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In reply to the discussion: White DUers: Tell Your Stories [View all]Straw Man
(6,622 posts)I lived and worked in Japan for eight years. After several years in an apartment that I had found through an agency that specialized in ex-pats (with listings that were about 25% above market value), I decided to do my own housing search using regular Japanese real estate agencies.
I was turned down countless times because I wasn't Japanese. The reasons ranged from a curt "No foreigners" to the polite fiction that "You won't understand which days to put your garbage out." The places that were willing to accept me straight away were mostly dumps. When I finally found a decent place, I had to get a Japanese friend to sign for me as a character reference and financial guarantor.
It was all completely legal: no laws about housing discrimination at the time (1990s). I read somewhere that in 2016, the Japanese government commissioned a study on housing discrimination. That's a step in the right direction.
In addition to housing difficulties, I frequently had men curse me out when I went out in public with a Japanese woman. Sometimes they would address the woman directly, telling her that she was disgracing her country.
Japan is a marvelous country in many ways, but in other ways, not so much.