Honorary white

Honorary whites is a term that was used by the apartheid regime of South Africa to grant almost all of the rights and privileges of Whites. Most notably, East Asians were also ascribed as honorary whites. Japanese, Koreans and Taiwanese were granted the honorary white status, while the Chinese and individually designated figures of other races were later added as well.

The designation was ascribed to all Japanese people (who were also once ascribed as Honorary Aryans by Nazi Germany) in the 1960s to assist a trade pact formed between South Africa and Japan in the early 1960s, when Tokyo's Yawata Iron & Steel Co. offered to purchase 5,000,000 tons of South African pig iron, worth more than $250,000,000, over a ten-year period.

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

Thenceforth, 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.

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 inconsistencies with apartheid.

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 wrote:

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