As the foreign population in Japan increases – reaching 3.4 million in December 2023, an increase of over 10% year-on-year – the issue of racial profiling is the subject of growing opposition in the Archipelago. Testifying in April in the center-left daily newspaper Mainichi, an unnamed police officer confessed that he had come to consider "that the orders given to 'crackdown on foreigners' – in other words, judge them on their appearance alone – constituted a violation of human rights."

The officer, who spent 10 years in the police force, recounted how he was assigned to a local police station and had to "target foreigners for questioning and checking their residence cards." "There was a 'month of repression of foreigners' during which we had to redouble our efforts to check cards, but also [to] search them for drugs or knives," he said. The order came from the Criminal Investigation Division, which was on the lookout for undocumented immigrants. The checks were not targeted at any particular ethnic group, but, the officer pointed out, there was prejudice against "blacks and Southeast Asians" and Koreans – who represent Japan's second-largest foreign population and have long faced discrimination.

Racial profiling was condemned in 2020 by the UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination, which recommended action to prevent it. On the Archipelago, the issue was publicly raised, in December 2021, when the US embassy in Japan expressed concern on its Twitter account that it had "received an increasing number of testimonies of foreigners stopped and searched by police for no reason other than racial profiling."

In response to this message, Japanese lawmakers asked the National Police Agency to conduct an internal investigation. In November 2022, the latter acknowledged six cases of inappropriate or unjustified screening based on racial stereotypes. At the time, and while Japan was banning all entry due to the Covid-19 pandemic, the police intensified checks on foreigners to find those in an undocumented situation. In particular, they targeted neighborhoods with large foreign populations, such as Tokyo's Okubo district.

A negative image

A survey by the Tokyo Bar Association, conducted between January and February 2022, further revealed that 62.9% of the 2,094 foreign residents surveyed had been questioned by the police in the last five years. Of them, 85.4% were approached because they were foreigners.

On January 29, three people filed a complaint against the Japanese government over this issue. Maurice, a black American who goes only by his first name, complained that he had been stopped "16 or 17 times" since arriving in Japan 10 years ago. Zain Syed, a Pakistani who became Japanese at the age of 13, claimed to have been checked by the police 15 times since moving to Nagoya (in the center of the country) in 2016. Yet, he explained, these checks reflect negatively on people. "I think there is a very strong image associating 'foreigner' with 'criminal.'"

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