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the section on "Japanese ethnic privilege" smells like WP:SYNTH
Latest comment: 1 year ago35 comments10 people in discussion
Mureungdowon has been blocked 1 week for edit warring. Any discussion of Japanese privilege is off-topic for this page. Let's move on. — The Hand That Feeds You:Bite 18:02, 14 April 2023 (UTC)
The following discussion has been closed. Please do not modify it.
The sources are:
-a book from 2002 containing zero references to the phrase "japanese ethnic privilege"
-a newspaper poll referred to by some korean blog
-an article about a quote from a single guy saying "Only Japanese among Asians are races close to Europeans".
I respectfully propose to remove this section per WP:SYNTH. Tdmurlock (talk) 02:47, 3 March 2023 (UTC)
But there is a real topic in there. A great many writers have described Japanese feelings of superiority over other races in Asia, analogous to white privilege. An example is the book Japan and Global Migration: Foreign Workers and the Advent of a Multicultural Society (2015 ISBN9781134655106) which discusses the issue on page 80. Another example is Interracial Intimacy in Japan: Western Men and Japanese Women, 1543-1900 (2003 ISBN9780826460745) with relevant text on page 10. Both of these discuss how Japanese privilege in colonial Korea and Greater Asia came into conflict with European-heritage white racial superiority in the 20th century. Binksternet (talk) 03:43, 3 March 2023 (UTC)
Binksternet is correct. Japanese have their own racial privileges, unlike ordinary Asians. Right-wing nationalists in Japan think that Japanese are racial different from Asians because they recognize it. Japanese people are still more favored than other Asians in other Asian countries. This is clearly a phenomenon similar to white privilege, so it must be written down. Ironically, anti-Japanese racism in South Korea has become more visible on the left-wing than on the right-wing, as Japanese people are treated almost as white people in South Korea. Mureungdowon (talk) 05:22, 3 March 2023 (UTC)
I'm going to make an individual article. See Draft:Race privilege. (It would be nice if Binksternet and other users participate.) Mureungdowon (talk) 05:41, 3 March 2023 (UTC)
And do these sources describe this as white privilege? BobFromBrockley (talk) 11:20, 4 March 2023 (UTC)
This speaks to the page's WP:SCOPE. I know there's a link and that Americans instinctively read '...benefits white people over non-white people in some societies...' as solelypossibly discussing northern Europeans and those passing for them... but that's not what the words in that sentence actually mean in a global context (cf. WP:BIAS and WP:READER).
We should reformulate to be clearer in the lead if this is solely going to be a discussion of white Americans and people like them—e.g. ignoring China entirely and only discussing Japan and Korea in the context of GIs and expat English teachers—when "white-skin privilege" has been a real thing for millennia across India and East Asia to name only the usual majority-of-humanity over the last since-the-dawn-of-agriculture.
Alternatively, the entire structure and focus of the page need to be redone in a way that would decenter the cultures of the educated whites who make up an outsized share of Wiki's editors... and which the article itself suggests isn't terribly likely to happen. — LlywelynII 12:35, 5 March 2023 (UTC)
A great many writers have described Japanese feelings of superiority over other races in Asia
I think that makes it more clearly a topic of an article on Japanese supremacy (equivalent to White supremacy), rather than the topic of privilege.
