Are we going to allow foreigners to destroy our Japan?!

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

There’s a minor kerfluffle among some in the Japan foreign community over the recent publication of a magazine/book (the actual term the publisher uses for it is a ‘mook’. Fitting) titled Gaijin Hanzai Ura Fairu 2007 (The Underground File on Foreign Criminals 2007). Basically, it’s just one long hate-rant against anyone in Japan who’s not Japanese. Normally, I get really pissed off whenever Governor Ishihara goes on one of his anti-foreigner rants, and I pop a vein when the head of the National Police Department does his annual number-juggling speech to demonstrate that 2% of the population committing 1% of the crimes represents a deadly threat to the Japanese populace. This piece of trash should have me livid. It doesn’t, though, not by a long shot. It’s not even worth a half-hearted Pit rant. This is just too pathetic for me to do anything more than laugh at.

Here’s some of the discussion (with some page scans) going on over at the FuckedGaijin.com forums, where I first heard about it. There are also some threads where people are getting more righteously indignant over at Big Daikon and debito.org. Mostly, the fucked gaijins are mocking it and trying to hunt down our own copies. I bought mine last night, and the wife and I had a good laugh over how ridiculously over-the-top everything was. This morning, I brought it to work (since the other two gaijin in the office had heard about it and were looking for it as well) and shared it around the office (with the J-staff as well).

The cover illustration is a mass of snarling caricatures of foreigners with blood-red eyes (one in the corner looks more like a zombie), topped by Kim Jong-Il and Hu Jintao. The sub-headline along the bottom reads Are we going to allow foreigners to destroy our Japan?! Inside, we have City of Violent Degenerate Foreigners!! about how dangerous we’ve supposedly been making Tokyo, Catch the Iranian!! about, well… catching Iranians. They don’t even try the usual dodge of prefacing each mention of “foreigner” with “illegal” like the governor does (when he can remember to), these guys are just pissed at all of us. There are other sections each about other countries, including the US (mostly about servicemen in Yokohama and Okinawa, with one page about the CIA influencing the government), and a Q&A section on Korean call-girl services that reads like it was written by a 16-year-old virgin (“do their pussies smell like kimchee?”)

Speaking of writing by guys who’ve never gotten laid, the funniest part had nothing to do with crime: Those damn foreigners are taking our wimmin! There are two pages of mixed couples engaged in PDA (all looking pretty consensual) ranging from an arm around a waist to some serious gropage, with wildly histrionic captions. The headline is “So you think foreign guys are good, huh? We know Japanese guys are small, but come on!”, with captions ranging from “This is Japan! Go back to your own country and do that”, to “Shit, that fuckin’ kind of foreigner”, to “Oi, nigger! Get you hand off that Japanese woman’s ass!” (no creative translation on that one, the Word was written out phonetically).

There’s an article on the ten worst foreign criminals in Japan. Between that and the sex-fiend section, I’m rather upset to have been snubbed so blatantly by the publishers. Perhaps I’ll rate a mention in next year’s issue.

The inside back cover has an ad for a math puzzle book by the same publisher, with the caption “Exercise your brain and beat the foreigners!” (the book itself doesn’t have anything to indicate that the authors were cool with this), while the outside back cover has a world map rating the criminality of each country. China gets 14 skull & crossbones, Brazil gets 8, Thailand gets 2, Mongolia gets 3 for some reason (jealous sumo fans?), while North America, Europe, Africa and Australia don’t get any.

It’s getting late, and I’m about ready to go home before a client calls with some last-minute crap that keeps me in the office all night, so forgive me if I don’t wrap this up with something witty. It was mundane, pointless and I just wanted to share.

2

Do some kinds of foreigners get more hate than others? You said that some countries had lots of skulls and bones and others had none. Does this mean that a white guy will get less hate than a korean or chinese guy?

3

The author of that is so going onto my “Gaijin Smash” list.

4

None for North America? C’mon, we practically invented gang violence and the lynch mob - that’s got to count for something.

