[clavicat]

That's kind of ironic. Funnily enough, one respect in which Japan is less xenophobic than Germany is the total absence of terrorists and serial killers that target immigrants or any incidences of mob violence like the 2018 Chemnitz riots. I'm sure you've heard of the NSU-Mordserie—or have you?

>In December 2018, five German police officers were suspended from their posts after Seda Basay-Yildiz, a Turkish-German lawyer who had defended the family of one of the victims of the NSU, was faxed a death threat against her two-year-old daughter. The fax was signed "NSU 2.0". An investigation concluded that, just before the fax was sent, a Frankfurt police computer had accessed a confidential database to obtain Basay-Yildiz's address. The phones of the police officers who were on duty at the moment were confiscated, and it was found that many were exchanging racist and far-right messages in a group chat, and posting pictures of Hitler and swastikas.

It seems a little crazy to me that you were perfectly willing to live and work in a country where agents of the state fax death threats to two-year olds in the name of a Nazi terrorist group, but a guy standing up when you enter a train is so xenophobic that even living in the country, like millions of foreigners happily do, is just unthinkable. Know what I'm saying?

There are foreigners who have good reason to avoid Japan, namely indentured workers from southeast Asia. Something tells me that a guy who used to work in Germany and posts on Hacker News is not going to suffer the same problems that they do.

[blinzy]

I mean, Germany is not void of issues, or the UK, where I currently reside, or any other country really...

But comparing my example with the NSU makes no sense to me, the NSU is comparable with Aum Shinrikyo (the Japanese cult that caused the sarin attack back in the 90s) in the sense that they both have/had negligible memberships compared to the countries population, i.e., a few hundreds or couple thousands members, so I don't think in either case you can generalise the behaviour of German or Japanese citizens from the existence of 100 or 1000 pieces of shit human beings.

Japan's immigration percentage is also massively different (~2%) from that of Germany, Spain, UK, or USA (each ~15%) and I'm sure that has an impact on the attitude towards foreigners too.

I completely agree though that the issues I may run into in Japan are probably going to be different and possibly less severe than those that eastern/southeastern asian people or dark-skinned people may face.

[clavicat]

People invoke Aum Shinrikyō all the time to draw conclusions about the condition of Japan at the time and the wider sociological forces that led to its rise. People invoke the existence of the tiniest, most fringe right-wing groups to draw conclusions about Japanese attitudes as well.

But I'm not even claiming the NSU, or even its allies in the state apparatus, are representative of the attitude of the average German, which are of course very liberal by historical standards—what I'm saying is that despite Germany being a country where the police forces are penetrated by Nazis operating in coordination with murderous terrorists and where right-wing groups were able to mobilize a riot with thousands of participants in Chemnitz alone, none of that stops millions of immigrants from leading peaceful, happy lives in Germany, despite the real, even violent, dangers that some of them face.

In comparison, a stranger not wanting to sit next to you on a train sounds like a very trivial problem—a very first-world problem. And yet, it's enough to cause you to dismiss Japan entirely as some inhospitably xenophobic society, even though there are immigrant communities in the countries that you've lived in who can complain about much worse. I'm sure you've seen the videos of people screaming racist abuse at passengers on the Tube—would it be fair to conclude that Britain is so hostile to immigrants that I shouldn't even consider living or working there?

My contention is simply that the experiences you've described are hardly adequate to demonstrate that Japan is uniquely or exceptionally xenophobic, and it's bizarre to conclude from that alone that it would be difficult to establish a happy life there.

[blinzy]

Again my point with Aum is that, like NSU, they're microscopic in terms of percentage of population (NSU membership being 0.0002% of Germany, Aum being 0.001% of Japan) so it's missing the point of discussing behaviours that may encompass a more substantial percentage of each society.

The bar example is way worse than the train example, to the point I already mentioned that said behaviour is illegal in the European countries I've lived in; and I only described two examples as I didn't feel like writing a whole essay on the good and bad, but those certainly weren't the only issues we faced (nothing as severe as death threats or whatever, but enough to make me not want to settle there).

Anyway, I'm pausing this here; hopefully you're not arguing on bad faith, but it's clear this conversation isn't going anywhere productive anymore...