Comments by "Regis" (@Timbo5000) on "The Japan Reporter" channel.

I feel for you, having to live in a society obsessed over race and identity... when will they learn that skin colour is utterly and absolutely meaningless?
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@Manannan anam Yeah... either they're arrogant to think that they are the only "real" black people and the rest is "fake" (whatever "real/fake" is supposed to mean to begin with), or stupid enough to think all ethnic groups with black skin colour are the same and have the exact same identity (just the thought of Australian Aboriginals and Nigerians being considered the exact same group makes me cringe). Either way it's absurd
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@John Smith Actually there are a lot of black people from America that "return" to their African ancestral lands. It's a relatively new trend and it concerns many migrants. Africa is much better than the ghettos in the US, but I imagine there's also plenty that come from better places in the US. For them it's a significant downgrade, depending on where they go. But a lot still do.
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@Snatcher Claus Yup, and; "I refuse to adapt to your way of life, so water down your culture and make place for mine. I come here, you adapt to me."
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I'm born and raised in western Europe, half black and feel the exact way about America. Here in Europe I've never experienced racism, while in America (only a few months) I noticed everybody cared about skin colour a lot more. I think America is one of the few countries where skin colour matters and the rest of the world essentially looks to how you behave/what your culture is. And there is a lot of discrimination everywhere towards people who are culturally different, but that is not racism. Even in the countries with the most discrimination, people will mostly still accept a person with a different skin colour that is culturally exactly the same as they are. Actual racism is very rare outside of the US, because it's only in the US that culture and skin colour are constantly mixed up. To be a person with black skin is also to be "black" culturally, there. So the lines between "normal" discrimination you see around the world and actual racism are blurred. Because discrimination against their culture is at the same time discrimination against their skin colour, which makes things complicated. But in reality no such thing as a "black" culture exists, unless you're crazy enough to think all of Africa and Aboriginals in Australia and many more groups with black skin colour are somehow all the same identity. They are obviously not and skin colour is meaningless. What matters is your culture, how you fit into the group.
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@davidgn40 It's not lack of education that does that, it's lack of integration. They fail to become proper parts of the culture they enter, so they flock together in ghettos and structurally fall behind the natives. How can a migrant child ever compete with a native child if he has grown up with parents speaking a foreign language at home? His very first day at school he'll already have a significant disadvantage he needs to catch up with. He has to properly learn the language even though he was born here, he has to still learn to be a part of this society even though he was born in it. If the parents don't properly integrate, the children are already at a massive disadvantage from the very start. Education is available to them equally, at least it is here in Europe. They still fall behind.
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@John Smith Diversity of culture does, yeah. Because you put people with different behaviourisms, customs and beliefs together and that can clash and generate distrust. But diversity of skin colour is irrelevant as long as you have a shared identity. The problem is that in multicultural societies there is no shared identity and it isn't forming either. A homogenous society with a small amount of foreigners that fully integrate into the main culture is much better. But it's wrong to think this is about skin colour; it is not. It's about identity.
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@matty6878 I think they'll change their views on Koreans too. I'm a European, Dutchman to be precise, so I'm no expert but I occasionally see articles about how Korea does things like deny Japanese Navy entry to their waters because they fly the rising sun flag and other things like that. It seems like they are stuck in the past, always ready to be offended by something. Japan did a lot of things wrong in the past, including to us in the Dutch East Indies. My aunt was in a Japanese concentration camp back then but luckily survived. We can either get stuck in the past and constantly revive those issues or we can build a better future with a changed Japan. We did the same with Germany and it worked out great. But a lot of Koreans, including the government, always seem to be out for confrontation and escalation. If we always chastised Germany for their past we wouldn't have been such great allies today. We even have a shared tank division now with the nation that invaded us so many years ago. We chose the future, not the past.
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@Manannan anam Multiculturalism = one big melting pot monoculture with no specific culture popping out.
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@forhonor7408 True, but genes are only a small part of that identity. I'm not aware of any differences between personality and such between ethnicities, but I don't think it's unlikely that there are. And maybe differences in average intelligence exist too, but that is unknown at the moment. If the average mentality within an ethnic group is different , the culture they form will be different. So in that sense, genes are relevant too. The total sum of what creates a culture is complex. At the least we should think of the group's history, surrounding cultural influences, climate and landscape, subelements of the culture also influencing how the rest develops (like language, which also heavily impacts how a culture as a whole develops if you compare languages with large vocabularies and types of grammar that for example are good for poetic expression), the current genes of the ethnic group and its influence on both the phenotype and possible behavioural traits, the ethnic pedigree of the group (the ethnic groups that came before, whose cultures and legacy usually are still a part of the new culture) and much much more. Culture certainly didn't spring up from thin air, but it isn't a purely genetic thing either. It's a highly complex combination of probably hundreds of factors, big and small.
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@Manannan anam Yeah that's what it is in practice. I was talking about the theory of multiculturalism, which even if it works perfectly is also a very bad thing because it turns every country into the same melting pot and thus kills cultures. What makes multiculturalism even worse is that it doesn't even work and indeed we see subcultures constantly clashing.
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Amuro Ray You don't understand the difference between natural multiculturalism (for example ancient Rome, where people from all over the world were drawn to do business) and ideologically forced multiculturalism. The first will always exist and isn't a bad thing. The second is terrible and involves mass immigration and the subversion of your culture, based on the idea that the original culture must make place for foreign cultures to exist besides it on an equal grounds.
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Amuro Ray No, most people BY FAR come from safe countries. This is happening because our governments actively let them in and in some cases even actively brought them in. But you're right about one thing; I and other citizens never had a say in this practice. Becoming a multicultural country was an ideological choice and continuing the mass migration is an ideological choice too. Refugees rarely come and when they come they rarely outnumber the ones that are let in/brought here by the government. Refugees are not and never were the problem.
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What a split between young and old.... Well, I guess we can say the future of Korean-Japanese relations is bright, going by how young Japanese generally reacted. Or.... they'll swing around once they get older? We shall see
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