Yesterday night while walking home, I was racially profiled and stopped by the cops - it was approximately 11:20 at night. I was taking my usual route home from Asakusa Station when two bike cops pulled up in front of me in order to prevent me from walking.
They asked me in Japanese where I was going. I told them I was going home. They asked me what I was doing in Japan. I told them I was an international student. At that point they asked to see my gaikokujin touroku (foreign resident card). I took it out of my wallet and handed it to them before asking them what this was all about.
Over the next ten minutes, I made small talk with the cop who wasn’t scribbling down my name, appearance, local address, phone number, disembarkation date, and favorite type of sushi on a clipboard. As I suspected, they were checking to make sure I wasn’t an illegal. The areas of Asakusa and nearby Ueno are notorious for red-light districts, yakuza headquarters, and drugs. I guess there must be a lot of illegal immigrants there too.
There weren’t any problems with the run-in that led to me being immobilized in fast hardening anti-crime foam or hit in the kneecap with nightsticks, though the cops did think it was a bit fishy that I was registered in Kyoto but currently reside in Tokyo. I explained to them the whole summer internship thing via Stanford University and they seemed to get the picture.
As they were finishing up, the cops said I spoke great Japanese and wished me good luck with my studies before biking off. That was it.
I wasn’t frightened or anything during the inquiry; more than anything, I couldn’t get over how funny the whole thing was. First of all, I wonder why they approached me in Japanese if I was clearly a foreigner. Were they trying to test me to see if I could speak the language? What would have happened had I played dumb and only spoke to them in English as though I hadn’t a clue what they were saying? Would they have been intimidated and gone away or switched to English to confront me further?
While they were just doing their job, it is obvious that the Japanese police profile and target white people because they are visibly different from the Japanese. The real illegal aliens in Japan however (some of whom I have met), are predominantly people from nearby Korea, China, and Taiwan. Indeed, a trip to the nearest 100-Yen Shop a block from where I was pulled over would surely yield several illegal workers.
However, given the same circumstances that night, had I been a Chinese-American or Korean walking home, I would have surely not been stopped. While Japan is certainly still a homogenous society, Tokyo feels more multicultural than ever. A Japanese coworker at Columbia once told me, “It used to be that you could tell who everybody was. Japanese people looked like Japanese, Chinese looked Chinese and so on. But nowadays, everybody looks the same. It all mixes. That’s Tokyo fer ya.”
Thus, ironically, it seems that if you’re a non-Japanese Asian or Asian American in Japan you may still be grouped under the umbrella of “looks Japanese” and left alone. White skin, on the other hand (and black skin for that matter, though there are very few black people in Japan), is a dead giveaway that one is not Japanese, and as good of a reason as any to hassle someone about a wrongdoing or infringement.
All it takes is a change of scenery to flip everything upside-down. This was the first occasion where I ever felt like a minority. It's not a feeling I will likely forget.
B.E.W.
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