Have you seen In the Valley of Elah?
You’ve never been to Japan, have you? 
Gringo isn’t even necessarily derogatory. I would compare it to “Yankee” in that it can be derogatory, but can also be used as a simple descriptor. Here in Panama it is a neutral, with no offense usually being meant or taken. (If people want to be derogatory, they will call you a yanqui.)
Interesting side note: back when I was in college, if someone used the term “Jap” they were probably using is to mean “Jewish-American Princess”. Same word, different racism.
In high school I was uncomfortable (as a half Chinese person) when a phrase like “chink in his armor” would come up. Not so much with the use of the word (which was clearly in a non-racist context) but because everyone in the class would cast surreptitious glances at me to see if I would react.
It’s actually a term derived from Texas/Mexico geography; the etymology is that they have “wet backs” because they have just swum across the Rio Grande illegally.
So a Californian writer using it probably speaks more to how widespread the term was, instead of it being an obscure regionalism. And it’s not typically a term meant to be a slur on Mexicans or Mexican-Americans; I’ve always heard it used as a pejorative term for illegal aliens, although I suppose it could be misconstrued as a broader slur.
In Breaking Bad Hank (the DEA agent) uses the term “beaner” as a slur to refer to Mexicans. I’ve never heard the term outside of the show - possibly another manufactured slur?
No. I’ve heard it for decades, especially when I lived in Colorado in the 1970s. According to Wiki, its first use in print was in 1965, but may go back to the 1940s.
Yeah, I know it isn’t always intended to be derogatory, and I likely could tell by tone if it is.
But isn’t what is derogatory kind of up to the target audience somewhat, rather than the speaker? I mean, my mom STILL calls asians “orientals” and doesn’t think a thing of it. If you say I choose to be offended by gringo when no offense is intended, couldn’t one say asians choose being offended by Oriental when no offense is intended?
I don’t doubt that there’s still some old timers in homogeneous areas that still don’t think Jap is a bad thing to say.
It has? Not seeing much of a problem here.
To elaborate on what I said back in post #69, reporting of Operation Wetback was heaviest in Texas, but followed by California and Arizona. The huge Mexican population in California insured that the word was widely known there.
An article in the LA Times quotes Mexican-Americans as saying that a shift from a particular meaning to a general slur occurred starting maybe as early as the 60s.
Originally Posted by Exapno Mapcase View Post
Japanese is not a race, it’s an ethnicity like Chinese, Vietnamese, or Korean.
Actually I think the issue with the previous statement is as much how poorly it fits a lot of US (or English speaking, but the US is really the center of race obsession in the modern world IME) discussion as how it doesn’t fit Japanese (or Korean, I’m more familiar with those two) sensibilities.
‘Ethnicity’ ‘and a people*’ are commonly roped into ‘race’ in US discussion in the context of endless jockeying for advantage in debate by calling other people ‘racists’. Maybe in part because there aren’t specific related terms like ‘ethnicist’, but still.
Also, to the extent we don’t mainly function in eg. Japanese or Korean we are seeing their concepts translated into English. Minzoku and minjok (Japanese and Korean respectively, the same Chinese word as suggested by the similar pronunciations) is translated either as ‘people’ or ‘race’. The Japanese version, as in Yamato minzoku, is tainted now by association with militarism and atrocities. Minjok is still largely non-controversial to refer to the Korean people, as in uri minjok, our people. Jinshu/injong are two other words the languages share even more likely to be translated as ‘race’. Jinshu was also once used to distinguish Japanese but it’s also frowned on now in that use. In Korean AFAIK injong has longer tended to used for race in the Western sense, eg. injong chabyeol for racial discrimination, rather than referring to the Korean people as an ‘injong’.
- ‘the Jewish people’ is probably the most descriptive term as opposed to the Jewish ‘race’, ‘ethnicity’ or even religion. The cohesion and common experience of the mulit-ethnic/racial modern Jewish people is not entirely, or for many at all, based on Judaism per se.
Yes, in the legal sense “Japanese” (kokumin) is all about nationality, but in the cultural sense, “Japanese” (nihonjin) is all about ethnicity. So some people who are legally Japanese do not consider themselves to be ethnically Japanese (e.g. Ryūkyūans) and some people who are culturally considered to be non-Japanese are legally Japanese.
Oh, and some people who are legally non-Japanese are considered to be culturally or ethnically Japanese.