5

Hm, I never knew Iranians constituted a large expatriate population in Japan.

6

Nah, that was the English. Instead of hanging people they didn’t like they just called them a witch and burned them. Less cleanup afterwards, I assume.

7

Sure and the Italians may have started the Mafia. But where did these things reach their peak? Here in America.

8

Winning WWII and the bomb has to count for something.

9

Pretty much. I know I’m far less likely to get randomly hassled by the police than Asian, South American or Middle Eastern foreigners. Like Asians in the US, we’re viewed as the “model minorities”.

According to Wiki, and the recent Ministry of Justice report (in Japanese) out of a population of 130 million, there are about 600,000 Koreans, 500,000 Chinese, 300,000 Brazilians (mostly of some Japanese descent) and 190,000 Filipinos, 57,000 Peruvians and just under 50,000 Americans (no idea if that’s counting the 40,000+ military personnel or not. Probably not), with an additional 300,000 from everywhere else. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs (in English) says there were 6,600 Iranian nationals in Japan as of 1999. Deservedly or not, they have a high-crime reputation here disproportionate to the actual population.

10

Now this is what actually ticks me off.

http://mdn.mainichi-msn.co.jp/national/news/20070208p2a00m0na007000c.html

“Number of crimes committed by nonpermanent foreigners declines in Tokyo”

Doesn’t sound like bad news, does it? Here’s a quote:

[note: “crimes” includes violent and property crimes (murder, rape, theft, arson, etc). Victimless crimes like visa violations, drug possession, prostitution and speeding are classed separately as “offences”.]

Down 17% nationwide? Sweet, that’s one hell of a decline. How could the National Police Agency (sorry, I called them the NPD in the OP) ever spin this to reinforce the “Gaijin Criminal” stereotype they seem to depend on? I know! Let’s compare these figures to crime figures from 15 years ago in rural regions that didn’t have any foreigners back then! ‘Nonpermanent’ eliminates most Korean and Chinese residents, and 1991 was about when the gov’t started issuing work visas to Japanese Brazilians (the total foreign resident population was half was it is now, with permanent residents making up a larger percentage). So with some creative statistics, all we need to do is pick a sample population far smaller than what exists today, and then only compare raw numbers. Let’s see what we get:

Wow, 35.4 times the crime in Chubu, which happened to get an enormous spike in the foreign population after 1991 since it received the vast majority of those 300,000 Brazilians. And hoo boy, 21.5 times more crime in Shikoku. That means in 1991, on an island slightly smaller than New Jersey with over 4 million people, there was a grand total of 13 investigations into suspected crimes by foreigners.

Gee, I don’t see any massaging going on here, do you?

But how does the NPA view these results?

Riiiight. You know, most police agencies would be crowing over a 17% drop in crime in any subset of the population, but these useless slugs are so desperate to keep people in fear of bogeymen under the bed that they actually spin it to claim that crime is skyrocketing out of control.

11

Somewhat. I think that the uber-Patriot people pretty much hate anyone not Japanese, but they’re intimidated by white people so would only ever talk down about us in their own heads.

I used to walk through the West exit of Shinjuku every day and about once every week or every other week there’d be some dude giving a speach about how evil foreigners were. I always paused to give a :rolleyes:

But most Japanese don’t seem to care all that much. Probably there is some amount of similar feelings towards Chinese or Malaysians as Americans might have towards Mexicans among the general population. Just annoyingly, the government has a larger percent of bigots than the general populace.

12

True. The most important thing to me in all this is that yesterday, the building manager at my condo waved good-morning to me as I left for work, my next-door neighbor saw me walking to the station and ran to catch up to chat with me about kids and school as we rode the train, I got an e-mail from my cycling club about next weekend’s ride, and after work I took a late-night cab home where the driver and I chatted the whole way about baseball and vacation spots.

I’ll vent, but a few anonymous jerks aren’t going to ruin this place for me.