Quote Originally Posted by Steve Ototo View Post
Do not forget that all human people have the habit of excluding people who look different from them. This has been a primitive method of gathering tribes together. Now that we are civilized, many thousands of years after tribalism, we still struggle to understand our tendencies.
This is my point. Tribalism based on looks is quite primitive and, although natural to our ancestors, shouldn't be accepted in today's world.
It is only recently that the United States has struggled to become free for all people.
This is why we Europeans see the US as late by a few decades socially speaking. Even slavery (an relatively old issue) was made illegal almost 100 years earlier in Britain or France than in the US.
In Japan of 100 years ago, gaijin made no sense. They had no koseki, and no real names - just katakana noises - and no real language, just grunting (English). How were Japanese people to understand them? Were they to be considered REAL PEOPLE? So, they were gaijin.
So the Japanese entered the antique era of intercultural relations in the 20th century. Their way of calling all foreigners "gaijin" remind me of the Ancient Greek way of calling all non-Greek speakers "barbarians" (which meant something like "gaijin" at the time, and only acquired a strongly negative connotation later).
As Japan struggles with post-tribal thinking, just like the rest of the world, there is still the habit of describing people as Us or Them. I do not see it as a defect in Japanese character - just a common human struggle.
Actually when we look back at history it is not so surprising that the Japanese are a few thousands years backyard in the state of social development. The earliest Japanese civilisation (i.e. settled, agricultural society) only dates from the age of the Roman Empire. All of Europe had agricultural societies from 5000 BCE, i.e. 5000 years before Japan. In South-Eastern Europe (Bulgaria, Greece...), it predates Japan by 7000 or 8000 years. Indeed, Japan was still in the height of the medieval era in the mid-19th century, so about 500 to 800 years late compared to Europe. It had caught up so much (5000 to 500 years) thanks to the heavy influence of China, which developed much earlier. Japan is only "developed" today because copied the West in the late 19th century, then was forced to adopt an Americanised system after WWII. But mentalities do not change nearly as quickly as systems and technologies. This is why the Japanese socio-cultural mindset still carries strong elements of ancient or medieval way of thinking by Western standards.

I am not saying this to disparage Japan; I am trying to analyse history as rationally and objectively as possible. It may sound offensive, but to me it is just cold facts which political correctness will not change. History is history, whether it is nice or ugly, whether we like it or not.