It’s not like there’s anything wrong with your hair, the policeman politely explained to the young black man as commuters passed through Tokyo Station. It’s just that, based on his experience, people with dreadlocks were more likely to possess drugs.
Alonzo Omotegawa’s video of his stop and search in 2021 led to debate about racial profiling in Japan and an internal police review. For him, though, it was part of a long-standing problem that began when he was first interrogated as a 13-year-old.
“In their minds, they’re just doing their job,” said Mr. Omotegawa, 28, an English teacher who is half Japanese and half Bahamian, born and raised in Japan.
“I’m as Japanese as it gets, a little tan,” he added. “Not every black person will have drugs.”
Racial profiling is emerging as a flashpoint in Japan as growing numbers of migrant workers, foreign residents and mixed-race Japanese change the country’s traditionally homogenous society and test deep suspicion of foreigners.
With one of the world’s oldest populations and a stubbornly low birth rate, Japan has been forced to rethink its restrictive immigration policies. And as record numbers of migrant workers arrive in the country, many of the people tidying hotel rooms, working the register at convenience stores or flipping burgers are from places like Vietnam, Indonesia or Sri Lanka.
But foreign-born Japanese say social attitudes toward them have been slow to adjust. In January, three of them sued the Japanese government and local governments in Tokyo and Aichi, a nearby prefecture, over the conduct of their police forces. The plaintiffs said they were regularly subjected to random stops and searches because of their racial appearance.
It is the first legal case in Japan to argue that officers routinely rely on racial profiling in policing, a systemic issue that plaintiffs and experts say the Japanese public is largely unaware of.
Each of the three plaintiffs — one naturalized citizen and two longtime residents — said they were stopped for questioning several times a year. One of them, a Pacific Islander who has lived in Japan for more than two decades, estimated he had been questioned 70 to 100 times by police.
Motoki Taniguchi, a lawyer representing the plaintiffs, said perceptions in Japan were slow to catch up with the reality the country was already experiencing.
“Many Japanese people still have the illusion that we are such a homogenous country that we shouldn’t accept immigrants because they will tear society apart,” he said.
His clients’ experiences contradict what Japan’s National Police Service said it found in 2021 after Mr. Omotegawa’s video caused enough of a stir that the United States Embassy in Tokyo issued a warning warning Americans about racial profiling. Last year, police said, there were just six cases of racial profiling in a country with about three million foreign residents. Police officials defended their officers, saying they had acted without any “discriminatory intent” — even in the six cases — and that officers are trained to question people only on reasonable suspicion. He declined to comment on the lawsuit and said he did not have more recent profiling statistics.
The lawsuit, which seeks about $22,000 in monetary damages for each plaintiff and a court ruling confirming that the racially discriminatory police interrogation was against Japanese law, said some internal police guidelines expressly encourage profiling. As an example, he cited a 2021 police training manual from Aichi that encouraged officers to use drug, firearms or immigration laws to stop and question foreigners.
“Anything works!!” said the handbook for junior officers cited in the lawsuit, which was reviewed by The New York Times. “For those who seem foreign at first glance and those who do not speak Japanese, they firmly believe that they have, without exception, committed some kind of illegal act.”
Aichi police said they “could not confirm” that particular manual is currently in use.
In a 2022 survey by the Tokyo Bar Association, about six in 10 foreign residents in Japan said they had been interrogated in the past five years. The survey involved only foreign residents and did not provide comparative data for average Japanese citizens. Several foreign-born residents said in interviews that police profiling is universal.
Upadhyay Ukesh, 22, came to Japan from Nepal as a 14-year-old with his father. He was still a teenager in 2017, he said, when he was stopped on the way to school and four police officers made him raise his hands and searched his book bag. They found only pencils, erasers, notebooks and textbooks and sent him on his way.
Profiling has since become a regular nuisance, said Mr. Ukesh, who now works at a hotel in Osaka and oversees about 50 part-time workers, many of whom are not Japanese. Recently, he said, he was waiting for his girlfriend on the street when two police officers asked to search him.
“I let them check, but I really don’t like them checking my belongings for no reason,” she said.
Tran Tuan Anh, 35, a grocery store manager in Tokyo who first came to Japan from Vietnam as a foreign language student a decade ago, said he is stopped once or twice a year by the police. Once, police officers cornered him as he ran to haul trains. He said they appeared to suspect he had been involved in a recent stabbing.
“They thought I was a foreigner and chased me,” he said. “One officer stood in front of me and another behind me so I couldn’t get away.”
Akira Igarashi, a sociology professor at Osaka University, said that even as individual attitudes change in Japan, bureaucracies such as the police can become more hardened. Officers appear to be acting on a mistaken assumption that crime is more prevalent among immigrants, he said.
“The Japanese police don’t know that this is discrimination,” he said.
Such encounters can be particularly disturbing for the small but growing number of Japanese nationals, including Mr. Omotegawa, who are of mixed race or naturalized.
Laura Nagai, 31, who was born to a Sri Lankan mother and Japanese father, said she was repeatedly stopped for questioning by police on her way to work as a fitness instructor, causing her to be delayed. Her boss and co-workers didn’t seem to believe her, unbelievably it happened so regularly.
She said she learned about the term racial profiling from news reports about the recent lawsuit, allowing her to recount troubling experiences she’s had for most of her adult life.
“I think normal people in Japan don’t know this is happening,” Ms Nagai said.
