Maybe because they’re both island nations with an isolationist culture, but there are definitely parallels to be drawn between the treatment foreigners get in the UK and in Japan. Growing up, being Polish was the identity others assigned to me and how they identified me and the main way in which I was described, and people make a lot of assumptions about me based on it. I used to get asked if I was Jewish a lot growing up because I have pretty stereotypically Slavic features, for example, and one time a teacher described me as “sallow skinned” after seeing I have an ethnic name on the school register.
Comment on Will I ever be seen as truly British?
stembolts@programming.dev 1 month ago
As an American it always seemed strange to me the perception of someone as an outsider. I know other Americans do it too so it’s not like we are some special snowflake country, we have a lot of intolerance of course.
But idk, to me Americans have all sorts of accents, indian/asian, hispanic, african, australian, whatever. I never considered that someone who sounds different wouldn’t be the same as every other American.
Not sure if this train of thought is shared by other countries. I have heard that Japanese people will basically never consider anyone not native to Japan as anything other than foreign. That is a strange thought to me.
I guess I’m bad at being bigoted.
CalciumDeficiency@lemmy.world 1 month ago
lvxferre@mander.xyz 1 month ago
I think that the key difference is that plenty societies were built with the “immigration” mindset. It isn’t just the ones in USA, but mostly the whole New World. And even if the “bulk” of the immigration in the XIX and XX centuries is over, the mindset is still here.
As opposed to the typical society in the Old World where, if you were born somewhere, odds are that your grand-grand-grand-grandparents were also born there, like Japan and UK-minus-London.
trolololol@lemmy.world 1 month ago
Australia is great at this. It has a crazy number of migrants, if I’m not mistaken 50% of people is either 1st Gen Australian or 0th Gen like OP and me.
zephorah@lemm.ee 1 month ago
We’re a larger melting pot. In fact, that’s kind of our schtick. In spite of the racial shit, it swings entirely the other way as well. It’s a big country. England doesn’t cover a lot of surface area. 68million vs 341.5million.
Regionally there’s dialect nuance based on immigration. We’re a country of immigrants. If we’re discussing Poland then let’s talk Wisconsin. You can’t throw a stick in any direction without hitting a “ski” last name. People actually say shit like “borrow me your car Friday” or “borrow me a pencil”, instead of “lend”. My understanding is borrow and lend are the same word in Polish, context telling you what you need to know. All without identifying as Polish, just Midwest American, as far as I can tell. Even though we’re younger as a country, we’ve had time for that to happen.
lvxferre@mander.xyz 1 month ago
That’s correct. The distinction between lender and borrower is given by the case, so the same verb works for both.