No. Not at all.
Ivory said:
You don’t get to choose what’s offensive to people, even if you don’t like those people.
His point is that the people who decide what is an offensive term are the people to whom the term is directed.
I agree with that. So should we all.
But Japs think you shouldn’t complain about being called gaijin because it isn’t offensive and if you think it is offensive then it’s only because you don’t understand Japanese.
Huge fucking double standard.
As you know, I don’t need your permission for anything. I’m just telling the straight dope to people who don’t know.
“Gaijin” means foreigner or outsider. While it can be used in a xenophobic sense, it is not the equivalent of any target-specific slur. And I understand it is falling out of favor anyway.
That’s pretty much my understanding. It is a term used to describe everyone who is not Japanese, and a slur that general is hardly worth getting your panties in a knot over.
I’m a her.
Anyway, yeah so? If the Japanese choose to act badly that means… what? I get to as well? Tit for tat?
Sorry, not a good enough reason. If they are acting insulting then that’s on them. Find it offensive.
And using Jap in this thread makes you look bad. It doesn’t warm my heart that you’re “sticking it” to the Japanese.
Tony Greig (cricket commentator) always used to talk about the Paki cricket team on the radio. I was surprised to find out it was a slur. Now I’m wondering if he was just being happily racist on the radio, or if it wasn’t a slur back then/in Australia.
Holy shit, thanks for that info. The last 16 years living in Japan and working for the government and for private industry haven’t helped me at all as to the understanding of the term. But now you’ve shown me the light.
Irrelevant. Japanese misbehavior is not a justification for your misbehavior.
What term is replacing it?
“Gaikokujin,” for some anyway. More explicitly a foreign national, less a generalized Other, AIUI.
Where are these people who say that? In the 25 years I lived in Japan, I had that conversation with friends like zero times. It may have come up on that one program some years back where they had a bunch of foreigners on all screaming for the mic. I want to say Terry Itoh was on the program, but I don’t like screaming programs, so I didn’t follow it.
If you live in Japan then you know there is a fundamental difference between the two words. When I first lived in Japan in the early 80s, the only term used was “gaijin.” I think in my years, the only real blatant, over-the-top discrimination I personally received was trying to rent and found how Japanese hate renting to foreigners. I even had a girlfriend who I met in Roppongi where she’d go to meet foreign guys. She owned some rental properties in Azabu and wouldn’t rent to foreigners. She’d fuck them, but not rent to them.
Japan has a serious racial problem, but it’s generally not against white Americans. My Japanese exwife’s mother told me she never had a problem with me being a foreigner, and added “Of course, it would have been different if you had been black” without any apparent thought. The funny thing is that she was a great woman who probably wouldn’t have objected, had I been black.
The vast majority (99%+) of cases I heard “gaijin” used, it was without malice. I’d be told all the time that I couldn’t understand something about Japan because I wasn’t Japanese, but I really can’t recall if people would use “gaijin” or “gaikokujin.”
You’ve lived in Japan for 16 years and you hate the people you life with enough call them “Japs?”
It’s no paradise. There are as many problems as anywhere else. More than many.
But seriously, dude, life is too short. Go back. Don’t waste your breath talking to people you despise.
And if you feel the need to tell me you don’t hate them, just know that this is the impression you are giving everyone.
That can be and is used to refer to Pakistan, yes. But I’ve never heard of that being used to refer to people from Pakistan, nor would it make much sense to the locals, I don’t think.
True. In fact, I don’t use the term other than on this site, in threads like this, where I justifyably can use it, without directing it to anyone in particular. I never deliberately feel like hurting people’s feelings.
OK, I don’t want to give that impresssion because its not true. It’s just a part of the culture I don’t like. There are many parts of Australian culture I have equal dislike of.
I don’t hear gaijin much in the media at all (other than reading it in mags like FRI etc). But I hear it in daily life a lot. Appending san to the end doesn’t really make it nicer. “Gaijin-san”. Really, Ms. shop-assistant, did you just call me “Mr. Foreigner”? How do you know I’m a foreigner? And why is that a more important discriptor of me than “customer”?
In the US, everything is an “offensive term”. Absolutely everything.
Give me a break. :rolleyes:
I know US bashing is popular, but that is not true. As a country built on immigration and slavery, and a history of not always treating those groups very well, we have to repair damage that was done by those institutional and social discriminatory policies. One way is to try to be aware of the impact of the words we use.
So yes, we are working through the growing pains of a troubled past, but because of people standing up and refusing to be called names that are demeaning, things are getting better socially.
“Getting better” for whom- for aging New Left academics such as yourself, with vested interests in stoking your tired old Peggy McIntosh bullshit in order to churn out that continued grant money and those Democratic votes?
Yup! That’s right! You nailed it one. My goodness how clever you are.
(And if you do care- better for my Holocaust surviving immigrant parents who were denied access to neighborhoods and jobs for being Jewish who I watched life get better and better for over the decades. That and the copious grant monies of course.)
Apparently, you’re not much cleverer; you are, after all, arguing reactionary political correctness with a complete stranger via Internet, instead of colliding atoms or something.
I multitask!
Oops, that’s alarm on the collider right now. Gotta go or my atoms will over collide.
See you 'round. Don’t forget to check in with your therapist again today, lest those multi-generational traumatic memories cause you yet another borderline-personality episode this week…