The Indian Express (Delhi Edition)
Racial profiling in Japan is prevalent but unseen, some residents say
IT’S NOT that there is anything bad about your hair, the police officer politely explained to the young Black man as commuters streamed past in Tokyo Station. It’s just that, based on his experience, people with dreadlocks weremorelikelytopossessdrugs.
Alonzo Omotegawa’s video of his 2021 stop and search led to debates about racial profiling in Japan and an internal review by the police. For him, though, it was part of a perennial problem that began when he was first questioned as a 13-year-old.
“In their mind, they’re just doingtheirjob,”saidomotegawa,28, an English teacher who is halfjapanese and half-bahamian, born and raised in Japan.
“I’m like as Japanese as it comes, just a bit tan,” he added. “Not every Black person is going to have drugs.”
Racial profiling is emerging as a flashpoint in Japan as increasing numbers of migrant workers, foreign residents and mixed-race Japanese change the country’s traditionally homogenous society and test deep-seated suspicion toward outsiders.
With one of the world’s oldest populations and a stubbornly low birthrate, Japan has been forced to rethink its restrictive immigration policies. And as record numbers of migrant workers arrive in the country, many of the people tidying up hotel rooms, working the register at convenience stores or flipping burgers are from places like Vietnam, Indonesia or Sri Lanka.
But Japan’s foreign-born residents say social attitudes toward them have been slow to adjust. In January, three of them sued the Japanese government and the local governments in Tokyo and Aichi, a nearby prefecture, over the conduct of their police forces.
It’s the first legal case in Japan to argue that officers routinely rely on racial profiling in policing, a systemic issue that the plaintiffs and experts say the Japanese public is largely oblivious to.
Each of the three plaintiffs — one naturalized citizen and two longtime residents — said they hadbeenstoppedforquestioning multiple times a year. One of them, a Pacific Islander living in Japan for more than two decades, said that he’d been questioned 70 to 100 times by the police.
Motokitaniguchi,lawyerrepresenting the plaintiffs, said that perceptions in Japan had been slow to catch up to a reality that the country was already living.
“Many Japanese are still in the illusionthatwearesuchahomogenous country, that we shouldn’t takeimmigrantsbecausetheywill break society,” he said.
His clients’ experiences conflict with what Japan’s National Police Agency said it found in 2021, after Omotegawa’s video caused enough of a stir that the US Embassy in Tokyo issued an alert warning Americans of racial profiling. The year before, the police said, there had been just six cases of racial profiling in a country with about three million foreign residents. It declined to comment on the lawsuit and said that it did not have more recent statistics.
The lawsuit, which seeks monetary damages of about $22,000 for each plaintiff and a court ruling confirming that racially discriminatory police questioning was against Japanese law, said that some internal police guidelines explicitly encourage profiling.