Ive been to Japan a few years ago and they always felt very friendly and welcoming. They’re somewhat shy and awkward, but can’t say I had any negative experience.
If you want to feel bad, go to Italy, especially Rome. Many Italians are super racist, hate tourists and are not afraid to hide it.
You’re going to face it anywhere you go. Don’t let it hold you back. There’s always a slight feeling of unease around those that are different from yourself. But not everyone turns it into a justification to hate. I saw this video 5 years ago about a guy going to Japan trying to track down the location of a meme image from the early internet. They ended up heading off to a smaller town that wasn’t very touristy. Something that could go very badly. As some of the small towns like anywhere else can be very insular. But instead when they got there. Ended up spending the night chatting up an eager bar owner about Kurosawa and star wars.
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.
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.”
This, tbh. The less you expect your own government to cater to your preferences, the less you tend to judge foreigners by their nation’s foreign policy.
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.
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.
Japan is one of the most xenophobic countries on the planet. This is just one example.
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.
Despite having population crisis and financial loses, they are still committed to xenophobia. They are master of that.
Sure would be a shame if they also had an abysmally low birth rate which will result in their societal collapse.
Probably on my list of reasons why I don’t want to visit Japan
Ive been to Japan a few years ago and they always felt very friendly and welcoming. They’re somewhat shy and awkward, but can’t say I had any negative experience.
If you want to feel bad, go to Italy, especially Rome. Many Italians are super racist, hate tourists and are not afraid to hide it.
You’re going to face it anywhere you go. Don’t let it hold you back. There’s always a slight feeling of unease around those that are different from yourself. But not everyone turns it into a justification to hate. I saw this video 5 years ago about a guy going to Japan trying to track down the location of a meme image from the early internet. They ended up heading off to a smaller town that wasn’t very touristy. Something that could go very badly. As some of the small towns like anywhere else can be very insular. But instead when they got there. Ended up spending the night chatting up an eager bar owner about Kurosawa and star wars.
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.
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.”
This, tbh. The less you expect your own government to cater to your preferences, the less you tend to judge foreigners by their nation’s foreign policy.
They seem like lovely people. :>
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.
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.