As someone who lived in Japan, most everyone is extremely friendly to your face, especially if you are a tourist and demonstrate some ability to speak Japanese or know about the culture. Out right rudeness is extremely rare, especially in the Kantou region.

But when you live there you learn about the underlying racism.

If you could pass as Japanese, because you are of east Asian descent, you will be fully expected to be completely fluent in the language and culture. If you aren't then you must be extremely dumb, because you are Asian after all. Any insight you might have coming from a western country is disregarded, because why would you know anything the collective society doesn't already know. When I was switching from teaching English to a tech job, I recommended a childhood friend I grew up with in America to take over my position. He was making far less teaching at a much worse eikaiwa school. In Japan, you include a picture with your resume, and when my boss saw that he was Filipino American, he outright said they would prefer someone who looks American and went with a previous coworker I had told him was awful.

If you aren't obviously east Asian you get the opposite treatment. You'll constantly be complimented on your ability to do basic things like pick up food with chopsticks and the ability to say hello. If you can have a conversation, there will be constant "compliments" on it. It gets annoying very quickly.

But when it rears its ugly head the worse is when you try to do anything real in the country a tourists wouldn't normally do. Lots of people in Tokyo bike to various places, but when I studied there we were warned to either buy a bicycle and make sure its registered or just never ride. Borrowing a friends bicycle was outright forbidden. At some point you will be stopped by the police and if you can't prove you own the bike or have permission to ride it, you will be taken in until they figure out the owner. The few students who did get bikes were stopped atleast once every couple weeks.

Depending on perspective the racism can be considered light atleast. Black and brown friends usually would say the annoyances were atleast obvious and evenly applied. The racist landlord will tell you up front that hes going to increase the monthly rent on the apartment you're trying to rent because he "had problems with foreigners" before and you don't have a song and dance with a racist person that really doesn't want to rent to you finding constant issues with your application until you give up. You can quickly scout around to find someone who agrees not to do that or atleast less so. Certain banks will outright deny certain services to foreigners, but if you know the right banks you can get a credit card. The police will bother you, but if you have your gaijin papers they aren't going to beat you or make up charges. For white friends it was usually extremely shocking that such things existed at all and usually were the most vocal about the societal racism they were experiencing for the first time in their lives. But I think it made them more sympathetic generally to people from their home countries.

Despite all of that, I loved my years in Japan. A lot of the smaller annoyances usually go away once you actually get to know people and explain the issues you're having. One girlfriend even took it on herself to explain to new friends how condescending it was to say I can use chopsticks so well after living in the country for multiple years. Often times its ignorance not malice and people understand. But there are definitely issues you will have if you're a foreigner and you move to Japan.