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Comment by remyrylan | Hacker News Reader

Why is that a bad thing? Every single race or culture has a right to want to preserve itself. Maybe you have some personal issues you need to work out before you go off projecting self hatred onto other cultures.

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What is a race?

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>Every single race has a right to want to preserve itself and it's culture.

"Japanese" isn't a race, and culture isn't a function of racial identity.

If these things were true, then American culture would belong only to one race, and it clearly doesn't.

Japanese is a race.

No, "Asian" is a race, "Japanese" is a nationality, which doesn't necessarily require one be Asian.

Aren't there specific ethnic groups indigenous to Japan, that one might refer to collectively as the 'Japanese' regardless of nationality ?

Ainu is a race, as are Yamato and Ryukyuan. Asian is a much bigger race, then we have nationalities. Sometimes Japanese is used to mean Yamato.

Also, see Han (ethnicity) and Chinese (nationality), where outside of China the latter is often used to mean the former.

Fair enough, and I'm sure that when Japanese nationalists talk about Japanese as a race, they probably mean Yamato, but that doesn't make it accurate to describe "Japanese" as a singular ethnic or racial identity.

It isn’t accurate but nor is it exactly wrong. The word is very contextual. Most nationalities can be construed into races, and many things we considered race today arose from nationalities a long time ago (in the long run they blend together).

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