Alonzo Omotegawa’s video of his 2021 stop and search led to debates about racial profiling in Japan and an internal review by the police. For him, though, it was part of a perennial problem that began when he was first questioned as a 13-year-old.
阿朗佐·表川（音）2021年遭警察拦下搜身的视频引发了关于日本种族定性(profiling)的辩论及警方的内部审查。然而，对他来说，这属于一个老问题了，从他13岁第一次受到盘查时就已经开始。
“In their mind, they’re just doing their job,” said Mr. Omotegawa, 28, an English teacher who is half-Japanese and half-Bahamian, born and raised in Japan.
“在他们看来，这不过是在做自己的工作，”28岁的表川说。他是一名英语教师，一半日本血统，一半巴哈马血统，在日本出生、长大。
“I’m like as Japanese as it comes, just a bit tan,” he added. “Not every Black person is going to have drugs.”
“我是个不折不扣的日本人，只是肤色更黑一点，”他补充道。“不是每个黑人都有毒品。”
Racial profiling is emerging as a flashpoint in Japan as increasing numbers of migrant workers, foreign residents and mixed-race Japanese change the country’s traditionally homogenous society and test deep-seated suspicion toward outsiders.
随着越来越多的移民工人、外国居民和混血日本人正在改变日本传统的单一族群社会，并考验着对外来者根深蒂固的怀疑，种族定性正在成为日本的一个引爆点。
With one of the world’s oldest populations and a stubbornly low birthrate, Japan has been forced to rethink its restrictive immigration policies. And as record numbers of migrant workers arrive in the country, many of the people tidying up hotel rooms, working the register at convenience stores or flipping burgers are from places like Vietnam, Indonesia or Sri Lanka.
日本是世界上老龄化最严重的国家之一，而且出生率一直很低，因此不得不重新考虑其限制性的移民政策。随着创纪录数量的外籍劳工来到日本，许多打扫酒店客房、便利店收银或做汉堡的人来自越南、印度尼西亚或斯里兰卡等国。
But Japan’s foreign-born residents say social attitudes toward them have been slow to adjust. In January, three of them sued the Japanese government and the local governments in Tokyo and Aichi, a nearby prefecture, over the conduct of their police forces. The plaintiffs said they had been regularly subjected to random stops and searches because of their racial appearance.
但在外国出生的日本居民说，社会对他们的态度调整得很慢。今年1月，有三名生活在日本、生于外国的人士起诉日本政府以及东京和附近爱知县的地方政府，指控警察行为不当。原告表示，他们经常因自己的种族样貌遭遇随机拦截和搜查。
It’s the first legal case in Japan to argue that officers routinely rely on racial profiling in policing, a systemic issue that the plaintiffs and experts say the Japanese public is largely oblivious to.
这是日本第一起认为警察在执法中经常依赖种族定性的官司，原告和专家表示，日本公众在很大程度上对这一系统性问题视而不见。
Each of the three plaintiffs — one naturalized citizen and two longtime residents — said they had been stopped for questioning multiple times a year. One of them, a Pacific Islander living in Japan for more than two decades, estimated that he’d been questioned 70 to 100 times by the police.
三名原告——一名入籍公民和两名长期居民——都表示，他们每年都会数次被拦下并盘问。其中一名在日本生活了20多年的太平洋岛民估计，他被警方盘问了70到100次。
Motoki Taniguchi, a lawyer representing the plaintiffs, said that perceptions in Japan had been slow to catch up to a reality that the country was already living.
代表三名原告的律师谷口太规表示，日本人的观念迟迟没有跟上这个国家的现实。
“Many Japanese are still in the illusion that we are such a homogenous country, that we shouldn’t take immigrants because they will break society,” he said.
他说：“许多日本人仍然抱有幻觉，认为我们是一个单一族群国家，我们不应该接纳移民，因为他们会破坏社会。”
His clients’ experiences conflict with what Japan’s National Police Agency said it found in 2021, after Mr. Omotegawa’s video caused enough of a stir that the United States Embassy in Tokyo issued an alert warning Americans of racial profiling. The year before, the police said, there had been just six cases of racial profiling in a country with about three million foreign residents. Police officials defended their officers, saying they had acted without any “discriminatory intent” — even in the six cases — and that officers are trained to question people only with reasonable suspicion. It declined to comment on the lawsuit and said that it did not have more recent statistics on profiling.
发生在他客户身上的遭遇与日本警视厅在2021年的说辞存在矛盾。当时，表川的视频引起很大轰动，以至于美国驻东京大使馆特意提醒在日本的美国人注意存在种族定性的可能性。而警方表示，前一年，在这个有约300万外国居民的国家只有六起种族定性案件。警视厅为警察辩护说，他们的行为不存在任何“歧视意图”——即使在这六起案件中也是如此——而且警察受过训练，只有在合理怀疑的情况下才会进行盘问。警视厅拒绝就这起诉讼发表评论，并表示没有关于种族定性的最新统计数据。
The lawsuit, which seeks monetary damages of about $22,000 for each plaintiff and a court ruling confirming that racially discriminatory police questioning was against Japanese law, said that some internal police guidelines explicitly encourage profiling. As an example, it cited a 2021 police training manual from Aichi that encouraged officers to use laws on drugs, firearms or immigration to stop and question foreigners.
