You're not big, you're not clever
I'll keep this brief because the tale is recounted in detail on other blogs - but there is an illuminating flap in progress over a magazine which appeared a few days ago in Japanese convenience stores. It is entitled Gaijin Hanzai Ura Fairu ('Foreigners Underground Crime File'). I don't yet have a copy myself, but a number of pages are scanned in at the pages indicated below. From these it is clear that it is a work of scabrous racism of a kind which, in the west, you would not find outside the publications of the dedicated ultra-right. But this magazine was on sale in Family Mart, a chain convenience store with branches every few hundred years across Japan.
The magazine (or mook - Japanese for a hybrid of a magazine and a book) gives explicit expression to a notion which peeps between the lines of a lot of crime reporting - that crime in Japan is simply and straighforwardly the fault of foreigners. Not Caucasians or Europeans/North Americans (one and the same in this kind of thinking), but Africans, South Americans, South Asians and people of the Middle East.
There is an article about the state of Tokyo entitled:
City of violent, degenerate foreigners!
Another piece is headlined:
Catch the Iranian!
But the giveaway is a series of photographs, sneakily shot with a telephoto lens, of Japanese women canoodling with gaijin men (reminiscent of those old Ku Klux Klan publications showing pictures of mixed race couples guilty of "miscegenation".)
Profanity and racist invective follow.
You sluts really think foreign guys are so great, huh!!
and
Oi Nigger!! Get your fuckin’ hands off that Japanese lady’s ass!!
and
This is Japan! Go back to your own fuckin’ country and do that!
And then the clincher:
We know Japanese guys are small, but . . .
Oh no. How sad. How disappointingly obvious. There was I, hoping to identify a complicated racial paradigm shift, or a radical rippling of the zeitgeist (or at the least a dangerous breach in the space-time continuum). But it turns out to be all about a little bloke somewhere who, in the words of Lily Allen, is "small in the game" . . .
A Google Blog Search for Gaijin Hanzai Ura File or Gaijin Hanzai Ura File or 外人犯罪裏ファイル will lead you to the latest webchat. The most comprehensive blogging on the subject so far is by that tireless campaigner for gaijin rights, Arudou Debito. He's updating with new posts, so start from the top of the page, but the original post, including images from the mook, is here. The later posts contain the text of a letter to Family Mart (which ahs outlets in the US) demanding the removal of the offensive publication. Apparently they have agreed to do so within a week - which doesn't strike me as particularly prompt or effective action.
If you want to buy it for yourself, it's here on Japanese Amazon.
There's a version of the story which I wrote for Tuesday's newspaper here.
