Gregory, I had a good laugh at your description of your friend’s wily response. Cheers.

In 2005, before Japan instituted the fingerprinting (it should be noted that Japan used to finger print foreign residents but stopped the practice in the 1990′s) a friend of mine, a British citizen who worked for the Foreign Office and was stationed in Pakistan, came back to Japan for a visit (he had lived there for a few years before joining the Foreign Office). The technique at the time to weed out terrorists was to ask them, in English “Are you a terrorist?”. My friend, using his guile, deftly answered “No” and he was allowed entry into the country.

As another example of the underlying xenophobia in Japan, read the English language newspapers (Japan Times, The Daily Yomuiri) and follow any and all crime stories. Whenever there’s a robbery or a murder, ‘eyewitnesses’ always claim that the suspect was ‘foreign’ (in this case meaning Chinese or Korean). I’ve even read statements from the police that say that the suspects are foreigners, but fail to offer any evidence to this theory. A few days later the suspect(s) will be caught, and they will all be Japanese.

“Of the few terrorist attacks in Japan, including the bombings of the headquarters of Mitsubishi Heavy Industries in Tokyo in 1974, which killed 207, and of the Hokkaido government office in 1976, which killed 80, and the sarin gas attacks by the Aum Shinrikyo cult in 1995, which killed 12, none was by foreigners.”

Given this history, and the different way Japan now treats foreigners and non-foreigners, it is hard to believe Japan’s new border regime is really a response to the threat of terror per se. It seems just as much a result of xenophobia and a legal code that grants less rights to foreigners–two trends we are also familiar with in the West, esp. the U.S., as you point out.