Social media and anti foreigner sentiment

I am from Europe married to a Japanese spouse with PR status living between Tokyo and Osaka. I have lived in Japan about 25 years.

For personal reasons I had to create a TikTok account and connect with someone overseas. I’ve never had a TikTok account before and I only set it up for this particular purpose.

As far as I am aware the only information the app had on me was my location (although I thought I had opted out of tracking on my iPhone, it had somehow spotted that I was near Shizuoka).

For the novelty value I thought I would flick through the app. I was served a variety of “tiktoks” mainly from Asia, perhaps due to the one person I connected with being in Asia but outside Japan.

There were also a lot of videos from Japan. About a third to a half of them were “anti-foreigner”; the rest were on a variety of topics.

The “anti-foreigner“ videos included videos apparently from private individuals celebrating how foreigners who don’t speak Japanese would be expelled (disinformation of course), complaining about immigrants and immigration, celebrating tougher measures to deport foreigners etc. Some others were apparently news items reporting in a congratulatory manner on tougher measures to solve the “foreigner problem”, the remainder were mostly reporting on crimes committed by foreigners in Japan.

Needless to say none of the other Japan videos reported crimes committed by Japanese and none had political content. The only ”political” or “current affairs” content was the anti foreigner sentiment i described above.

I suspect these videos are a mixture of inauthentic activity, activist activity and private individuals -although it would be difficult to work out which is which.

I would be interested to hear from other people repeating this (unplanned) experiment on TikTok or on other social media sites and whether or not they experienced the same. I suspect this is not limited to TikTok.

I would also suggest that the people that say foreigners in Japan are overreacting to the anti foreigner sentiment wake up from their complacency. This experience certainly woke me up, if I’m allowed to say “woke” these days.