DEMISE OF CRIME
MAGAZINE HISTORIC
Gaijin Hanzai's
withdrawal from the market showed real power of 'newcomers' for the first
time"
By Arudou Debito
Column 35 for the Japan Times Community Page Published
March 20, 2007
DRAFT FIVE, "DIRECTOR'S CUT" with links to
sources.
Japan Times version at http://search.japantimes.co.jp/cgi-bin/fl20070320zg.html
An academic version of this article is available
at Japan Focus (http://japanfocus.org/products/details/2386)
Making headlines worldwide
last month was the publication of a magazine entitled GAIJIN HANZAI URA FAIRU (The Underground Files of Gaijin [sic] Crime).
On sale at major Japanese bookstores and convenience stores nationwide,
Gaijin Hanzai (GH) attributed criminality to nationality, and depicted
foreigners as "dangerous" and "evil".
Much ink and many pixels
have already described the magazine as an example of "hate speech"
(archive of the events at www.debito.org/index.php/?cat=27
). So this article will not dwell on
its contents. See all of it scanned at www.flickr.com/photos/ultraneo/sets/72157594531953574/
The news: Despite Japan's lack of laws, or a civil
society which can curb hate speech of this sort, activists put GH out of
circulation. Despite no help from
domestic groups or even Japan's press, "Newcomer" residents and
immigrants demonstrated their power as organized consumers for probably the
first time in Japan's history.
HANZAI HANTAI
On January 31, GH went on
sale nationwide. According to the Japan
Times (February 23), about
half of the 30,000 copies produced went to FamilyMart, Japan's third-largest
convenience store.
The reaction was
immediate. That same day, an Internet blogger named Steve
scanned it and notified mailing lists.
Soon dozens of Japan-related websites (including Japan Probe, Big
Daikon, Trans-Pacific Radio, Mutant Frog, Gaijin Pot, Ikeld, Joi Ito, Ejovi,
Fukumimi, Japanjin, Japundit, ESLCafe, and Debito.org.) were buzzing with
opinion and outrage.
On February 2, Japan Probe
proposed an official boycott
of GH stockers. Emails of protest
went to their domestic and overseas offices.
Overseas newspapers took notice. The Guardian that
day: "[GH] goes beyond being puerile and into the realm of encouraging
hatred of foreigners."
Within 24 hours, apologies
from distributors were coming in:
FamilyMart's US subsidiary Famima promised to have GH off the shelves
"within seven days". Other convenience stores soon followed
suit. I also dropped by two local conbini, showed managers GH's famous "nigger" and
"Korean kimchee pudenda" pages, and got it summarily removed with
apologies.
On February 3, Debito.org offered a bilingual
letter to stores explaining why the bearer would refuse to shop there
unless GH was immediately returned to the publisher. The letter, downloaded at least 1156 times over February,
demonstrated that the threat of boycott was real.
Successive days brought
more articles: The Times (London),
Reuters, Australia's ABC News, China's People's Daily, Bloomberg, South China
Morning Post, IPCJapan (Spain), finally even our Japan Times. In powerpoint presentations to domestic
human rights groups nationwide, I included GH's images, eliciting empathy and
outrage (albeit no visible action).
Nevertheless, no Japanese press picked up the story.
On February 5, FamilyMart
(which had only sold 1000 copies) officially returned GH to the
publisher. Amazon Japan rebutted
with freedom of speech arguments (comparing GH to Mein Kampf), but soon sold
out and offered no more for sale.
By February 9, GH had
become a collector's item. Even the
publisher, Eichi Shuppan, advertised that
Gaijin Hanzai was "out of stock", and Amazon Japan offered used
copies (list price 690 yen) for 20,000 yen (within a week 40,000 on eBay). Shortly after, there would be no record on
Eichi's website that they ever sold the book.
Victory was total for the activists.
WHY THIS CASE MATTERS
Protest is not
unprecedented. Non-Japanese residents
have often successfully decried actions deemed disparaging, unfair, or even
racist: Anchorman Kume Hiroshi’s "Gaijin should speak
broken Japanese" gaffe (Kume apologized a decade later); the Tamachan
Sealion Residency Certificate Demo; the NTT DoCoMo "Gaijin
Deposit" Boycott (NTT repealed the tariff); the Mandom
"Rastafarian Monkey" ad campaign; police "foreign
crime" posters; anti-discrimination lawsuits such as the Ana Bortz, Steve McGowan, and Otaru Onsen cases (all
discussed at Debito.org).
Crucial has been the
Internet, linking advocates worldwide as never before. Networking and campaigning effectively
enough to be noticed by domestic authorities, press, and opinion
makers--through letter campaigns, media exposure, public shame, face-to-face
negotiations, demonstrations, even humor.
It gave non-Japanese (especially the "Newcomer" immigrants,
who have anti-defamation leagues nowhere nearly as powerful as the longstanding
"Oldcomer" Zainichi
organizations) unprecedented influence.
