Italy, Rojava, Tajikistan, Djibouti, and Mozambique etc also use English language while visiting most foreign places.
This is NOT an “American tourists litter too much” thing.
American tourists speak Chinese?
I do, right into a toilet ( term for throwing up while drunk)
Since when was “speaking Chinese” a euphemism for drunken hurling?
It’s a term my father in law uses
Sounds like your father-in-law is racist.
Are you American and embarrassed about it?
Your entire post screams so
No, not American. I just read a lot on newspapers about how another tourist got drunk and pissed at the local holy site and such.
I feel sympatethic to anti-tourism, but this sign is xenophobic rather than anti-tourist so wanted to mention that.
Also holy shit #7 from the tesseract list replied to me, I am saving this. So cool :3
If you dont have any staff who speak those languages I kinda get not wanting to provide service to people who only speak them, though it would probably be better to just say “no foreign language service available”
They are master of polite racism. They do it because they are xenophobic af.
I used a bus in Japan to go to Mount Fuji. Seats were assigned like on a plane and I was sitting next to some Japanese guy. I did my best to respect their customs and remained silent and kept to myself for the two hour ride. The inside of the bus was as silent as a church for the entire drive even though it was full.
On the way back at the end of the day, the bus had dropped a few passengers somewhere and stopped at a station for a toilet break. When we boarded again the driver went to see the passenger beside me and moved him to another seat on the bus to sit in a seat that had been freed up next to another Japanese person. It looks like the passenger went to see the driver to request the seat change during the break.
I’ve spent the rest of the ride wondering what I had done wrong. It’s really a fucked up feeling and it must be horrible to be experiencing this sort of passive aggressive racism on a daily basis in your own home.
It probably wasn’t anything wrong you had done wrong. From what I’ve been hearing from some family who do business in asia. As they explain it, Japan has had an economic whiplash from the 80s and a lot of those cultural and economic policies that gave them initial success were not sustainable long term. And since Japan is a VERY proud culture, they’ve found it easier to blame outsiders than their own miscalculations.
they’ve found it easier to blame outsiders than their own miscalculations.
Enough said, round the world
Yep, xenophobia went up globally following the financial crisis of '08.
Sure America was the big trigger, but no country did anything to guard themselves from the risk ongoing at the time - And in Europe mena immigrants was the bogeyman written about in the media…
Japan is one of the most xenophobic countries on the planet. This is just one example.
Sure would be a shame if they also had an abysmally low birth rate which will result in their societal collapse.
I’ll never prejudge an individual from Japan or any other nation.
I will however judge the polity as a whole.
Mfs still pretending like they never did any warcrimes.
Literally every country on the planet is xenophobic, people only make a big deal out of it when it’s a western or western-aligned country.
The entire idea of inclusivity, tolerance, and multiculturalism is primarily a western idea sprung from western humanist values and honestly only even taken seriously in secular democracies which tend to be aligned with the west.
And then people act like the west and west-aligned countries are so depraved for not perfectly living up to those values, when hardly any other nation even tries or has any desire to.
It’s honestly kind of amusing once you stop giving a shit.
This is such an ignorant take. Multiculturalism is actually the norm in most of the world throughout history, and the rare instances of isolationism are more often a result of geography than culture. The current xenophobic and nationalist state of the world is an aberration resulting from rampant and ongoing colonialism in the past few centuries. Many nations that exist today encompass regions that were far more multicultural and politically complex prior to their colonization by Europeans.
As for the West, our current secular humanist values are the result of the enlightenment period in which European colonizers appropriated and synthesized the ideas of colonized peoples around the world. The reason we don’t live up to them is because we stubbornly refuse to reckon with our colonialist past and present, such that we just go on living with the contradiction to the detriment of the world and ourselves.
It’s honestly kind of amusing once you stop giving a shit.
Not caring doesn’t make you cool, it just makes you another cynical asshole among many. IMO the world could do with less cynical assholes.
It’s hard not to be cynical in this world.
And you think everyone before western colonization was enlightened and multicultural? Sure their political regions were more complex, but in-groups and out-groups have existed in every region since at least the dawn of civilization, and those in-groups were typically defined by a range of factors including but not limited to culture, language, ancestry (and by extension, ethnicity), and religion.
You must have been sleeping through World History class if you think everything was kumbaya all around the world until the Europeans showed up…
edit to add:
I’m sure we all want the world to be such that everyone can just get along and coexist with each other, but that’s simply not the world we live in. And seeking simple solutions to complex problems is never helpful. Pretending everything would be perfect if it weren’t for those pesky Europeans is reductive. You can scream “blame white people” till you’re blue in the face, but ultimately you’re just playing into the same racialized dichotomy that you feign to be criticizing.
After all, it was always just a sliver of white people even within European societies which were the dominate classes there, who oppressed everyone they could, including the rest of the white people they shared a nationality with. The vast majority have always been disenfranchised, just like everyone else. And everyone else had their aristocracies too. Let’s not pretend that’s an exclusively European thing.
