Over at Translator’s Note, Zachary discusses a NYT piece on Japanese racism in an interesting post you all should read. Anyway, here some of it:
The perception that foreigners commit more crimes has taken root partially because the crimes that foreigners do committ here tend to be more ostentatious. For instance, a couple months ago “foreigners” walked into the second floor of a posh jewelry store in Tokyo, punched out the one employee who was there, then walked out with millions of dollars in diamonds. Now, this heist was incredibly low hanging fruit, but I don’t think a Japanese person would have done it. It just took too much cojones.
Similarly, there are lots of other instances where the crimes that foreigners commit here seem all the more egregious because they are the sort of crimes the Japanese themselves don’t usually commit. This makes them more memorable and conspicuous, making the perception shared by many (but not all) Japanese somewhat more understandable.
Look at the rest on your own.
Meanwhile, Justin of Cosmic Buddha went to some festival at Miwa Shrine, and took some seriously dope pics while he was at it — be sure to read the captions.
One Comment
My knowledge of Japanese history is limited to general survey reading of the modern era. But in reading this I have to laugh.
As much as pre-WWII Japanese imperial aggressiveness needed to be curbed, one secretly regrets its absence when reading such posts as this. I’m reminded of the Clavell novel “Shogun”, when behavior such as this was met with rather summary justice.
If an aggressive “foreigner” who punched out a polite store clerk was caught red-handed with millions of dollars of purloined jewelry — immediate beheading with a samurai sword would go far towards curing this particular brand of over-testosteroned “cojones”, don’t you think? If criminals want to go for the big bucks I think they should be forced to gamble their life for it.
One secretly longs for this, before the Japanese society goes further down our American road of indulgence of crime and criminals.
OK, enough wishing. Cue the mandatory hand-wringing over the underlying social causes of crime. Maybe the foreigner was merely upset about current Japanese support for US “imperialist” policy and was just doing his part to smash the “war machine”, blah blah blah…