Japan's blackface problem: the country's bizarre, troubled relationship with race

Baye McNeil, a black American writer who has lived in Japan for a decade, told me he found the blackface appalling — but didn't think it was worth wasting too much time on in a country he loves, despite suffering from routine racism.
"These singers were some old guys doing niche music and weren't that terribly popular, so it wasn't like they were in my face all the time," McNeil told me.
But McNeil lost his patience last month when members of a popular mainstream Japanese group posed for the promotional photo that appears at the top of this page. In it, the members of girl band Momoiro Clover Z grin in full blackface alongside old crooners Rats & Star, who have been performing in paint since the 1980s. The two bands were set to appear together on Fuji TV, a major network.

But as McNeil knows all too well, this episode was only part of a much larger problem with race in Japan, a problem that cannot be quickly fixed with a petition. To Americans, and indeed most people, it’s pretty obvious that blackface is extremely racist. How could the Japanese, as well-educated as they often are, tolerate this practice? The answer goes way beyond mere ignorance of blackface's ugly history, to a powerful national belief in Japan's ethnic purity that leaves the country incapable of dealing with its race issues.

Racism in Japan isn't just for TV. it happens across the country.  A student from Pakistan who's family lived in Japan was attending junior high school in Chiba until he could no longer take the overt racism directed towards him, not only from the schools students, but the teachers and the schools principle as well.  The cities Board of Education had little idea on how to address the issue or resolve the problems and the abuse the student faced.  They choose to sweep the whole incident under the rug rather than dealing with the appalling racism this young man faced.   Students have been classified with derision by teachers simply because they believed them to be from another Asian country.   As the article mentions especially China and Korea.

Japan's race problem

Japan's problem with racism is well-established. A 2005 report by a UN special rapporteur described "profound" racism in the country, much of it aimed at people from former Japanese colonial holdings in China and Korea.
In 2013, extremist nationalists led a series of anti-Korean protests; they threatened to flatten Tokyo’s Koreatown and build a gas chamber in its place. Japan is one of the few democracies without hate-speech laws, so little was done to stop this. Anti-racists staged counter-demos, and an extremist group has since been forced to pay compensation, but the national government has done stunningly little to prohibit racist hate speech, particularly given Japan's recent history of fascism.
"The blackface thing is emblematic of a larger problem of Japanese politics and civil society in which diversity is not recognized, or cultivated, or respected," said Kyle Cleveland, associate professor of sociology at Temple University’s Tokyo campus, who lectures on race.