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The short answer is: no, you can't, but it's really not a problem. I assume your profile picture is accurate, and you are a white male. The Western notion that everybody should get an even break, regardless of background or appearance, just doesn't exist here in Japan. The Japanese feel entitled to judge according to appearances. White men have a role ...

I can't say that I completely understand your situation (I am, after all, of European descent), but you should not be surprised to find out that Some people are stupid have prejudices I have indeed been treated sometimes differently for being Eastern European (and proud of it!), and the thing that I found works best is to just ignore them and pretend that ...

Not at all. I lived in Georgia from November 2011 to May 2012 and there were lots of people visiting from nearby Muslim and Arab countries. In fact Georgia seemed one of the easiest countries to travel to for various Muslim and Arab countries going by conversations I had with people I met while working there in a backpacker hostel. I think in terms of ...

It's hard to make general statements about this issue because it's different for every region, business and individual. I'll just list some points: In general, explicit discrimination (i.e. a sign "Japanese customers only") is rare, I don't think there are any "places where a significant proportion of establishments discriminate against foreigners". The ...

Japan is a much more culturally and racially homogeneous society than the US, and within the Japanese population, people enjoy lower barriers to trust because of these shared norms. I remember once when I was a kid, me and my family were flying to Japan, and my Japanese mom started chatting with a Japanese lady in the seat next to her. A few hours later, the ...

Wasn't aware of any discrimination what so ever when I traveled in Japan. I was told that foreigners weren't allowed in some hotels. Personally I was never rejected. My guess it is as common as in any other country. Maybe I am just to thick to have noticed any. In that case you have your answer, just be as thick ;) Actually I would say the opposite. People ...

I'd like to preface this with saying that I don't agree with the prejudice but I acknowledge the fact that it exists and with that painful point in mind here are my thoughts and advice. The bad news is without actual interaction, it's really hard to change somebody's silent prejudice. To put people at ease around you that you are not going to actually speak ...

First of all, reading Debito.org will give you quite a misleading picture of Japan. The guy's on a crusade to ferret out every piece of discrimination and "discrimination" he can and, while I respect some of the stuff he's done, he goes way overboard at times. So the good news is that as a white guy, you've very unlikely to run into overt discrimination. ...

Namaste HaLaBi! In my experience, and my opinion, behaving in a friendly and respectful AND assertive manner goes a long way. I am a what people would call a "white South African", and have travelled in Turkey, Greece, Egypt and Indonesia, to name a few. In spite of dressing modestly (long skirts, arms completely covered and hair covered) I was constantly ...

What criteria would you use to label people xenophobic? And would these criteria really reflect your own experience visiting these places? In an article on xenophobia in European cities published in "Business Insider", the criterion is the answer "strongly/somewhat disagree" to the statement "The presence of foreigners is good for the city" in the EU survey ...

While a different type of attention, as a blond Caucasian people would stare when I was walking around South America, and point, and you'd hear "gringo, gringo" and often some choice words after that. A few cheery words back in my awful Spanish would get a laugh and they'd carry on as per normal. I had a friend who was of Sri Lankan descent, who grew a ...

There's no hard/fast way to measure this. Do you do it on race? Or just foreigners? Or how they're treated in their country? Or the distribution of race in a country? One international means of 'measuring' might be to look at the "Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination" - a document with 86 signatories and 175 parties. Several ...

I lived in Japan for a year and a half in the mid 90's. I was, at the time, fairly fluent in Japanese and very respectful of their customs. I remember one night, a few friends and I were out on the town and we stopped outside a bar and started talking to the doorman. After several minutes of friendly chatting in Japanese, we started to walk inside. ...

This trip, I stayed in Sapporo, Zao Onsen, Sendai, and a few nights in Tokyo. Outside of the adult entertainment industry, and a store that sold weapons inter alia, I didn't face any discrimination on the basis of race or nationality. I went to bars in all of these locations, and didn't have any problems. I went to onsen in Zao Onsen, Tsuru no yu onsen, and ...

There is explicit discrimination in some places, but these are based on the behavior of the foreigners in the past. When you try to rent an apartment, sometimes foreigners are explicitly rejected (sometimes in written form in advertisement). The reason varies for different nationalities of people. The major concern a landlord has with Westerners, ...

One does not simply measure xenophobia. There is this long forum thread: Name the most/least xenophobic countries. This article, These 20 cities may be the most xenophobic in Europe, uses a survey (PDF in article). A black friend of mine told me that it was not possible for him to go to Russia because of racism, some internet research backs that up. ...

Well...this is difficult to answer, because how many is 'common'? However, I've stayed in hostels in Australia, New Zealand, all over Europe, Central and northern Asia, USA/Canada and South America, and I can't recall a time that I've seen them charge EXTRA for female dorms - EXCEPT when there were fewer beds. Now, it's fairly common to charge more for ...

I am from a super minority and travel 4 times a month and based on my experience: 1 - First look clean and healthy (no red/yellow eyes) 2 - Pack clean and feel free to use the post office to send over things that could irritate the custom officer 3 - Prepare your documents and fill all forms before getting to the counter 4 - Look at your passport as ...

One of the assumptions I had was that banning a subset of a group (eg Russians) is less discriminatory than banning the whole group (eg all foreigners). That may have been an incorrect assumption. When all foreigners are banned, it's like "we like nihonjin", whereas if a particular group were banned, it'd be like "we remember when your mates trashed the ...