Anecdote: A few friends of mine use the internet country code – .jp to refer to Japanese related stuff, which I guess could be the same as “JP”.
And yeah, I’d stare a lot if I saw a sign reading ‘Jap Stuff’, the same as if I saw anyone using ‘chink’ or ‘gook’. Anyone using those terms in my sight/hearing would get such a bitchslapping.
(For the record, I’m Indonesian-Chinese first gen here in the US)
I was kind of surprised to find the word being used to offensively, and also so brazenly.
Crap, I completely missed the white gay guy part of it. I should’ve know by the “Queen” part of it. I thought you were talking about white hetero guys with an Asian fetish.
According to Wiki:
Oh, I’ve heard of yellow fever. (I am, after all, an Asian female living in the US 
) I just think it’s interesting that there’s a specific term for gay guys who like Asian guys. For some reason I’ve always associated Asian fetishes with white guys and Asian girls. :smack:
Sorry for the hijack. Carry on.
In the US, the term was used as a racial derogatory slang from well before the war. I’m guessing that since Australia and the UK didn’t have the same degree of migration from East Asia at the turn of the century, then it wasn’t as large of an issue there.
During the war, this racism was exploited by various groups, including those selling war bonds, as we can sell by one of the links above, and along with the internment, this usage has permanently exiled the term from acceptability.
I had a Greek neighbor when I was growing up in Salt Lake. He died in his 90s during the 1980s, so he was older generation. He used the term whenever the discussion turned to this country or the people, and he clearly wasn’t racist. Fortunately, the one time he didn’t use it was when I introduced a Japanese girlfriend.
We do our printing in Singapore, and I sometimes have to remind our Singapore staff to not use “Jap” as an abbreviation in emails, especially ones which go back to our US head office, with the Japanese staff there.
We use “JPN” as an abbreviation internally.
Not just US fans-- that’s what they call it here too (well, actually J-popu). Unless they have (or more likely had) their own word for it and appropriated it from the US term for it.
If you’re on Diabolos, by any chance, send me a buzz–the name’s the same.
I note the FFXI convention is moving to other games–EVE Online in particular, although the commonest country code you here there is RUs.
When I was stationed in Yokosuka, the term used for the local populace was JN.
Short for Japanese National.
Mindfield, just got to say that I agree with RickJay who is also Canadian as am I. Maybe it’s where I’m living or the people I’ve hung out with in my life (or maybe even being female), but I’ve never heard “rice” for cars either.
I like the term I heard once for the reverse of this phenomenon: Asian gays who like Caucasian men are “Potato Queens.”
Hmmmm, maybe that’d explain a little bit of that whole “Sweet Potato Queen” segment of books: they all appear to be written by Southern gay white men, but I’m not sure. On second thought, apparently they’re all women, but dressed in an outlandish enough manner for me to confuse them for drag queens. Weird.
See, to me, I understand there’s baggage there because… well, because there is. But sixty years after the war, I think it’s time we reclaimed a useful abbreviation. “Jap” is no worse, inherently, than “Texmex” or what-have-you. Not on a par with “chink” or “gook”, IMHO. That is to say, it is but it SHOULDN’T be. Not in 2007.
I’m 63, born in 1944. I think you may have a point, but I’ll suggest that you need to wait another 20 years or so. Too many people, mostly in the US, will contest your opinion. Me included. IMHO.
Dunno, seems to me like it’s still treading on thin ice. Don’t get me wrong, I’d love it if it happened, but I’m also of the opinion that the swastika should be reclaimed in the western world.
And it’s not like these things can’t be done-- they’ve just got to start somewhere. My school had a feminist organization known as the Cunt Club. Everyone with a school phone (cells were slightly less ubiquitous then) got a voicemail with someone reading Ensler’s short piece about the reclamation of cunt as a promo for their meetings.
(oh man, I just got an image of a schwastika-- an upside down e stylized into a crooked cross… guess that brings a new meaning to grammar nazi.)
Jap is not an inherently offensive term in Australia. Of course, it depends on the context.
Google shows shop names with the word Jap in the title - e.g. Jap Motors, Adelaide Jap, Jap World. No problem there.
I will ask my Japanese friend her thoughts.
For some of us, the war has nothing to do with it. I wasn’t born during the war. My parents weren’t even born yet. They weren’t interned either, and living in Hawaii, they were surrounded by Asians, and so they probably never got called “Japs” in their lives. But I can assure you we’d all still be offended if we heard that word.
Slavery ended over 130 years ago, and only recently have some African-Americans begun to adopt the term “nigger” for themselves. Maybe we’ve needed to wait this long for all the survivors of slavery to die off for the reclaiming to begin. If that’s the standard, then it’s far too soon for Japanese-Americans to embrace “Jap.” Maybe it’ll happen when the children of internment camp survivors die off. But I strongly doubt it’ll happen anytime soon.
I think we have perfectly good alternatives for abbreviating Japan/Japanese, so that’s not a compelling reason to reclaim “Jap.” It’s not really “reclaiming” it anyway, since it has always been an epithet here.
FWIW, I have never heard a person or group of people identify as “Tex-Mex”. I have only heard it used to describe food and music, and the latter was “Tejano” more than “Tex-Mex”.
I understand your sentiment, but that’s not the way it works. Here, it’s definitely on par with “chink” or “gook”. For it to be acceptable, Japanese Americans will have to embrace it. This ain’t going to happen for a while. I always wondered why we lived in the shitty part of L.A. as a kid and not in Santa Monica. You could legally ban non-white people from moving into your neighborhood until the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Even then, my friend who lived in Woodside California, an affluent suburb near San Francisco said that when a neighbor tried to sell their house to Japanese Americans in 1970, there was a shitstorm.
Perhaps you are unaware of the Asian Exclusion Act which banned all Asian immigration from 1921 until 1954. The other thing I hope you are aware of is that when all the Japanese American citizens of the USA on the west coast were shuttled off to internment camps they were forced to sell their possessions for pennies on the dollar. My maternal grandparents were upper middle class business owners and lost everything. My Dad (born here) was in a masters degree program at UCLA when he got thrown into the internment camp. My mom escaped the internment camps by moving to Utah and working as an unpaid indentured servant throughout the war. There will still be people living that remember the internment camps through 2040.
Perhaps “jap” will become acceptable, but it’s going to take a while, and for me personally, it’ll never be tolerable in my lifetime.
Somehow, I don’t think the reason people here find it offensive has anything to do with the war.
Tell you what. You get the people who refer to my wife and children and in-laws as “Japs” to stop using it as a racial epithet and then we’ll talk about reclaiming the word.
FWIW, I’m not disagreeing with you on this particular case, because I do think it’s still too early for a reclamation to happen. That being said, part of the reclamation process often involves a word that’s still being used as an epithet against a particular group. Cunt, as I mentioned above falls into this category. Queer also does this. My school had a Queer Alliance as well (note the “had” part-- they split into factions because queer was no longer progressive enough to encompass what they stood for).
I realize that at other times, the word has to cease (at least in most places), such as with nigger. I’m not trying to say that its usage halted completely before the black community picked it up, but it was certainly not widely acceptable. Which is sort of where Jap is, but as someone mentioned before, it’s been a lot longer since slavery than since WWII.
So yeah, I agree with you that the time maybe isn’t ripe, but I don’t think you can base the time of reclamation on whether or not ignorant fucks are still using it.