Japan residents with foreign roots raise voices over racial profiling

Mr Syed Zain (middle), who is a naturalised Japanese citizen, has filed a lawsuit against the national and local governments over alleged illegal questioning by police based on racial profiling. PHOTO: REUTERS

UPDATED Jun 10, 2025, 11:56 AM

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TOKYO - Residents in Japan with foreign roots have started speaking out about being subjected to racial profiling by police, with some taking the issue to court, but supporters of their efforts warn that progress may be slow given apparent public indifference.

Although a survey suggests racial profiling has been carried out for years, only recently has the issue been publicly exposed in Japan.

“I am not saying Japanese police should not question citizens, including those with foreign appearance... but I want to know the logic behind it,” said Mr Zain Syed, a 27-year-old naturalised Japanese citizen. Born to Pakistani parents, Mr Syed has been stopped by police on the street at least 15 times.

He said that whenever he had asked officers for their reasons for stopping him, they insisted he was being treated no differently to anyone else. But convinced that he had been targeted solely based on his ethnicity, he decided to join a lawsuit, in a bid to pressure the government toprevent discriminatory interrogations.

Mr Syed, who is self-employed and lives in the suburbs of Nagoya in central Japan, is one of three male plaintiffs in a civil suit filed in January 2024 against the Aichi prefectural police, Tokyo metropolitan police and the state, seeking 3.3 million yen (S$29,300) in damages per person.

The response to his Twitter post in 2019 describing police treatment, such as being asked persistently to present a foreign resident’s card or passport despite identifying himself as a Japanese, also emboldened him to sue and help others in a similar or worse situation than him.

“I am trying to make Japanese society better by stopping questioning based on prejudice. There are many people like myself with foreign roots who are willing to make contributions to Japan,” said Mr Syed, who came to Japan as an eight-year-old from Pakistan along with his parents and received Japanese nationality at the age of 13.

But his acquisition of citizenship is a rare step in Japan, a country whose naturalised citizens accounted for less than 0.01 per cent of the total population in 2024.

A recent survey carried out by lawyers in the suit backs the plaintiffs’ view that the stopping and questioning of those with a foreign appearance often lacks the existence of “sufficient probable cause” to suspect the person has committed or is about to commit a crime – the requirements set out under the Police Duties Execution Act.

The survey, released in February , found that over 71 per cent of foreign nationals in Japan had been questioned by police on the streets in the past five years, a rate around 5.6 times higher than for Japanese.

This is despite the crime rate between Japanese and foreigners being roughly the same, the lawyers said, citing an analysis using official government data.

According to Justice Ministry statistics, out of 182,582 people in Japan investigated by the police in 2020 for suspected Penal Code offences, 9,529 were foreigners.

With the total population in the country, including foreigners, in that year standing at 123.35 million and non-Japanese at 6.34 million, the ratio of people subjected to criminal probes was 0.15 per cent for both Japanese and foreigners in Japan, the analysis showed.

The questionnaire, the first of its kind comparing police questioning of foreign nationals and Japanese, drew answers from 521 Japanese and 422 foreigners who have lived in Japan for five years or more, excluding those from the north-east Asian region apparently because they look similar to Japanese people.

In January 2021, advocacy group Japan for Black Lives posted on social media a video which showed a police officer saying “in our experience many people with dreadlocks carry drugs” when questioning a mixed-race man at a station in Tokyo. The post went viral.

The group’s founder, Ms Naomi Kawahara, said she could not just stand by to watch her friend being subjected to groundless questioning just because of his appearance. She added the incident is only one among many experienced by her friend and other foreign-born acquaintances.

That December, the US Embassy in Japan tweeted a warning to US citizens about foreigners being stopped and searched by Japanese police in suspected racial profiling incidents.

The National Police Agency issued an advisory the same month to all prefectural police forces to avoid questioning people in a way that could be perceived as racially motivated.

The written advisory read that when choosing who to stop and question, police officers “should not base their decisions solely on how they look, such as appearance and clothing”.

In November 2022, the agency’s first-ever internal survey on the issue of racial profiling confirmed six inappropriate cases across four prefectural police forces in 2021, involving officers who stopped people for reasons such as “it is rare for a foreigner to drive a car” or “people with dreadlocks have possessed drugs”.

In a move to enhance transparency of police questionings, police officers have started wearing body cameras on a trial basis to record interrogations in public spaces.

Mr Maurice Shelton, an African American man from Georgia who wears his hair in dreads and is another plaintiff in the suit, recounted how he had been interrogated by police at least 17 times since first coming to Japan in 2010.

“Just because you look a certain way, does that mean you can be stopped randomly by the police?” said the 42-year-old CEO of a personal training gym in Kanagawa Prefecture. “Is that something that I should have to deal with because I’m a foreigner, or because I’m a black person, or because I have darker skin, or because I have this hair?“

He said he was partly motivated to join the suit because he had also received such treatment in Georgia, which made him leave the US.

“I’ve been harassed by the police in America. I’ve had guns pulled on me by the police,” he said. “I don’t want Japan to be such a place.”

Mr Motoki Taniguchi, one of the lawyers representing the three plaintiffs, said in one court hearing: “Racial profiling is intentional racial discrimination exercised by public authorities and constitutes the most pernicious form of discrimination.”

“It is the responsibility of the court to confirm the illegality of such a practice and to put an end to it,” Mr Taniguchi said.

Prospects for change, however, were muddied recently by comments the justice minister made when explaining the introduction of pre-arrival screening for visa-free travellers from fiscal year 2028 and other measures to strengthen the immigration system.

“The government is being strongly urged to take action as public anxiety is growing against foreigners not following rules,” Justice Minister Keisuke Suzuki said in May, in comments that were viewed as potentially encouraging discriminatory attitudes.

According to Japan for Black Lives’ Ms Kawahara, the recent surge in inbound travellers and the growing discussion of “overtourism” issues, such as problematic behaviour by a small minority of visitors, are likely stirring a public she says is largely ignorant of prejudice issues to accept tight surveillance over people with foreign appearances.

“Some people say casually that the victims claiming they have been discriminated against are just being paranoid or that they don’t see a problem in the police stopping foreigners on the street,” she said.

“They say, ‘Why not let police stop you if you don’t have anything to hide.’” KYODO NEWS

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