I fail to understand these kinds of posts where the mind is set to a certain pivot and immediately associate that X can't be done at Y so it must be racism.

Every country has their regulations and issues that prohibit them from doing something. In Japan, it's because they spent so much money in the late 1970s and early 1980s to introduce the world's first ATM on an industry wide scale. Each of the banks set up their own systems which were incompatible with each other, but it did allow bank customers the convenience of withdrawing cash without ever going to the bank years before it became the norm elsewhere. After spending billions though, they became stuck with a chaotic situation where a card from bank A can't withdraw from an ATM at bank B, and when ATMs became more prevalent abroad, they also became incompatible with those cards as well. Only within the past decade did computers become smart enough to handle the different systems that each of the Japanese banks use.

In the US, it's the reluctance of the industry to convert to Chip & PIN; does that make the US racist/xenophobic/hatred of foreigners/distrust of anything that's European? No, it's because the cost of the switchover here didn't made sense to US banks. Debit/credit card fraud has been low for years compared to Europe, there's already millions of POS terminals at ATMs, retailers, and merchants that converting all of them is so cost-prohibitive. Only now are the US banks realizing their mistake of brushing this aside as now we're the ones isolated by the rest of the world in this, rising credit card fraud has come ashore to the US costing banks billions per year, and increasing number of Americans complaining that their US issued magnetic stripe credit cards are worthless abroad.