Are there any Black People in Japan?

PRELUDE

David Chart`s article is about the results of a  survey on the attitudes of the Japanese people of Kawasaki towards people of different races.

One problem throughout Japan and specifically in Kawasaki, is that landlords are reluctant to rent apartments to non-Japanese.   Thinking that this was the result of a feeling that foreign people can up and leave without paying their rent, a system of guarantors was set up in Kawasaki.  Yet sadly, this did not stem the tide of landlords who refuse to rent to non-Japanese.

So what is the problem?  Why these rent refusals?

One answer may lay in communication problems – a fear that the landlord cannot communicate with the foreign renter.

Or

The answer may simply be racism.

Kawasaki as a city seems quite forward looking.  They have been one of the few cities to propose allowing non-Japanese to vote in local elections.  Many services are provided in a number of languages.  The libraries often have books of various languages.  Internationalism is not just a catch phrase, as it so often is in Japan, it`s a term with meaning and action behind it.

On to Chart`s article,

Are there any Black People in Japan?

By David Chart

Recently, I read a couple of articles that made me think. One was an open letter to Japanese people from a black man, listing a lot of “microaggressions” that black people suffer here, and posted on another blog. Another was the article “The Cultural Theory of Race: Yet Another Look at Du Bois’s “The Conservation of Races””, by Chike Jeffers, in Ethics Vol 123 (pages 403-426, 2013). One of the things they made me think about was the question “are there any black people in Japan?”.

In a biological sense, there obviously are. In this sense, black people are people with very dark skin, of African ancestry. There aren’t very many; looking at the statistics from the Ministry of Justice, and making some estimates, it looks like there might be about 25,000, or about 0.02% of the population. That could get up as high as 0.05%, I think, but not much higher than that. (Foreigners as a whole are only 2% of the population, and the great majority are Asian.) By comparison, the Amish are about 0.07% of the US population, if Wikipedia’s statistics are accurate.

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