this post was submitted on 24 Nov 2025
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Not entirely. But when you live in an ethnically homogeneous society you notice more subtle differences in people.
Japan isn't ethnically homogeneous. Westerners simply aren't interested in learning the history and social makeup of the island, or even acknowledge anyone lives outside Tokyo.
The Ainu, the Ryukyuans, and the Yamato are all distinct cohorts. And that's before you get into the post-Meiji cultural divergences.
The ainu and ryukyuan are a tiny fraction of the population, and there are only 2% of foreigners living in Japan, with half of those being Korean. There arent many countries with a lower diversity of population than that.
When you count mixed-race Japanese residents as Yamato by default, sure. When you deliberately blot out the historical genealogies as part of the fascist project of the post-Meiji Era, absolutely.
In the same way that somewhere north of 30% of the population in Vietnam has the last name Nguyen, we can pretend at homogeneity to salve the prickly attitudes people who desire the appearance of a uniform population. Ralphiel Cruz changes his name to Ted. Robert Francis O'Rourke changes his name to Beto. It has nothing to do with their racial composition and everything to do with their efforts to appear to fit in.
But if you believe Japan's 189M people all came out of the same petri dish, you're simply buying into a eugenics myth.