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Mr. Piccolo
17th February 2015, 18:16
I thought this story was very strange.


By Aislinn Laing, Johannesburg
3:10PM GMT 15 Feb 2015

South Africa has reacted with fury to a newspaper column by an adviser to Shinzo Abe, the Japanese prime minister, in which she praised apartheid as a model for her country's own immigration policy.

Ayako Sono, 83, who is also a bestselling conservative author as well as an education adviser to the government, wrote that it was necessary for Japan to accept immigrants, especially in order to care for the growing elderly population, but that they should live separately from the Japanese.


"Since I learned the situation in South Africa 20 to 30 years ago, I've come to believe whites, Asians and blacks should live separately," Miss Sono wrote in her regular column in the conservative Sankei newspaper on Wednesday.


She claimed that black Africans had "ruined" areas previously reserved for whites in South Africa, and would do the same thing in Japan if allowed to live where they chose.


She said that opening up to mass immigration, as Japan is considering doing, would only work if the country segregated races. "It is next to impossible to attain an understanding of foreigners by living alongside them," she said.

You can read the rest of the article here: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/japan/11414141/Japanese-author-provokes-furious-South-African-response-by-suggesting-a-new-apartheid.html

I did not know Japan was even considering opening up to immigration. Are these sentiments common in Japan or is Miss Sono an unusual case?

Anglo-Saxon Philistine
17th February 2015, 18:21
I don't think it's particularly strange, it's just the case of a politician actually saying what a lot of people are thinking, the poor bastard. And it wouldn't exactly be unprecedented; Japan, after all, depends quite a bit on immigrant Korean workers who are kept in a state of near apartheid even today.

Sperm-Doll Setsuna
17th February 2015, 19:11
Well, there's a lot of Iranian labourers (and some other south-asian ones) that have it a lot worse than the Koreans in terms of living conditions and estrangement (though the nationalists have a tendency to go against the Koreans first, probably some bitterness about losing the colony & heritage of the old colonial disdain)

Creative Destruction
17th February 2015, 19:26
traditionalist and conservative Japanese are notoriously racist, so this isn't too much of a surprise.

Yuli Ban
17th February 2015, 20:07
traditionalist and conservative Japanese are notoriously racist, so this isn't too much of a surprise.

Traditionalist and conservative humans in general are notoriously racist, so this isn't too much of a surprise.