As I understand it, Japan is seen to be like a parallel universe where the American South successfully seceded but became technologically advanced, even surpassing the North in some areas (by adopting a Meiji type constitutional monarchy)
What is characteristic of "the American South" here?
It actually makes it harder to tackle the discrimination, since it's not openly admitted. Glass walls and ceiling.
(Recommended read: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burakumin
'There is a "virtual taboo" in the Japanese media against discussing the topic, leading to widespread public ignorance.')
The society is based so strongly on group cohesion and de-emphasis of the individual, the experience of living there is very, very different than the West.
I think that this "deep cultural difference" is what the original comment was trying to get at. Sadly the reference point of "American South" ended up triggering a different (less useful) trajectory for the responses.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chichibu_incident)
The following may help--- if you think of Othello as a kind of ideal southern gentleman, as the Japanese sort of did
https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Othello-in-Tokyo%3A-Pe...
Now a Alt-Dixie readaptation of that adaptation must of course be the story of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nathan_Bedford_Forrest
(Taiwanese would be negroes loyal to the Cause, and Ainu would be the native Americans)
The biggest historical commonality between the American South and Japan - or, at least, the Tokugawa shogunate that was ruling around the same time as the South - was that both of them were at one point ruled by a cabal of essentially feudal lords. There is a lot of convergent social evolution that happens when your country's economic elite all make their money by owning land - lots of strange social titles, honorifics start floating around, people start talking around problems, and the like. However, this comparison is only skin deep, and there's plenty of things the Tokugawas did that have no parallel, or even worked backwards, to what happened in the historically contemporaneous American south:
- Sakoku (the policy of keeping Japan completely closed to trade and immigration).
- While America generally has had a long streak of veneration of the police, they never reinvented anything close to the samurai in terms of being a hereditary warrior class with a tax stipend.
- Likewise, the American South did not have a caste system; Japan did (and so did France?!?)
This makes more sense when you remember that the Tokugawa shogunate itself is the time reversal of the American South: the Tokugawas were born out of a long civil war and ended with a foreign invasion (from America) while the American South was born from foreign invasion (of Americans) and ended with a civil war.
The American South is also, interestingly enough, a mirror of Japan in other dimensions as well. The reason why the Tokugawas shut the country's borders for hundreds of years was because they understood that Christian missionaries were a front for a larger invasion force that would pillage the country's resources and abduct people to become slaves in other countries. Of course, the South was buying slaves abducted in other countries in massive quantities.
Going back to the convergent social evolution I mentioned before, you can see some of this in Japan today. Kyoto is notorious for doing exactly the same kind of backhanded compliment bullshit the South loves doing. But even then, that's one part of Japan, that was formerly the capital city. One stop on the Shinkansen takes you to Osaka where people are about as open and outgoing as Americans are.
They simply didn't want another religion. Buddhism was already troublesome enough with a long history of popular uprisings and many monasteries having become as powerful as daimyos. Oda Nobunaga had been mostly tolerant of religions and also of Christians, but he is infamous for bloody curbing their power. The Tokugawa didn't want any of that from happening again, regardless which religion.
There was also a strong motivation to deflate the power of the port cities. They were often in the hands of untrusted daimyos because the Tokugawa prioritized controlling inland regions with farmland and important road connections to keep the economy running and to ensure that troops could be deployed everywhere and kept supplied in case of rebellions.