该诉讼要求向每个原告赔偿2.2万美元的损失，并要求法院做出裁决，确认带有种族歧视的警方盘问违反了日本法律。诉讼称，警方的一些内部原则明确鼓励种族定性，并援引爱知县2021年的一份警察培训手册，该手册鼓励警察利用关于毒品、枪支或移民的法律拦截、盘问外国人。
“Anything works!!” said the manual for junior officers cited in the lawsuit, which was reviewed by The New York Times. “For those who appear to be foreigners at first glance and those who do not speak Japanese, firmly believe that they have, without exception, committed some sort of illegal act.”
“什么都行！！”诉讼引用的那本初级警官培训手册里写道，《纽约时报》查阅了手册内容。“对于那些看起来似乎是外国人和不会说日语的人，坚信他们无一例外地犯下了某种违法行为。”
The Aichi police said it “couldn’t confirm” the specific manual is currently in use.
爱知县警方表示，它“无法确认”培训目前采用的是该手册。
In a 2022 survey by the Tokyo Bar Association, roughly six out of 10 foreign residents in Japan said they had been questioned in the past five years. The survey polled only foreign residents and did not give comparative figures for average Japanese citizens. Several foreign-born residents said in interviews that police profiling feels universal.
在东京律师协会2022年的一项调查中，大约60%的在日外国居民表示，他们在过去五年中经历过盘问。该调查仅针对外国居民，没有给出普通日本公民的比较数据。几位外国出生的居民在接受采访时表示，警察以样貌定性的做法似乎很普遍。
Upadhyay Ukesh, 22, came to Japan from Nepal as a 14-year-old with his father. He was still a teenager in 2017, he said, when he was stopped on his way to school and four officers had him raise his hands and searched his book bag. They found only pencils, an eraser, notebooks and textbooks, and sent him on his way.
22岁的乌帕德亚伊·乌克什14岁时随父亲从尼泊尔来到日本。他说，2017年他还是个十几岁的孩子，在上学的路上被拦下，四名警察让他举起双手，搜查他的书包。他们只找到了铅笔、橡皮擦、笔记本和教科书，然后把他打发走。
Profiling has since become a regular nuisance, said Mr. Ukesh, who now works at a hotel in Osaka and oversees about 50 part-time workers, many of whom are not Japanese. Recently, he said, he was waiting for his girlfriend on the street when two officers asked to search him.
乌克什现在大阪的一家饭店工作，管理着大约50名兼职员工，其中许多不是日本人。他说，不久前，他在街上等女朋友时，两名警察要对他进行搜查。
“I just let them check, but I really don’t like them checking my belongings without reasons,” he said.
“我只得让他们搜查，但我真的不喜欢他们无来由地检查我的东西，”他说。
Tran Tuan Anh, 35, a grocery store manager in Tokyo who first came to Japan from Vietnam as a language student a decade ago, said that he is stopped once or twice a year by the police. Once, officers cornered him as he rushed to transfer trains. He said they seemed to suspect he had been involved in a recent stabbing.
35岁的陈俊英（音）是东京一家杂货店的经理，十年前作为一名语言生从越南来到日本，他说自己每年都会被警察拦下一两次。有一次，他赶着换乘火车时，警察把他围住了。他说，他们似乎怀疑他与不久前的一起持刀伤人事件有关。
“They thought I was a foreigner and chased me,” he said. “One officer stood in front of me and another behind me so that I couldn’t escape.”
“他们认为我是外国人，就追我，”他说。“一名警官站在我前面，另一名警官在我身后，这样我就无法逃跑了。”
Akira Igarashi, a sociology professor at Osaka University, said that even as individual attitudes change in Japan, bureaucracies like the police can be more sclerotic. Officers appear to act based on an incorrect presumption that crime is more prevalent among immigrants, he said.
大阪大学的社会学教授五十岚彰表示，虽然日本的个人态度发生了变化，但像警察这样的官僚机构可能会更加僵化。他说，警察的行动似乎是基于一个错误的假设，即移民当中的犯罪行为更普遍。
“Japanese police don’t know that this is discrimination,” he said.
“日本警察不知道这是歧视，”他说。
Such encounters can be particularly jarring for the small but growing number of Japanese nationals, including Mr. Omotegawa, who are of mixed race or have been naturalized.
对于表川这种人数虽然不多却在不断增加的混血或归化国民来说，这样的遭遇可能尤其令人不快
Lora Nagai, 31, who was born to a Sri Lankan mother and a Japanese father, said that the police repeatedly stopped her for questioning on her way to work as a fitness instructor, making her late. Her boss and colleagues didn’t seem to believe her, incredulous that it was happening so regularly.
31岁的劳拉·永井（音）的母亲是斯里兰卡人，父亲是日本人。身为健身教练的她在去上班的路上多次被警察拦下问话，导致迟到。她的老板和同事似乎不相信她的话，不相信这种事情会如此频繁地发生。
She said she learned of the term racial profiling from news reports about the recent lawsuit, allowing her to name the unsettling experiences she’d had for most of her adult life.
她说，她从最近这起诉讼的新闻报道中知道了“种族定性”这个说法，这让她成年后大部分时间里遭遇的那种令人不安的经历，有了一个称呼。
“I think normal people in Japan don’t know this is happening,” Ms. Nagai said.
“我认为日本的普通人并不知道有这样的事情发生，”永井说。
Victoria Kim是驻首尔的记者，主要负责报道国际突发新闻。点击查看更多关于她的信息。
Hisako Ueno自2012年以来一直为时报报道日本的政治、商业、性别、劳工和文化相关新闻。1999年至2009年期间她曾在《洛杉矶时报》东京分社工作。点击查看更多关于她的信息。
翻译：杜然
