You may have a different experience, as you married into the culture, and thus have a family there to help break the ice.
It certainly wasn’t breaking the ice; I first came to Japan after getting laid off living in a US state where I had no family, etc. I liked it enough to go back to live and didn’t meet my wife until about 6 years in. I made it a point to go to local bars and live shows and galleries where I’d meet people into what I was into, which is generally how it works in most of the world. The expat bubble is tempting, and yeah I do wanna speak English sometimes, but it’s just self-defeating to only live in that bubble.
How is this not conservative and insular?
Some people are conservative and insular, yes. A lot of them are not. I was giving one reason why some of them were.
. And by “weird spot” you mean decades of intense discrimination, including denying them access to basic healthcare.
By weird spot I specifically meant that many do not feel Japanese and don’t want to take Japanese citizenship but can’t necessarily go back. It is a weird spot insofaras it’s not a normal type of situation. This of course provokes discrimination from butthurt fuckheads who think “what, is Japan not good enough for you?” and the like. It’s weird because they are trapped in a situation where they are being asked to give up their identities (which is obviously wrong) but they also can’t go home to what they would consider or want to be their home. This, of course, is a gross oversimplification of the whole thing.
including denying them access to basic healthcare.
This I’m not aware of outside of the occasional “we don’t accept foreigners” which unfortunately does happen (sometimes due to worries about communication sometimes because racism), but it’s rarer in medical settings because denying treatment can come with actual punishment on that medical institution. Do you have more detail or a source (English or Japanese are fine).
Framing Japanese culture as conservative and insular was the polite way of saying they’re still a fascist country,
From the Wikipedia definition of fascism, it ticks some of the boxes but certainly not all of them. It certainly has more elements of it than I would like, but every time someone other than the LDP gets in charge (a couple of times since the '50s), they promptly faceplant and turn people off of themselves again. As a non-citizen, there’s basically nothing I can do on this realm. My wife also does not like this and votes for progressives and I think a lot of her generation would agree, but voter turnout here is a whole other problem.
run by the children of war criminals.
I think it’s more grandchildren these days, but yeah. The good news is that not everyone believes the same things as their parents or grandparents (I certainly don’t), but America’s involvement in the political system in the immediate post-war era and their working with those people and yakuza didn’t help things.
funding temples built to honor people who weaponized rape on a massive scale.
This I will take minor issue with. Yasukuni, which I’m guessing you’re referring to, was built to honor war dead more generally and all the way back in late 1860s for those who fought in the Boshin (Japanese civil war/revolution) War.
It does contain war criminals, which is fucking stupid, but also is no longer owned or run by the government (also something the Americans forced with separating religion and state). It’s now run by a bunch of far-right fucksticks. Some (generally very right-wing) government officials do interact with it “in a private capacity” which is often meant to signal something to their base. Some other do visit without the publicity as they would any other shrine.
I have family buried in Arlington National Cemetery in the US which also contains people who are guilty of warcrimes, convicted or otherwise. Should I never go there even though, to the best of my knowledge, none of my family ever engaged in such? That’s where I feel conflicted about Yasukuni. Fuck the org that runs it, fuck the politicians that use it to signal their far-right base, but I don’t begrudge people going to where their ancestors are enshrined. I would certainly love that all war criminals be purged from all such places globally, but I don’t know how one accomplishes that.
If you feel I missed something (in your first post, I wasn’t entirely sure to which specific group of Koreans you were referring, which may have led to some confusion and I certainly don’t claim to know everything in detail on the topic), you’re welcome to link to something so I can get more context or background.
It certainly wasn’t breaking the ice; I first came to Japan after getting laid off living in a US state where I had no family, etc. I liked it enough to go back to live and didn’t meet my wife until about 6 years in. I made it a point to go to local bars and live shows and galleries where I’d meet people into what I was into, which is generally how it works in most of the world. The expat bubble is tempting, and yeah I do wanna speak English sometimes, but it’s just self-defeating to only live in that bubble.
Some people are conservative and insular, yes. A lot of them are not. I was giving one reason why some of them were.
By weird spot I specifically meant that many do not feel Japanese and don’t want to take Japanese citizenship but can’t necessarily go back. It is a weird spot insofaras it’s not a normal type of situation. This of course provokes discrimination from butthurt fuckheads who think “what, is Japan not good enough for you?” and the like. It’s weird because they are trapped in a situation where they are being asked to give up their identities (which is obviously wrong) but they also can’t go home to what they would consider or want to be their home. This, of course, is a gross oversimplification of the whole thing.
This I’m not aware of outside of the occasional “we don’t accept foreigners” which unfortunately does happen (sometimes due to worries about communication sometimes because racism), but it’s rarer in medical settings because denying treatment can come with actual punishment on that medical institution. Do you have more detail or a source (English or Japanese are fine).
From the Wikipedia definition of fascism, it ticks some of the boxes but certainly not all of them. It certainly has more elements of it than I would like, but every time someone other than the LDP gets in charge (a couple of times since the '50s), they promptly faceplant and turn people off of themselves again. As a non-citizen, there’s basically nothing I can do on this realm. My wife also does not like this and votes for progressives and I think a lot of her generation would agree, but voter turnout here is a whole other problem.
I think it’s more grandchildren these days, but yeah. The good news is that not everyone believes the same things as their parents or grandparents (I certainly don’t), but America’s involvement in the political system in the immediate post-war era and their working with those people and yakuza didn’t help things.
This I will take minor issue with. Yasukuni, which I’m guessing you’re referring to, was built to honor war dead more generally and all the way back in late 1860s for those who fought in the Boshin (Japanese civil war/revolution) War.
It does contain war criminals, which is fucking stupid, but also is no longer owned or run by the government (also something the Americans forced with separating religion and state). It’s now run by a bunch of far-right fucksticks. Some (generally very right-wing) government officials do interact with it “in a private capacity” which is often meant to signal something to their base. Some other do visit without the publicity as they would any other shrine.
I have family buried in Arlington National Cemetery in the US which also contains people who are guilty of warcrimes, convicted or otherwise. Should I never go there even though, to the best of my knowledge, none of my family ever engaged in such? That’s where I feel conflicted about Yasukuni. Fuck the org that runs it, fuck the politicians that use it to signal their far-right base, but I don’t begrudge people going to where their ancestors are enshrined. I would certainly love that all war criminals be purged from all such places globally, but I don’t know how one accomplishes that.
If you feel I missed something (in your first post, I wasn’t entirely sure to which specific group of Koreans you were referring, which may have led to some confusion and I certainly don’t claim to know everything in detail on the topic), you’re welcome to link to something so I can get more context or background.