Regardless, this article is the wrong place for the subject. — The Hand That Feeds You:Bite 16:38, 5 March 2023 (UTC)
Similar case
I canceled the existing editing that equates Japanese privilege with the case of white privilege, but instead created the "Similar case" item and created a sub-item called "Japanese privilege" there. # Japanese privilege clearly exists, and it is clear that the Japanese are similar in historical position to white people. The term 'Japanese privilege' is also used by Japanese scholars. Mureungdowon (talk) 07:25, 13 April 2023 (UTC)
I think this content should never be removed. The Japanese, like white people, are the perpetrators of the racist system, not the victims. The Korean-Japanese relationship is, without exaggeration, similar to the black-white relationship. Mureungdowon (talk) 07:28, 13 April 2023 (UTC)
I presented today a direct source from which Japanese privilege equates with white privilege. This is definitely not WP:SYNTH.[1]Mureungdowon (talk) 07:29, 13 April 2023 (UTC)
I think the topic is potentially a valid one to include in this article, provided you stick closely to the sources and write the article in an encyclopedic way. However, the present version is very far from that. It reads like an polemical essay. For example, take the sentence "South Korean experts point out that Japanese are rarely subjected to racial discrimination, unlike non-Korean Asians living in other South Korea. First, "South Korean experts point out" violates WP:SAYS. Second "unlike non-Korean Asians living in other South Korea" makes no sense (I think the problem is the word "other"). That paragraph seems to be over-relying on an interview with one person (see WP:DUE). Most importantly, if you look at history you can see that the statement about the general absence of anti-Japanese racism is blatantly false. Have you heard about the internment camps in the U.S. during the 1940s? The U.S. government forcibly removed Japanese-Americans from their homes and essentially imprisoned them during WWII. Even long after WW II there was tremendous racism against Japanese in the U.S.
Unless you can cite direct quotes from reliable sources, it's WP:SYNTH to connect the topic of this article to other issues, such as Japanese mistreatment of Koreans or Japanese imperialism in the 1930s and 1940s.
I'd suggest rewriting this section, removing polemics and sticking to high-quality sources. Otherwise it will probably be reverted again. NightHeron (talk) 09:08, 13 April 2023 (UTC)
Anti-Japanese racism exists in the United States. However, in that sense, there was anti-American racism in Japan, too. Do you know about '鬼畜英米'? The Japanese military's torture of prisoners is also related to anti-American racism. Mureungdowon (talk) 09:22, 13 April 2023 (UTC)
I'm not talking about Japan's war crimes. It can be compared to the current Japanese privilege and white privilege. Check the source I presented on the Talk page now. There is no hate group for Japanese in South Korea, but there is a hate group for South Koreans in Japan. This is what many Koreans think comes from ethnic hierarchies. Korean nationalists do not regard the Japanese as inferior, but Korean nationalist still see many Japanese as imperialistic and colonialist as of 2020. Japanese nationalists view Koreans as inferior. Mureungdowon (talk) 09:25, 13 April 2023 (UTC)
Anti-Americanism, which is the subject of a long article on Wikipedia, is not the same as racism.
It's likely that the U.S. would not have used atomic weapons to kill many tens of thousands of Japanese civilians at the end of WW II if those civilians had been white.
You write "The Korean-Japanese relationship is, without exaggeration, similar to the black-white relationship." Really?? Did the Japanese capture vast numbers of Koreans and bring them on slave ships under inhuman conditions to Japan, where the economy for 200 years depended on slave labor by Koreans? What's the incarceration rate among ethnic Koreans living in Japan? And how often are they killed by Japanese police? Have there been any mass shootings of ethnic Koreans in Japan? NightHeron (talk) 09:33, 13 April 2023 (UTC)
There are not many murders in Japan in the first place. However, mainstream Japanese politicians tend to ignore violent hate crimes against Koreans in Japan. For example, there was an incident in which a Japanese racist burned down a house of Zainichi Koreans, but Prime Minister Fumio Kishida also remained silent. Koreans cannot engage in active anti-racism social movements even if they are subjected to racism in Japan. Japanese society is much more racist than American society. Japan does not have a civil rights law itself that prohibits racism. In the United States, BLM is supported by many. Only a few socialists actively support Korean human rights in Japan. I really think that Japan's anti-Korean racism is far more serious than America's anti-black racism. Mureungdowon (talk) 09:51, 13 April 2023 (UTC)
