Quote:
Originally Posted by mercedesjin
I mentioned before that some white friends of mine have expressed pain and discomfort being alienated. If they hadn't told me, they would've silently been in pain. What good does that do?
I do think it's beautiful to find the inner peace that both you and MMM have described, but that's not for me. I prefer to fight.
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The woman I knew felt she had no one to talk to, and in the end she broke from reality, so you are right. It does no good.
I don't know that I have found inner peace, and I am not saying your friends didn't experience true alienation, but I did meet a lot of people in Japan that were in the same situation that I was and saw things I couldn't see (Japanese people getting better service than non-Japanese at restaurants, for example). They called it racism, I called it paranoia.
Example after example was shown to me, and most of the time, I couldn't see it. ("See, he has 10 meatballs in his spaghetti, and I only have 9!" "We ordered before that table, but they got their food first!")
It is interesting talking about this here, as I had (and still have) dozens of Japanese friends in Japan, and I can't think of a single conversation I have had with them about race. Sure, we talk about Japan and America and Japanese people and American people, but never about white people (or black people) as a race. In a mono-racial society, it just isn't something that is a constant issue. It's like we don't compare our sun to other suns, because there are no other suns to compare it to. We got our sun, and that's it. It's such a back-burner concept in Japan compared to places where many races are living together.
This is why the idea that if a Japanese woman uses a parasol to protect her skin means she wants "to be white" is so preposterous to me. Skin tone for Japanese in Japan has never been about race... Caucasian or African... as that is so far off the radar in the Japanese mind.