Racial Profiling in Japan: Always a Foreigner

Racial inequality and discriminatory practices continue to disrupt the lives of millions of people and limit their opportunities, significantly reducing their quality of life. Despite the adopted international and national documents, the issue is far from resolved. Racial profiling has long been under international scrutiny and is a major concern. This is a special type of discrimination that flourishes in developed countries, in which law enforcement agencies are directly involved. The police practice of racial profiling, in which people are targeted or criminalized based on factors such as nationality, skin color or ethnic origin rather than objective evidence or illegal behavior, has become a persistent problem in Japan. Japan is an ethnically homogeneous state, so the situation with racial profiling is particularly acute, but Japanese authorities in the vast majority of cases ignore or hush up this problem, giving the green light to the further development of ethnic discrimination and creating a negative attitude towards foreigners in Japanese society.