I said that multiculturalism was the norm, not that everyone was holding hands and singing kumbaya. I also am not saying that colonialism is new or unique to Europeans, it just so happens that European nations are the most recent colonial powers and we happen to be living in the historical period immediately following their rise to hegemony. Obviously conflict and colonialism existed prior to European colonization, but it has never before had the global reach and dominance that European nations achieved. The fact remains that prior to colonization by Europeans, many regions around the world were more diverse and politically complex (i.e. multiple cultural, religious, and organizational paradigms existed parallel to and in conversation with one another). Though there was conflict, it was more local and restrained with different groups finding ways to coexist even if the relationship was tenuous. It’s impossible to deny the profound impact of Europe’s global conquest on the political environment in which we all currently live.
I don’t know. I told people in North Iraq that I grew up in Turkey, and despite my country spending better part of the 20th and 21st century massacring and displacing their population, these people were saying shit like “yeah government is bad, but the people are good.”
They seem like lovely people. :>
and yet japan is still viewed as an utopia by reddit weebs, despite japan being really racist
I went there recently. The organization and efficiency are truly astounding. I felt like the best parts of Japan and the best parts of the US fused together could make a utopia. But it’s never gonna happen because those best parts are direct results of the cultural mindset that leads to each one’s dark ends as well. They’re both sides of their respective coins, unfortunately…
I felt like the best parts of Japan and the best parts of the US fused together could make a utopia
Big Hero 6 moment
The US has ‘best parts’? Really can’t imagine anything good about them lol
I know, right? But my trip to Japan made me realize a few, surprisingly massive, key factors that differentiate the US from them are:
- Publicly available drinking water: while the US’s added fluoride is certainly contested by various groups, readily available drinking water is at least present almost everywhere. It is hard to find potable water in Europe, and Japan has zero drinking fountains. There are no water bottle refill stations. They just don’t exist at all there. It’s really kind of crazy given their unbelievably intense, sauna-like weather outdoors for the entirety of their sweltering summers (the humidity made it feel like 110° F in July; you burst into sweat after just a few minutes outside, literally, and many people use portable, electric fans, etc.), but they just expect you to be be self-sufficient carrying with your own water or to just tough it out until you get home or whatever.
- Trash cans while out and about: believe it or not, garbage is actually very difficult to dispose of in Japan, to the point of my late sister who had lived there for years advising us to take advantage of konbinis (convenience stores) to dump your trash, because you could literally go to multiple entire stores and not see a single trash can anywhere. You basically otherwise have to hold it with you until you get home.
- Americans with Disabilities Act: I was shocked to see how only some of Japan’s numerous, famous labyrinths of subways have escalators or elevators; some had literally none, so if you’re wheelchair-/scooter-bound or even on crutches, you just can’t ride trains at all. Additionally, I saw a business that had perhaps 2 dozen workers confined to an insanely tight room for their daily work; there were no cubicles at that place. The computer desks per worker literally touched each other, so you could stretch your arms sideways and you’d already hit your coworkers in the face. I wish I could say I was exaggerating but that kind of crammed, sardine can-level packing was so disgusting and demeaning to the hard workers there that I felt just a little more grateful to be in the US, where that kind of treatment towards employees, who couldn’t even walk 2 feet without bumping into a colleague’s chair, would absolutely not fly with the civil rights lawyers here.
Despite all the amazing things in Japan, from their higher-quality food to the blazing-fast Shinkansen trains and incredibly efficient, bidet-equipped Toto sink toilets, etc., I found just some various aspects of daily life there (especially the lack of easily discoverable water in the raging summer heat) to be quite eye-opening in a reverse way just as much. I do not think I could easily move and live there, even if they all suddenly spoke English.
I love their trains, the food is good, it’s a beautiful country.
But also, holy shit, Japan has just never reckoned with its imperial past in the slightest.
If you ever see those tourism promotion photos of mt. Fuji with a pagoda in the foreground, that pagoda was built in the 50s, around the end of the US occupation, to commemorate soldiers who fought in essentially every war that imperial Japan got itself into. It’s very clear political statement.
And I learned this, upon climbing that damn mountain, and reading the plaque in front of the pagoda, only to learn that it was a monument to imperialism the whole time
Police aren’t likely to kill you over there. Just harass you if you’re clubbing with their women.
But they can force confession out of you. Japan has one of the most conviction rates in the world…
Probably not worth visiting them anyways…
Yeah thanks for filtering yourself out of places I would like to give my business to.
Isn’t it xenophobia more than racism?
Japan has a very homogeneous population, so xenophobia and racism are quasi indistinguishable.
Japan, where racism doesn’t usually get the same criticism it does elsewhere for whatever reason…
Japan is too far away and too aligned with the west to receive criticism for racism
I’m not sure being aligned with the west means much while people are extremely critical in and outside western countries about racism.
Most westerners don’t care about racism beyond its utility to attack something they already don’t like. Same with homophobia. How much “tactical homophobia” did we just see against Lindsey Graham by people who probably think they’re allies because they don’t like a lot of people who are hostile to LGBT+?
Have you been anywhere? Racism is just a full on aspect of most places I’ve been west or not. Like anyone Asian whatsoever is just mchina or anyone white whatsoever from anywhere is mzungu and both get treated differently than wafrika. Same to locals, if you’re dealing with a hiring manager and you are in his tribe you’ll likely get the job, if you’re a different ethnicity then probably not.
They’re hateful, but they’re cute.
Japan cast cat girl, it was super effective. All knowledge of atrocities was erased from western nations.
