I was trying to ask Google why Japanese prefectures are called prefectures and I accidentally a racism:
I think the hilarity comes partly from the fact that when I stop the question at “Why are ___nese…” before I get to a noun, there is still a broken English nounification of the adjective that can happen if your standards are lax enough. And anywhere that you can ask “Why are Chinese smart?” without getting corrected on your grammar is probably also a place where you won’t get corrected on your racism. You have to be extra smart and well educated and enlightened to realize that everyone is definitely exactly the same everywhere.
Well, like, is it technically incorrect grammar?
In English, we put the plural status as part of the noun, but the Japanese language uses things like counters and the noun 日本人 does not actually specify whether you are referring to one or more Japanese people, as “neko” does not specify the number of cats, and so on. Japanese also doesn’t have an a/an/the attached to the noun.
So, if we adopt either a descriptivist mindset or some sort of cultural prescriptivist mindset, it could be argued that Japanese/Japanese is valid just as ninja/ninja and German/Germans. That also brings up that there is no simple plural form such as “Germans”, and I don’t think anyone anywhere will approve of “Japaneses”. (Wow, “Japaneses” sounds really racist.)
So I guess it’s down to whether the listeners/readers socially approve of it, much like “Brits” is okay, but “Japs” and “Nps” were both part of pretty damned racist WW2 propaganda and are thus permanently prohibited, even though all three are just shortenings of national names.
“Paki” bad. “Bikey” good.
Let’s just refer to every nationality as they refer to themselves in their own countries, for cultural respect. Sure, it will feel weird saying “nihonjin” without saying “wa”, and everyone else will look at you like you’re Steve Naruto Midnight Raven the Ultraweeb, final boss of the figurine and dakimakura dungeon,
Wait, where was I going with this?
Oh, right, to avoid further confusion, by decree of the International Society for Metrification, residents of the United States of America shall now be known as either United Statesians or Unionese,