On a related topic, this evening I read these excellent words of wisdom from Ari Tamat, who is the president of the Indonesian Community in Japan.
Japan's Hate Machine
Manufactured outrage turns foreigners into clicks
By Ari Tamat
Racism in Japan is not new, but it mostly stayed in the basement.
I remember the early 2000s on the anonymous forum 2channel, when nationalist vitriol spouted by the 'Netouyo' far-right lived in the web's dark, damp corners. As a foreign resident, I could decide how close I wanted to get. I knew it existed, but it stayed where it was. It didn't show up in the rest of my day.
Today, the basement has no doors.
The pollution drifts into the feeds of ordinary Japanese citizens who never asked for it, and that steady exposure changes how people think. I see housewives and high school students — people who have probably never spoken with a foreigner — suddenly ranting about Kurds or spitting out diatribes against Chinese. Decent people typing indecent things under photos of foreign families.
Foreigner-bashing has become a fad, a meme, a shortcut to attention.
This shift was not organic. Hate speech is now being promoted by political parties chasing votes, accounts flaming for profit, and outside forces that benefit from a divided Japan. Targeting the foreign community is easy content: simple, emotional, fast-moving. The platforms tilt the playing field. The loudest voices rise because outrage keeps people scrolling, and scrolling keeps revenue flowing.
Hate is a business model now.
It works because it exploits how the brain shortcuts. When a father in Kyoto was arrested for the murder of his young son, the nation was rightfully shocked. No one concluded that every Kyoto resident is a criminal. It was treated as one man's act. But when false rumors spread claiming the suspect was a foreign national, suddenly the entire foreign community was under suspicion.
Psychologists call this out-group homogeneity bias: we see our own group as individuals while flattening others into a single type. It compounds with the availability heuristic — we judge what's common based on what we're shown most often. We like to think we're fair observers. We're not. We run on filters, and algorithms know exactly how to feed them.
It takes very little: a single incident, a short video clip. Shared ten thousand times, it stops being an exception and starts being the rule for all foreigners.
Japanese society is largely unequipped for this kind of manipulation. Too many people absorb hate-fueled narratives without ever having a normal conversation with the neighbors they're condemning. Voices calling for sanity get drowned out. The gap between real life and online life grows, and the internet starts to feel like the truth, even when it's stitched from rumors and selective clips.
For those of us who have spent years or decades here — working, paying taxes, raising families, holding up parts of the economy — this disconnect wears you down. The contrast between the civil society I move through in person and the rage I encounter online is genuinely hard to process. On bad days, I wonder whether everyday politeness is just a surface layer. A sustained wall of hostility, plus the feeling of being treated as a perpetual suspect, turns long-term commitment into something closer to raw anger. Some people retreat into cynicism. Others push back hard, because they are tired of being the punching bag.
I've done both. Neither felt good.
The constant toxicity is also driving people away. Some leave the platforms. Others decide Japan is no longer a place they can call home. Japan needs more visibility for the contributions of its foreign residents. But the current climate is silencing the very people who prove we belong.
Coexistence is not an abstraction for this country. It is a practical necessity. We — foreigners and Japanese alike — are building this society together, and we cannot do that while profit-seekers dictate how we see our neighbors.
www.nbcnews.com
