Earlier by Federale: Japan Is A Nation By Blood—And Their Laws Still Say So

A question that is absurd on its face: Can you, a white or black man, an American or an African, “become Japanese?” Answer: Of course not. To be Japanese is to be of Japanese blood and raised in Japan, with its language, cuisine and other markers of Japanese culture. Why? Because the Japanese say so. So why can’t Americans say so?

Strangely enough, Canadian YouTuber Greg Lam, who is not Japanese and swallows all the usual eyewash about diversity, inadvertently confessed that truth in a two-part series titled Being Japanese. His YouTube channel, Life Where I’m From, is one of the best about the country by a gaijin (“foreigner.”) Lam respects Japan and its culture. But more importantly, despite his boilerplate Leftism, he can’t escape the truth: If you aren’t Japanese by race and culture, you can’t become Japanese.

Lam sincerely tries to address this important political, social, and racial issue, obviously intending to endorse the Globohomo Zeitgeist and relentless focus on “diversity,” as well as the Globohomo War on Japan [The Black War On Japan, FederaleFifthColumnist, July 15, 2019]. Lam’s problem is this: He’s been in Japan too long and is therefore too honest, not having received all the latest anti-white, anti-Japanese instructions.

Yes, Lam received the memo that anyone can emigrate to any nation and become whatever nationality he chooses, and he clearly believes it.

But he missed a few other others like this one: Never tell the truth if it hurts the cause. His documentary meant to say that non-Japanese migration to Japan is good for the country, but his execution proved quite otherwise. He permitted his interview subjects to speak candidly, and to say that almost no one—refugee, immigrant, naturalized foreigner, ethnic foreigner born in Japan, ethnic Japanese born abroad, or hafu, a half-Japanese person—thought he was really Japanese. Nor do the Japanese think that.

But let’s start with Lam and his background. He’s Chinese on his father’s side and a mix of White and non-White on his mother’s. Clearly not of real Canadian stock from the Motherland, Lam brings in Justin Trudeau to burble the current Diversity nonsense, which completely ignores Canadian history and culture and its origins in France and England. Despite French settlement and the strong Francophone influence even today, Canada was throughout its history, until the last 20 years thanks to mass immigration, the most English of colonies. Scottish regiments are in its military, places have English names, and the population is predominantly English.

Lam—quite typically for a Chinese ethnic—seems to think that white or English culture don’t exist, though he lived most of his life in an English-speaking and culturally English country. Just go to Vancouver, BC. It is overrun with Hong Kongers and Mainland Chinese who consider Canada a condominium or convenient way station. They, like Lam, think that Canada must be “diverse” despite its history, its specific and majority ethnic composition, and its connection to the Mother Country.

Being Canadian, though, Lam seems to think that the aboriginal tribes of Japan are important to being Japanese, so he first goes to Hokkaido to visit the Ainu, the last of the partly Caucasoid inhabitants of Japan who hold on to an increasingly miniscule presence in Hokkaido. Lam is implicitly criticizing his homeland over its treatment of Canadian Indians, which is about as far as he goes in acknowledging the Globohomo diversity narrative. From there, Lam’s story goes in the opposite direction.

Two stories are the most telling. First, Lam introduces a group of whites who immigrated to Japan and naturalized. A white immigrant, even one steeped in Japanese culture and language, cannot become Japanese. Even if he holds a Japanese passport, real Japanese don’t consider him Japanese, as one white immigrant admits.

All the “naturalized” gaijin go through an extensive procedure to prove they can speak Japanese fluently, in contrast to the United States, where naturalized aliens know little or no English or American history.

Still, my own experience with naturalized Japanese citizens reinforces Lam’s inadvertent point. As a federal immigration officer, I encountered an American woman who married a Japanese man. Because he was a government official, she had to naturalize. She did. She learned Japanese well and acculturated to some degree. But in the end, the marriage failed, most likely because a gaijin is never accepted as fully Japanese, citizenship regardless. (Marriages between Japanese men and white women rarely last.) Because she had to legally and fully repudiate her American citizenship to naturalize in Japan, to return home, her parents were required to sponsor her for a green card. She admitted she was never Japanese, but always an American. The Japanese agreed.

So much for whites who become naturalized Japanese citizens.

The second story concerns the hafu, a person who is half Japanese.

Lam presents the case of a Belgian hafu who realized that he wasn’t really Japanese when he had to decide which World Cup team he would support: Belgium’s or Japan’s. Full-blooded Japanese thought he should support Belgium because he wasn’t one of them.

“The best way to come to terms with who you are is just to accept that you may never be considered to be fully Japanese,” the Belgian hafu told Lam.

Consider the case of a man born to a Japanese woman whose black American soldier boyfriend abandoned her. Being the lowest of the hafu, black and Japanese, he had a difficult life.

“For [some] people, I’m Japanese. … But for Japanese people, I’m not Japanese.” In his native tongue, which is the Japanese language, he added, “people choose my identity without asking me.”

Another black hafu explained it this way:

I always felt it was like an insider-outside type deal. So, it’s like, you’re Japanese, or you’re not Japanese, and it wasn’t all that relevant what exactly you were, besides the fact you were not Japanese.

In other words, real Japanese decide who is Japanese, and whether one is a hafu or a naturalized gaijin, he will always be viewed as a mere citizen, not a true Japanese.

Another important case is that of the Zainichi Koreans. For almost 100 years, Korea was part of the Japanese Empire. Koreans were subjects of the Japanese Emperor and carried Japanese passports, but they were in no sense considered Japanese by the Japanese people.

Many still live in Japan. They are the largest non-Japanese ethnic group there. But even today they have their own schools, social organizations, and many still use Korean passports. Those with Japanese nationality do not consider themselves ethnic Japanese. They consider themselves Korean.

I’m Japanese “by nationality,” one of them told Lam. “But I don’t think I’m Japanese for sure.”

Indeed, he said, “I can never be.”

Contrast this with what we Americans are supposed to believe, and what we are endlessly told, about this country. Anyone can be an American, be he a German yodeler in lederhosen or a cannibal from New Guinea with a bone in his nose. The only requirement to become an American is wearing T-shirts and jeans from Walmart and scarfing down a steady diet of Big Macs and supersized fries.

Our country, we are to believe, does not have and never had one language or culture, or one majority race or religion, despite what Founding Father John Jay told us. It was always the polyglot “tangle of squabbling nationalities” that President Teddy Roosevelt warned against.

That’s preposterous, of course, but that’s where the leftist and the neoconservative claim that America is an idea, parroted by Traitor Joe Biden, has led us. And it partly explains the zeal for the Great Replacement, and Biden’s aiding and abetting an invasion of illegal aliens at the southwest border.

Our Globohomo Ruling Class cares not for our opinion about who is an American and who isn’t. But unlike our leaders, Japan’s leaders do care. They still defend the nation’s racial homogeneity because they are still connected to their people. Japan’s leaders still see themselves as Japanese.

The contrast with our country isn’t just stunning. It’s instructive.

The blogger Federale (Email him) is a 4th generation Californian and a veteran of federal law enforcement, including service in the legacy Immigration and Naturalization Service, the Department of Homeland Security, and other federal law enforcement agencies.

Federale’s opinions do not represent those of the Department of Homeland Security or the federal government, and are an exercise of rights protected by the 1st Amendment to the Constitution of the United States.