Japanese attitudes toward the world's blacks

In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Japanese first met Africans and Indians working as servants for Portuguese and Dutch merchants, who taught the Japanese analogies comparing blacks to animals. Commodore Matthew Calbraith Perry's first visit to Japan on the Black ships in 1853 reinforced the denigrating stereotypes of African peoples. When he returned in the following year, he held a reception for his Japanese guests onboard his flagship and the entertainment included a blackface minstrel show, which the Japanese enjoyed. In 1860, a Japanese mission visited the United States to learn about American culture. Its members accepted black slavery in the United States as normal and compared these slaves to their own outcasts. they saw blacks as pitifully ignorant, unsanitary, odorous, bad-mannered, physically repulsive, and sub-human. One samurai wrote, ‘I heard that the American term for “Africa” means “monkey”, and its natives personify monkeys.’

By the end of the nineteenth century, the Japanese were seeing the world Through Western, Social-Darwinist eyes and had formed a hierarchical view of the world's peoples. they placed themselves and other Asians between whites and blacks, and they idolized white society as providing the goal for Japan's development.

Japanese attitudes became more diverse as democratic ideas spread, and a few Japanese contacted activists and writers among black poets, activists, and intellectuals, such as W.E.B. DuBois. One Japanese scholar, Hikida Yasuichi, in the 1930s visited Tuskegee University and Hampton Institute.