Hector Martin

Hmmmmmm i think it’s still a gaijin thing rather than a race thing. You’ll hear “外人がー“ but not often a white person specific “白人がー”

Oh sure, it's a gaijin thing, but gaijin is largely equal to "not of the Japanese race" in practice, and that's the presumed first approximation. So the underlying division may be xenophobic, but race is how it is determined on first impression. So it's kind of both.

My point is that white people dont get discriminated against for being white specifically - just for not being Japanese. whereas black/Arab/Indian gaijin have specific prejudices tied to them being black/Arab/Indian so while I do get what you’re saying that’s not it

But that's like saying "black people don't get discriminated against for their race, just for <stat correlated with race>" when they are racially profiled. My point is it's still a kind of racism when race is what you're using to profile people, even if not the ultimate factor.

Nope, not the same. I've been straight up told by MANY Japanese people that I'm "a good foreigner" because I'm WHITE, THIN, PRETTY & POLITE. I'm pretty sure polite gets thrown in because they perceive me doing something differently than they would if I were Black, or Chinese, etc

I do know a white girl who was pretty brutally attacked by a Japanese man, and she even says that what he was screaming while he hit her was vile insults about women and foreigners. He never called her white.

*Calling* people by their race is not a necessary condition of being racist. Yes, Japanese people don't call foreigners they hate "white", but they're still looking at the color of their skin, then deciding they're a foreigner because of it, prior to invoking the hate.

Conversely, any foreigner that passes for Japanese (e.g. of Japanese ancestry) is not going to be discriminated against until they make their foreignness evident.