Racial profiling in Japan is common but goes unnoticed, some residents say

It’s not like there’s anything bad about your hair, the police officer politely explained to the young black man as commuters streamed past Tokyo Station. It’s just that, based on his experience, people with dreadlocks were more likely to be in possession of drugs.

Alonzo Omotegawa video of his arrest and search in 2021 sparked debates over racial profiling in Japan and an internal police investigation. For him, however, it was part of an eternal problem that began when he was first interrogated as a thirteen-year-old.

“In their eyes, they are just doing their job,” said Mr. Omotegawa, 28, an English teacher who is half Japanese and half Bahamian, born and raised in Japan.

“I’m as Japanese as they come, just a little tan,” he added. “Not every black person will use drugs.”

Racial profiling has become a flashpoint in Japan as increasing numbers of migrant workers, foreign residents and mixed-race Japanese are transforming the country’s traditionally homogeneous society and challenging a deep-seated distrust of outsiders.

With one of the world’s oldest populations and a stubbornly low birth rate, Japan has been forced to reconsider its restrictive immigration policies. And if record numbers of migrant workers When they arrive in the country, many of the people who clean hotel rooms, work the cash register at convenience stores or flip burgers come from places like Vietnam, Indonesia or Sri Lanka.

But Japan’s foreign-born residents say social attitudes toward them have been slow to adjust. In January, three of them sued the Japanese government and local governments in Tokyo and Aichi, a nearby prefecture, over the conduct of their police forces. Prosecutors said they were regularly subjected to random checks and searches because of their racist appearance.

It is the first lawsuit in Japan arguing that officers routinely rely on racial profiling in police work, a systemic issue that prosecutors and experts say the Japanese public is largely unaware of.

Each of the three accusers – one naturalized citizen and two former residents – said they were stopped for questioning several times a year. One of them, a Pacific islander who has lived in Japan for more than 20 years, estimates he has been questioned by police 70 to 100 times.

Motoki Taniguchi, a lawyer representing the plaintiffs, said the perception in Japan was slow to catch up to the reality the country was already living in.

“Many Japanese still live under the illusion that we are such a homogeneous country that we should not accept immigrants because they will break society,” he said.

His clients’ experiences contradict what Japan’s National Police said they discovered in 2021, after Mr. Omotegawa’s video caused enough of a stir that the U.S. Embassy in Tokyo issued a warning Americans warn against racial profiling. The year before, according to police, there were only six cases of ethnic profiling in a country with approximately three million foreign residents. Police officials defended their officers and said they had acted without any ‘discriminatory purpose’ – even in the six cases – and that officers are trained to only question people if there is reasonable suspicion. It declined to comment on the lawsuit, saying it does not have more recent statistics on profiling.

The lawsuit, which seeks monetary damages of approximately $22,000 for each plaintiff and a court ruling affirming that racially discriminatory police interrogations violate Japanese law, alleges that some internal police guidelines explicitly encourage profiling. A 2021 Aichi police training manual was cited as an example, encouraging officers to use drug, firearms or immigration laws to stop and interrogate foreigners.

“Everything works!!” according to the manual for commissioned officers cited in the lawsuit and reviewed by The New York Times. “For those who appear to be foreigners at first glance and those who do not speak Japanese, they are firmly convinced that they have, without exception, committed some illegal act.”

Aichi police said they “could not confirm” that the specific manual is currently in use.

In a 2022 survey by the Tokyo Bar Association, about six in 10 foreign residents of Japan said they had been surveyed in the past five years. The survey only surveyed foreign residents and did not provide comparative figures for average Japanese citizens. Several foreign-born residents said in interviews that police profiling feels universal.

Upadhyay Ukesh, 22, came to Japan from Nepal with his father as a 14-year-old. He was still a teenager in 2017, he said, when he was stopped on his way to school and had four officers raise his hand and search his bookbag. They found only pencils, an eraser, notebooks and textbooks, and sent him on his way.

Profiling has since become a real burden, says Mr. Ukesh, who now works at a hotel in Osaka and manages about 50 part-time workers, many of whom are not Japanese. Recently, he said, he was waiting on the street for his girlfriend when two officers asked to search him.

“I just let them check it, but I really don’t like them checking my stuff for no reason,” he said.

Tran Tuan Anh, 35, a supermarket manager in Tokyo who first came to Japan from Vietnam a decade ago as a language student, says he is stopped by police once or twice a year. Once, officers cornered him as he rushed to transfer. He said they seemed to suspect he was involved in a recent stabbing.

“They thought I was a foreigner and chased me,” he said. “One officer stood in front of me and another behind me so I couldn’t escape.”

Akira Igarashi, a professor of sociology at Osaka University, said that even as individual attitudes change in Japan, bureaucracies such as the police may be increasingly hardened. Officers appear to be acting on an incorrect assumption that crime is more common among immigrants, he said.

“The Japanese police don’t know this is discrimination,” he said.

Such encounters could be particularly jarring for the small but growing number of Japanese nationals, including Mr. Omotegawa, who are mixed-race or have naturalized.

Lora Nagai, 31, born to a Sri Lankan mother and Japanese father, said police repeatedly stopped her for questioning on her way to work as a fitness instructor, causing her to arrive late. Her boss and colleagues didn’t seem to believe her, in disbelief that it happened so regularly.

She said she learned the term racial profiling from news reports about the recent lawsuit, which helped her identify the disturbing experiences she’s had most of her adult life.

“I don’t think normal people in Japan know this is happening,” Ms. Nagai said.