A lodging facility in Kyoto has drawn a protest from the Israeli Embassy in Tokyo for asking an Israeli man to sign a pledge that he had never been involved in war crimes.
A lodging facility in Kyoto has drawn a protest from the Israeli Embassy in Tokyo for asking an Israeli man to sign a pledge that he had never been involved in war crimes.
I’m not saying it’s the right thing to do but a big difference here is that up until VERY recently, the US did not have an official language, so for them to say “English only” would be a bit more offensive than for Japan (whose official language is Japanese) to say “japanese only”.
Additionally, the US is on colonized land, so English wouldn’t be the native language of the land. Japan on the other hand has existed for close to 40,000 years and was not colonized in the same way (Not saying that the Japanese historically haven’t been colonizers, but the island of Japan is generally not). I genuinely wouldn’t even be mad about it if someone in Manitoba made a rule that was like “Ojibwe only”.
But also to your point, yeah the US did recently pick an official language AND launch an “English only” campaign for a whole profession and it is extremely fucked up.
Some parts of Japan, such as Hokkaido, can be considered to be colonized as its native people are the Ainus, not the Yamato people (the Japanese ethnicity).
The Yamato themselves didn’t didn’t exist for 40’000 years. It was during the 4th century BC to the 7th century CE that their main ancestors, the Yayoi and the Toraijin, migrated to Japan and displacd the Joumon people to the North. The latter had been in Japan for a much longer time.