this post was submitted on 18 Nov 2024
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Wow, chill out! I was very careful to use the word more. I didn’t say other countries are ethnically homogenous in the absolute sense, just relative to the US. Take Japan for example. Yes, there are quite a lot of ethnic minorities in Japan (both indigenous and foreign) however well over 90% of the country identifies only as Japanese and nothing else. This is a very different picture from the US.
You can see a similar story many other countries but not all. India, for example, has many ethnic groups which are strongly distinguished by language, religion, and culture. It’s also the case that ethnicity plays a major role in the politics of India and that role has been increasing of late, not diminishing.
“I just got back from touring Ireland. It’s wild over there. It just goes to show that without blacks, Jews, or Mexicans, people will improvise!”
-Jimmie Walker
Japan is a major exception to the general trend though. They are one of the only western democracies that barely accept any migrants.
And even then, Japan has a significant population of what used to be Korean Slaves during the war, to someone in the US, they might “look the same” but these people are heavily discriminated against, a lot of them are statless and refused citizenship because of their korean heritage, even if they lived in Japan for 80+ years.
And that’s ignoring the forced homogenisation in the late 19th and early 20th centuries during the Meijing Restoration. Where all the minor ethnic groups in Japan were forcibly “mixed in” and their culture was destroyed and replaced with the majority group’s culture to create an ethnostate.
Well you also have to take into account that Japan has elected a right wing government nearly consistently since the end of the war thanks to concerted government/American suppression of the left since the end of the war.