What made the Gaijin Hanzai
case special, even historical, is that the campaign was waged and won by the
Newcomers alone. As I wrote in a rebuttal to GH editor
Shigeki Saka, who claimed that a long-overdue debate on foreign crime had
been censored by an "army of bloggers":
"Even then, we as demonstrators never asked
for the law, such as it is, to get involved. We just notified distributors of the qualms we had with this book,
and they agreed that this was inappropriate material for their sales
outlets. We backed that up by
proposing a boycott, which is our inviolable right (probably the non-Japanese
residents’ only inviolable right) to choose where to spend our money as consumers.
We proposed no
violence. Only the strength of our
argument and conviction."
Funny thing is, editor Saka
assumed foreigners would not be part of this debate. He stated on February 7:
"In principle it is a magazine written in Japanese and sold in Japan...
it’s for Japanese people to read...
Maybe foreigners can’t read the articles in there and they only see the
pictures of the discriminated."
This blind spot,
surprisingly frequent in the Japanese media, assumes that non-Japanese
residents simply "don't count"--that they haven't any real voice in
Japanese society. Or can't even
read.
Wake up. Other public appeals by literate non-natives
have enlisted the domestic media to change many a policy.
However, this time Japan's masukomi took a powder.
Which means for the first time the power of non-Japanese as a consumer
bloc was the force to be reckoned with.
THE INVISIBLE HAND
One remaining mystery
is: Who produced GH? According to an industry source, a magazine
of this quality and quantity would cost at least US$250,000. Given that GH contains no advertising
whatsoever, the patron (listed as a nonexistent Joey H. Washington") is
clearly quite rich.
Some speculation on Joey:
First, the deep
pockets. What are deeper than
taxes? Japan's police forces,
particularly the National Public Safety Commission, have both secretive budgets
and a clear mandate to monitor foreigner activity (footnote[1]).
Second, police access. At least three articles quote the NPA or
ex-cops, and GH's last 13 pages have excellent summaries of foreign crimes best
collated from police databases. Even the editor admitted,
"We have spoken with Japanese police in order to write each article. For them
this issue is serious and they have provided the data."
Why would police cooperate
with Eichi, a pornography publisher affecting "public morals"?
Biggest giveaway is GH's
photos. Everywhere at once, either the
photographer has the patience of Ansel Adams, or GH includes police camerawork
of crime scenes. Cops feature prominently
in the photos, despite disliking being photographed on the job.
"
Plus some of the shots are
"eye in the sky", at just the right angle to be from police
surveillance cameras. Which just happen
to be proliferating in parts of Tokyo with lots of foreigners.
Now that you mention it,
every GH gaijin crowd scene is shot in Tokyo, coincidentally in places with
those spy cameras. Even though GH aims
to catalog foreign crime throughout Japan (and towns in Shizuoka and Gifu Prefectures
have higher foreign population percentages).
Finally, GH has data which
only the police or Immigration would have, such as the passport photo of a
suspect.
This is not out of
character. I have written in the past (Zeit Gist February 20, 2007) about
the NPA targeting foreigners as threats to public safety.
Since they apprise the
media biannually of the rise in foreign crime, the NPA working with a magazine publisher is
unsurprising. GH feels like a public
service announcement.
CONCLUSION
Many felt Gaijin Hanzai was
"hate speech", as it concertedly and maliciously attempted to
encourage fear and loathing of an entire segment of Japan's population. Yet startlingly few raised their voices
against it.
Contrast this with how
another society responded in a similar case:
On February 23, AsianWeek in San Francisco
published "Why I Hate Blacks".
Within were justifications for discrimination: their racist attitudes towards Asians, their slave
history, their lack of intelligence, and their Christianity.
Within days, news media,
ethnic anti-defamation leagues, even Nancy Pelosi, were demanding apologies and
retractions. Civil society kicked into
action, debated the issue, and shouted the columnist down.
In Japan, however, the
domestic press went quiet.
Coincidentally, Education Minister Ibuki Bunmei dismissed the notion of
focusing on human rights at all as "eating too much butter, resulting
in 'Human Rights Metabolic Syndrome'"--demonstrating the low regard
that even people in policymaking positions have for expanding constitutional
protections to Japan's international residents.
Consequently, publications
like GH remain on shelves: Another book
(Joshi Gakusei Daraku
Manual) compares foreign penis
sizes, cautioning its intended female audience that foreigners "don't have
money", "want a lot of sex", and "are junkies". Other manga give reasons for hating Koreans, and depict Chinese
as cannibals (footnote[2]). In other societies signatory to the same
treaties as Japan, they probably would not be on sale, or would at least face
controversy.
So who fought the good
fight this time? Civil society in the
form of "Newcomer" activists got Gaijin Hanzai off the market. They are learning how to fight for their
rights--this time completely by themselves for the first time in Japanese
history. Clearly now even the
"gaijin" do "count".
---------------------------------
An academic version of
this article is available at Japan Focus (http://japanfocus.org/products/details/2386)
ENDS
1550 WORDS