As commuters passed through Tokyo Station, a police officer politely explained to a young black man that there was nothing wrong with his hair. However, in his experience, people with dreadlocks were more likely to possess drugs.

Alonzo Omotekawa video His raid in 2021 led to a debate about racial profiling in Japan and an internal investigation by police. But for him, it was part of a long-standing problem that began when he was first interrogated at age 13.

“In their minds, they’re just doing their job,” says Mr. Omotegawa, 28, a half-Japanese and half-Bahamian English teacher who was born and raised in Japan.

“I look very Japanese, just a little tanned,” he added. “Not all black people turn to drugs.”

Racial profiling has emerged as a flashpoint in Japan, as a growing number of migrant workers, foreign residents and mixed-race Japanese people transform Japan’s traditionally homogeneous society and test deep-seated suspicions of outsiders.

Japan, with one of the world’s oldest populations and a stubbornly low birthrate, is being forced to reconsider its restrictive immigration policies.and as record number of migrant workers Many of the people who arrive in this country to clean hotel rooms, work cash registers at convenience stores, and flip burgers are from countries such as Vietnam, Indonesia, and Sri Lanka.

But foreign-born residents of Japan say social attitudes toward foreign-born people have been slow to adjust. In January, three of them sued the Japanese government and local governments in Tokyo and neighboring Aichi Prefecture over police conduct. The plaintiffs said they were regularly subject to unannounced stops and searches based on their racial appearance.

This is Japan’s first lawsuit alleging that police officers routinely rely on racial profiling in their enforcement operations, a systemic problem that plaintiffs and experts say the Japanese public is largely unaware of. claims.

Each of the three plaintiffs, one naturalized citizen and two longtime residents, said they were stopped for questioning multiple times a year. One of them, a Pacific Islander who has lived in Japan for more than 20 years, estimates he has been questioned by police 70 to 100 times.

Lawyer Motoki Taniguchi, representing the plaintiffs, said that Japan is slow to catch up with the reality that this country is already living in.

“Many Japanese people are still under the illusion that we are a mono-ethnic country and that we should not accept immigrants because they will destroy society,” he says.

His client’s experience contradicts what Japan’s National Police Agency said it had discovered in 2021, after Omotegawa’s video caused enough of an uproar to alert the U.S. Embassy in Tokyo. issued an alarm Warning Americans about racial profiling. The previous year, police said there were only six incidents of racial profiling in the country. Approximately 3 million foreign residents.Police officials defended their actions, claiming that the officers had committed the act. There is no “discriminatory intention” of any kind, — even in six cases — and that police officers are trained to only question people if they have reasonable suspicion. The company declined to comment on the lawsuit and said it did not have any more up-to-date statistics on profiling.

The lawsuit seeks monetary damages of approximately $22,000 for each plaintiff and a court ruling confirming that racially discriminatory police interrogations violate Japanese law and are part of internal police guidelines. stated that it explicitly encourages profiling. As an example, he cited Aichi Prefecture’s 2021 police training manual, which encouraged officers to use drug, firearms, and immigration laws to stop and question foreigners.

“Anything goes!” said a manual for junior officers cited in the lawsuit and reviewed by The New York Times. “If anyone appears to be a foreigner or does not speak Japanese, you can be sure that they have, without exception, committed some kind of illegal activity.”

Aichi Prefectural Police said it was “unable to confirm” whether a specific manual is currently in use.

In a 2022 survey by the Tokyo Bar Association, about 6 out of 10 foreigners living in Japan said they had been investigated in the past five years. The survey only targeted foreign residents, and did not provide comparison numbers with the average Japanese citizen. Several foreign-born residents said in interviews that they felt police profiling was universal.

Upadhyay Ukesh (22) came to Japan from Nepal with his father when he was 14 years old. In 2017, when he was still a teenager, he was stopped on his way to school, he said, and four police officers forced him to raise his hands and searched his book bag. They found only a pencil, an eraser, a notebook, and a textbook and sent him on his way.

Since then, Ukesh said, profiling has become a daily nuisance. Ukesh now works at a hotel in Osaka, supervising about 50 part-time workers, many of whom are not Japanese. Recently, he said, he was waiting for his girlfriend on the street when two police officers were asked to search her.

“I’m just letting them get it checked, but I really don’t want my stuff to be searched for no reason,” he said.

Tran Tuan Anh, 35, a Tokyo grocery store manager who first came to Japan from Vietnam 10 years ago as a language student, said he gets stopped by the police once or twice a year. Once, a police officer cornered him as he hurried to change trains. He said he appeared to suspect he was involved in the recent stabbings.

“They thought I was a foreigner and followed me,” he said. “One of the police officers stood in front of me and the other behind me to prevent me from running away.”

Akira Igarashi, a sociology professor at Osaka University, said that even if individual attitudes change in Japan, bureaucratic organizations such as the police may become more rigid. He said officers appeared to be acting under the false belief that crime was more prevalent among immigrants.

“Japanese police don’t know that this is discrimination,” he says.

Such encounters can be especially unpleasant for Omotegawa and a small but growing number of mixed-race and naturalized Japanese people.

Laura Nagai, 31, who was born to a Sri Lankan mother and a Japanese father, was on her way to work as a fitness instructor when she was stopped by police multiple times for questioning, causing her to be late. Her boss and co-workers didn’t seem to believe her, unable to believe that something like this could happen so often.

She said she learned of the term racial profiling from a news report about a recent lawsuit and was able to put a name to the disturbing experience she’s had for most of her adult life.

“I don’t think ordinary people in Japan know that something like this is happening,” Nagai said.