Kyōgaku no Gaijin Hanzai Ura File – Gaijin Hanzai Hakusho 2007
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The cover of Gaijin Hanzai Hakusho
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| Editor | Shigeki Saka |
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| Categories | Crime, foreign crime |
| Frequency | 1 issue |
| First issue | January 31, 2007 |
| Company | Eichi Publishing Inc. |
| Country | Japan |
| Language | Japanese |
Kyōgaku no Gaijin Hanzai Ura File - Gaijin Hanzai Hakusho 2007 (驚愕の外人犯罪裏ファイル―外人犯罪白書2007?, lit. Shocking Secret Foreigner Crime File - Foreigner Crime White Paper 2007), was a mook (ムック mukku?, a Japanese word for a cross between a magazine and a book) published in Japanese on January 31, 2007 by Eichi Publishing Inc.ja It was distributed in convenience stores and online at Rakuten Books and Amazon.com. The cover price was 690 yen.
Contents
Content
The mook contains images and descriptions of what it says are crimes committed in Japan by non-Japanese, including graphs breaking down crimes by nationality. The mook's cover, in red and black, shows caricatured images of foreigners grinning maniacally with glowing red eyes under its banner headline. No advertising content was included in the mook.
The mook included a caption describing a black man as a "nigga", an article entitled "Chase the Iranian!", and calls Tokyo a "city torn apart by evil foreigners". One cartoon re-enacts a murder on a pig farm in Chiba, east of Tokyo, allegedly by a Chinese man who overstayed his visa.[1]
Response
The product was withdrawn from FamilyMart shelves after several complaints from customers. Debito Arudou, a commentator on racial issues in Japan, posted a bilingual letter on his blog for readers to take to FamilyMart stores, protesting against "discriminatory statements and images about non-Japanese residents of Japan."[1] Richard-Lloyd Parry, Asia editor of The Times also criticised the book.[2] The blog Japan Probe requested its readers to "check that FamilyMart is complying with its pledge to remove the publication".[1] Citing the publication's "inappropriate racial expressions" FamilyMart decided to stop distributing the book on February 5.[1]
The editor of the book, Shigeki Saka, defended his decision to publish in an editorial in Metropolis. Saka stated that, "there are no lies, distortions or racist sentiments expressed in Gaijin Hanzai Ura Fairu. All the statistics about rising crime rates are accurate, and all the photographs show incidents that actually occurred." His stated purpose was to create an informed dialogue on the "taboo" topic of foreigner crime.[3]
Arudou disagreed with Saka's claim of informed dialogue on a taboo topic, arguing in an electronic journal that a magazine that "depicts foreigners as dangerous and evil" violates United Nations treaties pertaining to hate speech, incitement to racial hatred, and racial discrimination:
"Gaijin Hanzai fails the [freedom of speech] test because it a) willfully spreads hate, fear, and innuendo against a segment of the population, b) fortifies that by lacking any sort of balance in data or presentation, and c) offers sensationalized propaganda in the name of "constructive debate". Dialog is not promoted by fearmongering".[4]
The magazine soon went off the market, and, according to an April 5, 2007 report from Teikoku Databank, Eichi Shuppan KK, the magazine's publisher, went bankrupt.[5]
See also
References
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