In his Aug. 5 article "Once a 'gaijin,' always a 'gaijin,' " Debito Arudou says the word gaijin (foreigner) "strips the world of diversity," yet he himself is stripping the diversity of experiences of foreigners in Japan by asserting that we are treated like "n--gers" here.
I have no doubt that some foreigners have a terrible experience here, where this experience is not brought about by the foreigner's own ignorance or unwillingness to understand how things are done or to learn the language, but is due to racism or the dislike of foreigners by some Japanese.
Does Arudou realize what he is implying about the Japanese people? Does he really think they are all appalling people who think nothing of treating foreigners like "n--gers?" This hardly reflects my experience here, and you only need to turn on CNN to see stories about countries where this is actually the case.
Having lived in southern Mississippi during the late 1960s and actually gone through a segregated school system and lived in a segregated society, I can categorically state that foreigners are not treated anything like "n--gers" here. How can you possibly take seriously someone who makes such a flippant statement?
Finally, what word does Arudou suggest we use in Japanese to denote a person who has come here from abroad, that is, who is a "foreigner" (which, by the way, is derived from the Latin foras, meaning "outsider")?
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