Anti-Japanese sentiment

Anti-Japanese sentiment (also called Japanophobia, Nipponophobia and anti-Japanism) is the fear or dislike of Japan or Japanese culture. Anti-Japanese sentiment can take many forms, from antipathy toward Japan as a country to racist hatred of Japanese people.

Anti-Japanese sentiments range from animosity towards the Japanese government's actions during the Second Sino-Japanese War and World War II, to disdain for Japanese culture, or to racism against the Japanese people. Sentiments of dehumanization have been fueled by the anti-Japanese propaganda of the Allied governments in World War II; this propaganda was often of a racially disparaging character. Anti-Japanese sentiment may be strongest in Korea and China, due to atrocities committed by the Imperial Japanese military.

In the past, anti-Japanese sentiment contained innuendos of Japanese people as barbaric. Following the Meiji Restoration of 1868, Japan was intent to adopt Western ways in an attempt to join the West as an industrialized imperial power, but a lack of acceptance of the Japanese in the West complicated integration and assimilation. Japanese culture was viewed with suspicion and even disdain.^{[citation needed]}

While passions have settled somewhat since Imperial Japan's surrender in the Pacific War theater of World War II, tempers continue to flare on occasion over the widespread perception that the Japanese government has made insufficient penance for their past atrocities, or has sought to whitewash the history of these events. Today, though the Japanese government has effected some compensatory measures, anti-Japanese sentiment continues based on historical and nationalist animosities linked to Imperial Japanese military aggression and atrocities. Japan's delay in clearing more than 700,000 (according to the Japanese Government) pieces of life-threatening and environment contaminating chemical weapons buried in China at the end of World War II is another cause of anti-Japanese sentiment. ^{[citation needed]}

Periodically, individuals within Japan spur external criticism. Former Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi was heavily criticized by South Korea and China for annually paying his respects to the war dead at Yasukuni Shrine, which enshrines all those who fought and died for Imperial Japan as part of the Axis Powers during World War II, including 1,068 convicted war criminals. Right-wing nationalist groups have produced history textbooks whitewashing Japanese atrocities, and the recurring controversies over these books occasionally attract hostile foreign attention.^{[citation needed]}

Some anti-Japanese sentiment originates from business practices used by some Japanese companies, such as dumping.^{[citation needed]}

Like the elites in Argentina and Uruguay, the Brazilian elite wanted to racially whiten the country's population during the 19th and 20th centuries. The country's governments always encouraged European immigration, but non-white immigration was always greeted with considerable opposition. The communities of Japanese immigrants were seen as an obstacle to the whitening of Brazil and they were also seen, among other concerns, as being particularly tendentious because they formed ghettos and they also practiced endogamy at a high rate. Oliveira Viana, a Brazilian jurist, historian, and sociologist, described the Japanese immigrants as follows: "They (Japanese) are like sulfur: insoluble." The Brazilian magazine O Malho in its edition of 5 December 1908, issued a charge of Japanese immigrants with the following legend: "The government of São Paulo is stubborn. After the failure of the first Japanese immigration, it contracted 3,000 yellow people. It insists on giving Brazil a race diametrically opposite to ours." On 22 October 1923, Representative Fidélis Reis produced a bill on the entry of immigrants, whose fifth article was as follows: "The entry of settlers from the black race into Brazil is prohibited. For Asian [immigrants] there will be allowed each year a number equal to 5% of those residing in the country...."

Years before World War II, the government of President Getúlio Vargas initiated a process of forced assimilation of people of immigrant origin in Brazil. In 1933, a constitutional amendment was approved by a large majority and established immigration quotas without mentioning race or nationality and prohibited the population concentration of immigrants. According to the text, Brazil could not receive more than 2% of the total number of entrants of each nationality that had been received in the last 50 years. Only the Portuguese were excluded. The measures did not affect the immigration of Europeans such as Italians and Spaniards, who had already entered in large numbers and whose migratory flow was downward. However, immigration quotas, which remained in force until the 1980s, restricted Japanese immigration, as well as Korean and Chinese immigration.