From
Debito, here is an utterly jaw-dropping level of officially-sanctioned racism.
The Fukushima prefectural tourist information website list of hotels has an explicit categorisation according to whether foreigners are permitted or not. And 318 of the hotels say "no gaijin" or "外国人の受入：不可"! This is about
15% of all lodgings. Another 15% allow foreigners, and the majority don't say one way or the other.
This discrimination is actually illegal, despite Japan (uniquely in the "developed" world, though in the context of human rights it is not clear that the term should apply here anyway) having no laws against racial discrimination. As Debito mentions in the post, there are some laws concerning hotel management that strictly limit the ability of a hotel to turn away customers - and these reasons do not include their nationality or race.
What's worse, this is more than a year after the Fukushima Tourist Information Agency agreed that the discrimination was clearly illegal and said they would get it removed from the web site. In fact the number of explicitly racist hotels has increased about 10-fold in this time.
Remember that the JGovt has not so long ago stated that it was
inconceivable that they could take any more action to reduce racial discrimination. Obviously even enforcing their own laws is beyond their wit and imagination.
[I'm not sure if I have told this story before, but we were once turned away from a hotel in the Fuji Five Lakes area. However this was early enough in our time here, and my Japanese was sufficiently poor, that I cannot be quite sure that the hotel really was refusing us illegally for being foreign. It does seem somewhat implausible, however, that the hotel was really closed for business since it had an open front door and someone on reception. At the time we were a bit tired and wet and went next door rather than trying to argue the point.]
