>>52
Slavery may have ended with the Civil War, but really bad, blatant racism continued for another century or so. There were an awful lot of lynchings, you know. There were also things like the "sundown towns", where it was a rule - sometimes even blatantly stated! - that black people had better not be in town after sundown, lest they get assaulted, lynched, or otherwise killed. However, I mostly agree with your assessment of contemporary attitudes about racism (see below).

>>63
Now that I realized what you mean, I'm thinking about it more. I run a Beatmania IIDX website, and I've seen Japanese web masters apparently annoyed that I, a mostly English-language site, linked to them. I suspect it's, in part, reaction to things like Western anime fans copying fanart, but since I don't actually know any Japanese people that run websites, and am too busy to hang out on 2ch, and too embarrassed to ask on these web sites' BBSes, I haven't asked.

I would guess that, generally, most Japanese people don't have real day-to-day exposure to non-Japanese people, so foreigners are a little weird at first, but given enough time most Japanese people would overcome this. So, Japanese people come off as xenophobic, but not because they actually hate foreigners. Sure, there are Japanese that hate foreigners, just like there are Americans who hate anything that's not American. Sure, Japan has done really atrocious things in the past (like most countries), and I think Japan does itself a disservice by not sucking it up and admitting to it outright. However, I don't think the rest of the world is served well by being judgemental about it, per se. Granted, I don't have any family that remember when their part of the world was occupied by Japanese military forces, but at some time you just have to suck it up, try to let the past go, and try to work towards the future instead.

Oh, and ...

>>62
Please don't take offense at any of my guesses here. I'm trying to draw conclusions about people I don't know, and I'm curious about your opinion on what I've said in this post.

I think most of the claims of Japanese Imperial racism are referring to things like the empire-building policies of the 1930s, such as the occupation of Korea and Manchuria, and many alleged war crimes during that period. (You might compare this to the US' "manifest destiny" policy that won the West and killed lots of Indians. We read, in our histories of Asia, that officials in the Japanese empire of the 1930s had similar views - that it was the duty of the Japanese nation to lead the rest of Asia to a modern, civilized state. We also read that some Imperial officials took advantage of this to spread views that the other southeast Asian races were inferior to the Japanese, not unlike common American views of non-White Anglo Saxon Protestant races during much of the 19th and 20th centuries. (This is also what >>46 meant by "elitist", I think.)

It is also a commonly held belief in America that much of the Japanese educational system basically never mentions such things. I'd like to know what your thoughts about this are.

Anyway, thanks for carrying out a mostly civilized discussion with us, I look forward to more. I know how difficult it can be to follow long discussion in a language that's not your native language, so I hope my writing is understandable OTL

Remember that since we don't live in Japan, we will never have exactly the same perception of Japanese society that you do. There may be flaws we see that you don't, but there will probably also be many things we misundertand. I'm sure it's the same for you.