Spotlight: Beneath Japan's polite veneer lies secret codes of racial hatred aimed at minorities, foreigners

Is Japan a gentle nation? For many people who have little knowledge about the island country or just take a week-long vocation here, the answer would be a resounding"yes."

But for the ethnic minorities and some foreigners who live here for a long time, their bitter tales would tell a totally different story behind the iconic Japanese smile -- a real Japan with an underground social code of inherent racial discrimination.

Japan has a long history of discriminating "burakumin,"or hamlet people as they're known here in English. This group, brandished an"underclass"of people comprise those perceived as having impure or tainted professions such as workers in abattoirs or those in the leather industry. They were seen as "untouchable" and also known as "eta,"an ancient name for burakumin, and were"worth" one seventh the regard of an ordinary person in the Feudal era, and in some cases regarded just slightly higher than animals.

However, such discrimination was not eliminated with the Meiji Restoration, the Japanese Enlightenment in the 19th century, and still impacts people with burakumin ancestry.

Japan's big enterprises were found to use a 330-page list of buraku names and community locations to secretly screen job seekers and many families forbad their daughters to marry burakumin-related men. Prolonged discrimination against those with burakumin ancestry forced them to join the Yakuza, Japanese mafia gangs.

Besides the burakumin issue, Japanese mainlanders also look down upon Ainu ethnic minorities who were natives of Japan's northernmost prefecture of Hokkaido and Okinawans in the southernmost island prefecture of Okinawa.

Ainu people were forced to change their names into Japanese names since the Meiji government occupied the entire island in 1869 and they were forbidden to speak their own language. Although many places in Hokkaido still have Ainu-language names, many Ainu people, however, prefer to hide their identities due to severe online racial discrimination.

Okinawa is the name assigned by the Japanese government when it occupied the Ryukyu Kingdom in 1879. The same horrors inflicted on the Ainu people were also dealt out to the native Okinawans. When the United States attacked Okinawa at the end of World War II, Japanese soldiers forced Okinawa civilians to be human shields against U.S. bullets and artillery fire.

If the discrimination or mainlanders'prejudice against the burakumin and domestic ethnic minorities is "invisible," Japanese ultra-right racists' discrimination against foreigners is blatantly rampant.

"There was a lot of bullying when I was at school, particularly when I was an elementary school student. They used to throw garbage in my face but I had no idea why,"Ariana Miyamoto, the first Afro-Asian to be crowned Miss Universe Japan, told Xinhua.

"There was this one time when a whole class of kids refused to get in the swimming pool with me, because my skin was a different color,"remembered Miyamoto, who was born in Nagasaki Prefecture but was accused of not being Japanese.

A spiteful remark on one social media after Miyamoto's won the hard-fought competition read that "they should do blood tests before such events and if a contestants'DNA is less than 100 percent 'Japanese' they should not be allowed to participate." Another claimed that being "hafu," which represents "half" in English used by Japanese people referring to people of mixed-race, meant that the "other" half was "less than human."

Not only mixed-race Japanese people like Miyamoto, but also the South Koreans and Chinese who live in Japan are also harassed by racists. The issue of hate speeches against foreigners has drawn international attention, including from UN human rights organs.

Since 2013, the number of anti-Korean protests and hate speeches organized primarily by the ultra-nationalist group Zaitokukai, a self-claimed "citizens" group that will not tolerate special privileges being given to Korean and Chinese residents in Japan, surged in terms of intensity and frequency, with their slogans and placards during such speeches often reading"get out of the country"or"kill them all."

In the meantime, books and publications carrying disparaging content about South Korea and China have been growing in popularity or topping the bestsellers' list in Japan to the point that some bookstores even have a dedicated corner for such xenophobic literature.

Early last year, an education policy adviser of Prime Minister Shinzo Abe suggested in her column that Japan should separate foreign immigrants by race just like the apartheid in South Africa in the past.

And a recent racial discrimination case saw a lawmaker of Abe's ruling Liberal Democratic Party call U.S. President Barack Obama a descendant of black slaves."People in the country's founding era would have never thought that a black slave would become president,"said Kazuya Maruyama in a Diet meeting in February.

With such a severe and deeply-ingrained racial discrimination problem, it is surprising that Japan has no legislation banning hate speech, and ironically cites the Constitution that protects freedom of expression to defend such acts of odious behavior although the UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination in 2014 urged the country to take"appropriate steps to revise its legislation"with penal sanctions to address the spread of hate speech against minority groups.

"If hate incidents are not tackled quickly and effectively, targeted groups may experience permanent damage to their self-esteem and sense of belonging within their societies,"Rita Izsak, a UN special rapporteur on minority issues, said here earlier this year."If you look at genocide... the first stop on the way is always hate speech," Izsak warned. Endit