This paper identifies racialized literary tropes in North African visions of Japan from the turn of the twentieth century: the promise of civilizational progress and cultural whitening figured in the light of the rising sun and racial debasement in mixed human-animal origins. Mediated in part by French accounts of Japanese culture and translations of its literature, the appearance of these tropes in two instances of anticolonial and decolonial discourse suggests that a distinct racial imaginary emerged in colonial and independent North Africa. The paper thus argues for the significance of these tropes and their image of whiteness to recent scholarly analyses of the construction of blackness in North Africa. It begins with Mustafa Kamil’s 1904 book al-Shams al-mushriqa, which put forth Meiji Japan as a model to Egyptians of state modernization faithful to national character by racializing its notion of progress. Remarking on the legendary origin of the Ainu ethnic minority in northern Japan from the marriage of a Japanese princess to a dog, Kamil asserted that even a people “blackened” with backwardness could become “white” through cultivation and education. Echoing his reformist predecessor al-Tahtawi’s position on the Sudanese, Kamil shifted this discourse into a new civilizational arena that expressed Egypt’s relation a different model of civilized whiteness, as well as to its British occupiers and the Sudan it sought to control, the former offering a solution to the latter situation. The task of navigating these global racial hierarchies returns in the context of cultural decolonization that preoccupied North African intellectuals after independence. There, Moroccan writer Abdelkebir Khatibi looks to Japan for an alternative aesthetic model. He draws on the belated French translation of Japanese modernist novelist Junichiro Tanizaki’s 1933 essay L’éloge de l’ombre (1977), which argues that Japanese aesthetics is based on the attenuation of light in shadow, rather than on illumination. Building on exchanges with his compatriot Abdelfattah Kilito, Egyptian friend Jacques Hassoun, and Franco-Chinese colleague François Cheng, Khatibi connects the liminal image of humans turning into dogs to a shadow that always falls on people like the Japanese or Moroccans, who will always seem to bear a stain to European eyes. Even as Japan promised alternatives to European models of racialized domination, this persistent racial inflection shifts whiteness from a predicate of progress to a reified marker of difference.