Not all anti-Americanism is racist. But '鬼畜英米' is plain racism. At that time, the Japanese insisted that Americans and Britons should be massacred because they were nothing but ghosts and beasts. That is '鬼畜英米'. Mureungdowon (talk) 09:54, 13 April 2023 (UTC)
The actions taken by the U.S. government against Japanese Americans in the 1940s are accepted as racism in the U.S. Even if the Germans started the Pacific War, would the Americans have locked German-Americans in large numbers? I think the U.S. government would have done enough of that at the time. Japanese camps operating in the United States in the 1940s are clearly war crimes, but this is a very exceptional case. The Japanese clearly have almost the same level of racial privilege as the white. If the Germans, not the Japanese, had started the Pacific War, the American government would have persecuted the Germans. Mureungdowon (talk) 09:39, 13 April 2023 (UTC)
I think even if Japan was a white country, the U.S. would have used nuclear weapons without any guilt, but the Hiroshima and Nagasaki problems basically happened because Japan did not surrender in the first place. Almost all South Koreans believe that Hiroshima and Nagasaki's atomic bomb attack was absolutely justified. Mureungdowon (talk) 10:06, 13 April 2023 (UTC)
And you don't think that the belief that the unnecessary killing of many tens of thousands of innocent civilians "was absolutely justified" reflects ethnic hatred against Japanese? The Japanese government at the time was making secret inquiries through 3rd parties, such as the Soviet Union, about conditions for surrender. The U.S. knew this, because they had broken the Japanese secret codes. But the U.S. did not want the Soviet Union, which declared war on Japan only at the very end of the war, to have any role in the surrender, and at the same time wanted a dramatic demonstration of military superiority over the Soviet Union, which did not yet have atomic weapons. That's why all those civilians had to die, either from the blast or from radiation sickness later. NightHeron (talk) 10:34, 13 April 2023 (UTC)
There is no clear consensus in academia as to whether the Hiroshima and Nagasaki issues were justified or unjust. Do you really think all the people in the Debate over the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki#Support position are racists? My view is clear. At the expense of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, more Koreans, Chinese, Southeast Asians, and even Japanese were able to live. Of course, I respect the opinions of those who disagree with this view. However, Germans do not claim Bombing of Dresden as racist genocide. Please check out the article on Nippon Kaigi. The white guilt of Hiroshima and Nagasaki is rather used by the historical revisionism of Japanese right-wing to far-right nationalists. In South Korea, center-left liberals rather defend Truman. The United States killed at least one-third of North Koreans during the Korean War, and massacred on Jeju Island before the Korean War, but Americans do not feel white guilt toward North Koreans and Jeju Islanders. Mureungdowon (talk) 10:54, 13 April 2023 (UTC)
Some of the content in the article on the Jeju uprising in the English Wikipedia is considered a far-right view in South Korea as of 2023. Jeju uprisings had little to do with the WPSK, and began with the violent suppression of peaceful (non-communist) left-wing Korean nationalist protests by Chinilpa police. Massacre victims groups and South Korean liberals demand an apology from the United States, but the United States ignores it. But why is Hiroshima and Nagasaki the only issue? Can Japanese right-wing nationalists be considered to have much greater lobbying power than South Korean liberals and have nothing to do with the ethnic privileges of the Japanese in the first place? (Of course, I also sympathize with the people who were exposed to radiation in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.) Mureungdowon (talk) 11:03, 13 April 2023 (UTC)
The story keeps getting to the point, but I'm not trying to talk about Hiroshima and Nagasaki. That is not an important part of the Talk page of this article. The point is this: it is clear that the Japanese have racial privileges over other Asians, this is an issue that has also been studied in Japanese academia, that content must be maintained in white privilege articles.Mureungdowon (talk) 11:06, 13 April 2023 (UTC)
There is zero reason to include that topic in the article about white privilege. Start your own article if you want to do one on Japanese privilege. — The Hand That Feeds You:Bite 16:24, 13 April 2023 (UTC)
Returning to the section of the article you're writing, your challenge is to put aside your own opinions, observe WP:NPOV, WP:V and WP:NOR. carefully follow the sources, and stick to the topic. The article is about "privilege," not about all grievances Koreans might have against the Japanese. NightHeron (talk) 12:34, 13 April 2023 (UTC)
