Word of Power Levels of the Rising Sun

Japan taught me racism in the nicest possible way

Eddie Mendoza

Q: What’s the difference between a tourist and a racist?

A: Two weeks

- South African proverb

One of the more amusing misconceptions that white liberals cleave to is that ‘racism’ is a function of ignorance. Lack of exposure to other peoples leads to the proliferation of stereotypes based on distorted third-hand information, which then curdles into ‘hatred’, ‘bigotry’, ‘xenophobia’, and all the rest of the mean scary words. Thus the perennial liberal imperative “Educate yourself!” whenever they encounter someone making a general statement about a group, which of course is what is meant by ‘racism’. “Danes are taller than Italians.” “Oh my God you eugenicist that isn’t true I know an Italian man who’s six foot three so you’re just wrong, why do you want to genocide Italians?”

As with virtually everything liberals believe, the truth of the matter is the precise opposite. Stereotypes are the result of extended contact between groups, and amount in practice to the boiled down residue of the averaged experience of the members of one group with the representatives of another. Far from being misleading, they are almost invariably highly accurate as regards the means of group traits and behaviours. Stereotype accuracy is one of the most replicated findings in the social sciences, which stands in stark repudiation to the mandatory superstition that stereotypes are wrong. This is the real stereotype threat.

Stereotypes don’t necessarily have to involve ‘hate’, although it is true that they very often do. Hate tends to develop if the averaged experiences of one group with another are overwhelmingly negative. Since human groups in close proximity to one another have a tendency to violently jostle against one another, competing for territory and resources, neighbouring groups will tend to have both the most accurate stereotypes of one another, and the lowest opinions of one another. Familiarity breeds contempt, as they say. As they also say, good fences make good neighbours, which is why the borders of nation-states are an important Chesterton’s Fence. This is why when those good fences gets torn down, they tend to be re-erected, sometimes in a rather messy fashion.

Speaking of the heroic Romanian fence-builder of the Middle Ages, I recently had a chance to sit down for a very cozy chat with one of my other favourite Romanians, Alexandru Constantin , along with my favourite high school history teacher, Phisto Sobanii, on their podcast The Black Ibis Social Club. Getting some eyeballs on this episode is the main motivation for this short piece, since I unforgivably left it out of the big podcast update I put out a couple days ago.

S2E18: John Carter

We started the conversation talking about the Shiloh Hendrix affair, but ultimately got onto the subject of the Land of the Rising Sun. As it turns out, Alexandru and I have both spent quite some time living in Japan, an experience which contributed to both of us becoming incorrigible racists. This is a very common occurrence: almost anyone who spends a significant amount of time living in a very different country will start to draw conclusions about the differences between human groups. Your levels of epistemic closure need to be extraordinarily high to avoid this.

When I first moved to Japan I was, in most ways, an unreconstructed liberal. I took the axiomatic precept of the Boomer Truth Regime – that stereotypes are both incorrect and evil, because all people are basically the same – more or less for granted. This was very easy for me to do: I’d grown up in a remote, homogeneously Anglo part of rural Canada, and while I’d had some degree of exposure to different ethne at university, this was during a period in which Canada was making a real effort to filter immigrants for quality, and most of the non-white, second-generation immigrants I interacted with were heavily westernized. I wasn’t unaware of cultural differences, but I generally assumed that it went no deeper than that, and that inside every human being there was a liberal Anglo struggling to break free.

Japan of course is a completely alien culture. Among the many profound differences with the contemporary West is that the Japanese are, famously, intensely and unashamedly racist, or ‘xenophobic’ as it is usually framed. I was initially taken aback by how frank the Japanese could be about this, for instance by asking questions about me that were clearly in rooted in their stereotypical understanding of what young North American white boys were generally like. But there were two things about this experience that quickly made me stop and think. First, these questions were almost never hostile, but rather came from a place of genuine curiosity: they were simply trying to get to know me, which they would do by starting with a default mental picture and then testing to see if and how I conformed or departed from that picture so that they could update their model accordingly. Yet I had been assured my entire life, by every TV show, movie, and teacher, that stereotypes were always hateful! Second, a great many of their stereotypical assumptions about me were uncomfortably accurate. Yet I had been assured my entire life, by every TV show, movie, and teacher, that stereotypes were always wrong!

It didn’t take me long to get over this cognitive dissonance, which I resolved by the simple expedient of concluding that I’d been lied to by my culture, which is something that even then I’d realized happens a lot. This then gave me internal permission to observe the Japanese themselves, to notice the myriad differences in character and behaviour as compared to my own people, and to connect these individual level differences to their emergent societal consequences.

Learning racism in Japan is a humbling experience for a Westerner. I’ve travelled to a lot of different countries, and everywhere else I’ve either felt like my own people were basically on the same civilizational level (Europe), or at a noticeably higher level (South America). Japan is the only place I’ve ever been where I felt like an unlettered, uncouth, savage, stinky barbarian primitive one step removed from the cave – where it was obvious that my own people could learn quite a bit about how to comport themselves in a civilized fashion. Then again, at the same time, this taught me to value that very barbarism: it’s quite possible, as the Greek understood when regarding the Mede, to be overcivilized.

I could go on about this subject for hours, but I’ve got things I need to do today – like go to the gym and get some work done on other projects I’ve been engrossed in – and I wanted to get this out fast. In any case, I did go on about this subject for hours, with Alexandru and Phisto, so if you’d like to hear more about Japan you’ll just have to click through and listen.

Black Ibis, Maximiliano Moretto

Thank you as always for your attention, and as always, a huge thank you to my supporters. Please accept my apologies for two podcast update posts in a row! I will have something of greater substance soon. In the meantime, because Substack complains if I don’t include this: