OTARU, Hokkaido -- Otaru Onsen Osupa is not a natural setting for the airing of great issues. It is a faded child's-birthday-cake of a building on a windswept highway skirting the Sea of Japan, some 5 km from the center of town. In the lobby are game machines and a fruit stall. Upstairs, last Thursday morning, about 100 mostly elderly customers fresh from the baths sat on the floor around low tables, sushi, beer and other refreshments at the ready. If the foreign-looking man quietly awaiting their attention at the microphone up front aroused their curiosity, they did not it show.

Arudou Debito is, as his name suggests, something of an anomaly. His American birth and upbringing give him a decidedly Western appearance, and yet, should a public bath attempt to exclude him on the grounds that only Japanese are admitted, he can whip out his passport and say quite truthfully, "I am as Japanese as you are." He acquired Japanese citizenship in October 2000. What would the Osupa's customers make of him?

The lawsuit Arudou, a 37-year-old university lecturer, filed with two others at Sapporo District Court in February 2001 has nothing to do with Osupa. The defendants are another Otaru bathing facility and the Otaru municipal government. In September 1999, when Arudou was an American named David Aldwinkle, he and a party of friends were denied entry to Yunohana Onsen -- in violation, says the suit, of the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination, which Japan signed in 1995. A judgment is expected this summer.