The new addition looks like a violation of WP:COATRACK. If we tell the reader something about Japanese privilege, then we should keep it short and provide a link to the article about it, which has not been written yet. We should directly compare white privilege to Japanese privilege with at least one sentence, to make certain the paragraph is on topic. So the first thing is for someone to write the article Japanese privilege (perhaps using another phrasing), and only after that is done should we bring a mention of it here. Binksternet (talk) 17:23, 13 April 2023 (UTC)
First of all, I will exclude the case of Korea and the case before the Second Sino-Japanese War. However, the rest of the content must be maintained because there is a source that there is Japanese privilege similar to white privilege Mureungdowon (talk) 19:04, 13 April 2023 (UTC)
The term Japanese privilege actually exists, and the examples I have presented correspond to it Mureungdowon (talk) 13:00, 13 April 2023 (UTC)
I try to avoid editing any political articles, but this one came to my attention because the same editor who added the "Japanese privilege" section happened to edit another unrelated article on my watch list. I removed the passage in question because of WP:OR and WP:SYNTH. After all, any ethnic national considered a native of their own birth nation could be said to enjoy "privilege" over other possible minorities. For example, using the cited source's logic, ethnic Koreans could be said to enjoy "Korean privilege" in the Koreas that are difficult or impossible to access for ethnic minority citizens and residents. As for "privilege" in apartheid-era South Africa, the sources mention both China and Japan as recipients of this, a detail the editor omitted. Moreover, their "honorary white" status—which was the result of short-term economic and political necessity—seems to be a different phenomenon to what is referred to as "white privilege", which appears to be rooted in longstanding social and historical forces. —CurryTime7-24 (talk) 20:42, 13 April 2023 (UTC)
Do you think Japanese living in South Korea and South Koreans living in Japan are subjected to the same level of racial discrimination? The racial hierarchy that exists between Japanese and Korean cannot be denied. There is no Korean privilege, and it is not a Korean privilege, but a Majority privilege. But Japanese privilege exists. Mureungdowon (talk) 21:14, 13 April 2023 (UTC)
I'm not sure what you're saying. This discussion is about your additions to this article, which are irrelevant to it and distort cited sources in order to fit your personal opinions. —CurryTime7-24 (talk) 21:21, 13 April 2023 (UTC)
Again, there is definitely a correlation discussed in some sources between the white privilege of the European diaspora and the racial prejudice of Japan against other Asians. Unfortunately, I don't think that any of us in this discussion have enough of a handle on the big picture to write coherently and accurately about the issue. And if we aren't able to put a neutral description in front of the reader, then the best option is to have nothing. Binksternet (talk) 22:04, 13 April 2023 (UTC)
Latest comment: 1 year ago1 comment1 person in discussion
The first sentence needs improving because
of the repetition of the word privilege three times
"benefits ...under the same circumstances" seems confusing as if you have all pervasive benefits then your circumstances are different.
listing of just "social, political, or economic" as there may be others (genetic, historic, religious, medical, psychological ....).
white skin disambiguates here, so I suggest removal.
Suggested
White privilege is when whites have societal advantages over [[non-whites[[
old
White privilege, or white skin privilege is the societal privilege that benefits white people over non-white people in some societies, particularly if they are otherwise under the same social, political, or economic circumstances
(sociology) The collective advantages that white people are granted and enjoy in a society, usually apart from demonstrable merit, as contrasted against the advantages (or lack thereof) of non-whites of the same society. quotations
“White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack
Peggy McIntosh “White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack” in 1988...
"Peggy McIntosh who popularised the term, wrote "I was taught to see racism only in individual acts of meanness, not in invisible systems conferring dominance on my group." day, but about which I was "meant" to remain oblivious. White privilege is like an invisible weightless knapsack of special provisions, maps, passports, codebooks, visas, clothes, tools, and blank checks." Wakelamp d[@-@]b (talk) 05:49, 28 April 2023 (UTC)
