The Japanese social welfare as a driver of racist discourses

Racism in Japan has characteristics that can be traced back to social and cultural historical constructs. The manifestations of this structural component of Japanese society are multidimensional, as well as multi-level, as they act both at the institutional level and in everyday life. Social welfare is precisely one of the areas in which racism is expressed. It is a vehicle for discrimination, institutionalised in its social and cultural embeddedness. At the same time, it becomes a means of feeding hate and racism, used as a popular racialised discourse. Japanese racism, integrated into its welfare system and instrumentalised through racialised welfare discourses, has become an integral part of the hate speech phenomenon, with its rules and peculiarities. This chapter aims to explore the multidimensionality of Japanese racism through a multi-level analysis of the national ‘racialised welfare discourse’. Its modes of action and the spheres in which it occurs will be examined, taking into consideration the institutional and non-institutional actors involved. The different platforms where racism through welfare spreads will also be analysed. This work focuses on primary data processed through a small-scale qualitative content analysis of the most relevant social media channels to define, inductively, current social and cultural phenomena.