Honorary whites

The designation was ascribed to all Japanese people (who also once were ascribed as Honorary Aryans by Nazi Germany) in the 1960s. At the time, Japan was going through a post-war economic miracle, and this designation assisted a trade pact formed between South Africa and Japan in the early 1960s when Tokyo's Yawata Iron & Steel Co. offered to purchase 5 million tonnes of South African pig iron, worth more than $250 million, over a 10-year period.[1]

With such a huge deal in the works, then Prime Minister Hendrik Verwoerd determined that it would be tactless and disadvantageous to trade arrangements to subject the Japanese people to the same restrictions as other ethnicities because trade delegations from Japan would regularly visit South Africa for business and trade.[1]

Afterward, Pretoria's Group Areas Board publicly announced that all Japanese people would be considered white. Johannesburg's city officials even decided that, "in view of the trade agreements", the municipal swimming pools would be open to all Japanese guests.[1]

The designation gave Japanese almost all of the same rights and privileges as whites (except for the right to vote; they were also exempt from conscription). Until the early 1970s, opposition party politicians and the press questioned why Japanese were granted special privileges, citing hypocrisy and inconsistencies with apartheid.[2]

The new designation granted to the Japanese seemed grossly unfair to South Africa's small Chinese community (roughly 7,000 at that time), who it seemed, would enjoy none of the new benefits given to the Japanese. As Time reported one of Cape Town's leading Chinese businessmen's saying "If anything, we are whiter in appearance than our fellow Japanese friends." Another indignantly demanded: "Does this mean that the Japanese, now that they are [considered] White, cannot associate with us without running afoul of the Immorality Act?"[1]

Furthermore, inclusion of other Asians as honorary whites complicated matters on how the Chinese were treated, and apartheid regulation on Chinese varied from department to department and province to province as locals could not distinguish these Asians apart from each other, due to similar genetic traits.[1]

In 1984, the Group Areas Act was amended to allow Chinese South Africans to live in areas the government had declared white areas and use the facilities within them.[3] Chinese South Africans were required to apply for a permit from the government in order to move into a white area. Permission had to be obtained from all the neighbours in the suburb for the application to be accepted.[4][5]

Unlike Japan and Taiwan (ROC), South Korea was unwilling and eventually outright refused to establish diplomatic relations with South Africa because of apartheid.[7] Although South Africa offered honorary white status to South Korean citizens when the two countries negotiated diplomatic relations in 1961, it severed ties with South Africa in 1978 in protest against apartheid, and full diplomatic relations between the two countries were not reestablished until 1992 when it was abolished.[8]

The "honorary white" status was given to other special visitors belonging to other races, including:

• Guyanese author E. R. Braithwaite who wrote a scathing book Honorary White: Visit to South Africa[9] about his stay;
• Cricketers in the West Indian rebel teams;[10]
• Players of Polynesian (a sub group of Austronesian) Maori or Samoan backgrounds in the 1970 touring All Blacks rugby team[11][12]
• Australian Aboriginal tennis player Evonne Goolagong Cawley.[13]
• African American tennis player Arthur Ashe was also offered Honorary White status but he refused and explicitly demanded to be booked as a black man when he visited and played in South Africa.[14]
• Malawian diplomats

• Honorary Aryan
• Honorary male
• Model minority
• Racial hierarchy
• Takao Ozawa v. United States
• An Investigation of Global Policy with the Yamato Race as Nucleus