Context first. Rowe’s phrasing “past conduct persecuting many other Asian peoples” is not inaccurate as it goes, but it is misleading. Let’s remember a few things: the Han Chinese, Japanese, and Koreans are all racist (unless you take the Sister Souljah line that it’s impossible for the party with less social power in a relationship to be racist). All have a long tradition of believing that they are ethnically superior to foreigners, especially each other.

Japan, being a row of craggy islands, has generally been protected from invasion and thus has had more opportunities to be the aggressor than the attacked. Korea, conversely, being a peninsula between neighbors that have usually been stronger, has often been in a Poland-like position, and most of its bellicoseness has been turned inward. The DPRK still uses the Northerners’ sense of resentment at the southern Shilla and Choson dynasties for selling out Koreans in order to curry favor with various phases of the Chinese empire–a tactic of hilariously brazen hypocrisy on the DPRK’s part, considering that the regime has, from day one, depended on the PRC for its very existence.

In the mid-1800s, Japanese society emerged from a long isolationist period into an era of accelerated industrial growth that was cast as a recovery or “restoration” of its pure, superior Japaneseness. In reality, much that was touted as the Japanese “way” of this or that was a contemporary fabrication, or at least the stitching together of customs that had never taken rigid, codified form before. But however dubitable in historical accuracy, the Meiji Restoration gave the Japanese a sense of purposefulness and allowed the country to develop at a phenomenal rate. It set about becoming a world power through mimicry of existing world powers: industrialization and colonization.

Japan’s crushing defeat in World War II made it open to direction from its conquerors; but while the Japanese economy had collapsed, the social fabric remained. You don’t have to agree with all the compromises that were struck during the MacArthur era to acknowledge that Japanese society, with its good and bad points, had to form the basis for constitutionalization.

A lot of the resultant legal changes were, in fact, revolutionary. Article 9, with its renunciation of war powers, is the most famous. Making the Emperor symbolic but not political head of state (which the Meiji constitution had not, of course, done) was another widely-publicized change.

But there were others. For example, the new constitution contained an explicit prohibition against forced arranged marriage–previously unthinkable in a society in which duty to the family was absolute. Such a stipulation must have seemed close to anarchical to many traditionalists.

But the members of the constitution committee were not fools. They knew that reshaping Japan wholesale into the United States of the Orient wouldn’t work. So they did the next-best thing, planting democratic ideas and hoping they would germinate. Not surprisingly, some are taking longer than others. Discrimination based on race is outlawed by the constitution–but that just applies to citizens, and the rules for citizenship are, of course, defined by legislation passed later by the Diet. The law makes it extremely difficult for non-ethnic Japanese to naturalize. (Let’s not forget, however, that many resident Koreans and Chinese choose not to apply for citizenship.) The easy mixing of different ethnic strains, something Europeans and Americans take for granted, has not been present in Japan since before recorded history. It’s no big shock that it still hasn’t come to pass a mere 60 years after democratization.

The trajectory is good overall, I think–but progress is going to take a long, long time, and it’s not going to be linear. Directly confronting unpleasantness is not a strength that is valued here, and Japan still feels misunderstood over World War II. I do not endorse these ways of thinking. I only think it’s worth pointing out that they cannot be changed by fiat and that the recent social upheavals resulting from the 1991 bursting of the bubble have made many people, understandably, more ready to cling to the old ways. Resident non-citizens move around freely; they have the right of exit if they wish to leave Japan for a more hospitable place; and while certain jobs are closed to them, there are no impediments to their becoming rich if they work at it. That’s not the ideal, but it’s a far better start than minority populations have in many other countries.

Added on 14 July: I edited several paragraphs above for clarity.