No More, Mr Nice Guys

Let’s pretend.

Imagine an acquaintance invites you to stay as a lodger in their house, and you move in forthwith. At first, all seems well: you pay towards the housekeeping costs, keep quiet, clean up after yourself, are a model guest. Then one morning, as you walk into the kitchen for breakfast, your host delivers you a stinging slap in the face.

‘What did you do that for?’ you ask, taken aback.

‘Oh, I just do that sometimes,’ they reply with a nonchalant shrug. ‘It’s a habit.’

Mystified, you ask a friend’s advice, but you don’t get a lot of sympathy. ‘As a guest, you ought to just accept it,’ they say, ‘you should respect their custom of slapping you round the face.’ You suggest that you might ask not to be slapped, but your friend disapproves. ‘It’s their house, so if that’s the way they choose to do things, it’s not your business to question it,’ they chide you. ‘If you don’t like it, you don’t have to live there.’

Seems like bad advice, doesn’t it? High-handed, unsupportive, unhelpful. But here in Japan, there are a small but high-profile number of resident expatriates who sport exactly this attitude. ‘Guests have no right to complain’ appears to be the mantra of these people who, in a transparent ploy to contrive an amusing acronym, I’ll christen Whiny Apologist Nice Guys.

Well, WANGs, please look away now: my experience and observations have led me inexorably to the opinion that Japan suffers from a pernicious, deeply entrenched institutional xenophobia, with examples of which I could fill this page two or three times if that was my point. Individually, Japanese people are overwhelmingly generous, sweet-natured and hospitable, and citizens and companies often go far out of their way to cater to expatriates when there’s really no need for them to do so. But conversely, the government and its agencies seem to go out of their way to make life difficult for us, and the WANGs’ eagerness to kow-tow isn’t likely to persuade them to change their attitude.

To return to the house-guest analogy, it is of course true that guests have duties and responsibilities, and can create a bad impression by shirking them. So, yes, some expatriates behave like idiots, and the rest of us have to bear the burden of the reputation they create. All we can do is behave with respect and consideration and trust the Japanese people to recognize that the troublemakers are, as in any demographic, a tiny minority.

But, whatever the WANGs might say, hosts also have duties and responsibilities to their guests, chiefly the provision of a welcoming, sympathetic environment. When they fail to meet them, the guests are unhappy, the relationship and atmosphere in the house deteriorate, everyone suffers. If nothing else, word will get around that the hosts are bad, and no-one will want to stay with them. Faced with a population that’s both shrinking and aging, Japan will soon need to boost its workforce substantially, and as it’s likely to have to do so with immigrants, it’s very much in the nation’s interest to treat them well.

That’s what the Japanese establishment needs persuading of. Some things are universal - or at least, should be universal - and entitlement to the right not to be treated like crap because of where you come from is one of them. Were there WANGs in the black communities telling people to show due deference and respect in the face of South Africa’s apartheid regime, or segregation in the USA? (‘Just give the man your seat, Rosa, and don’t make a fuss, it’s just their way of doing things.’) I certainly wouldn’t equate what happens in Japan with those extreme examples of inhuman nature, but the underlying attitude is essentially the same: that it’s acceptable to treat some people worse than others according to their origin or skin colour. When this happens, though, those people complain about it, and will continue to do so. The complaining will stop when the discrimination stops, and not before.

And this is what the blithe, misguided WANGs need persuading of. If they’re trying to create harmony, then they’re going about it the wrong way; by accepting and thereby tacitly encouraging discrimination they’re helping to perpetuate it, which will just lead to continued discord as Japan accepts more immigrants. The problem is not that people complain about being discriminated against; the problem is that discrimination occurs in the first place. If, instead of castigating the victims for speaking up, the WANGs focused their energy on tackling discrimination, then perhaps it would help solve the problem for everyone.