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- guardian.co.uk, Friday 13 November 2009 15.03 GMT
Tatsuya Ichihashi, the prime suspect in the murder of Lindsay Hawker, has been caught. Perhaps the process of achieving justice for the family of the British teacher can begin at last.
However, the Hawkers are not the only victims of this sad episode; others will suffer, albeit indirectly and to a much lesser extent, from the ensuing cultural fallout. This is because the mainstream media has seized on the crime as an excuse to indulge in practically the only form of overt racism still tolerated today – the demonisation and denigration, en masse, of Japanese men.
When British citizens are killed abroad, the countries in which the crime takes place rarely attract such negative scrutiny as Japan has with the Hawker case. As David McNeill remarked in the Japan Times a couple of months after the murder, the case unleashed a flurry of "yellow peril" scaremongering in the western media.
Typical of the response was the Daily Mail, which sent a reporter to the Roppongi entertainment district of Tokyo (hardly the place to find a cross-section of Japanese society) to get the lowdown on Japanese men from foreign bar hostesses. They rattled off the old stereotypes of the men as '"strange, uncomfortable and unpredictable", "so very different to us", impossible to understand and having an unhealthy attitude to foreign women. The paper announced that the murder had "cast a sinister shadow" over Tokyo's entire female expatriate community. "In Japan," it proclaimed, "British women constantly have to put up with unwanted male attention – such as the endemic groping on the trains". Later, it interviewed another British teacher who cautioned women to be "wary" before travelling to the country.
Others have also capitalised on this crude stereotype. In September 2008, Radio 4 broadcast a play by John Dryden and Miriam Smith entitled A Tokyo Murder, which was loosely based on the Hawker case and which trotted out the same xenophobic caricatures about an uptight society with an underlying streak of insanity that refuses to co-operate with western forces of reason and justice.
This year Clare Campbell included a discussion of the Hawker case in Tokyo Hostess, an investigation of the Roppongi bar scene and the Lucie Blackman murder – even though Lindsay Hawker had nothing to do with hostessing. As Susanna Jones commented in a review of Campbell's book, the only thing the murders have in common is that Blackman and Hawker were "targeted by horrifyingly dangerous men". To imply that the presence of two psychopaths makes a whole country dangerous for foreign women is to leap to the most preposterous of conclusions.
And it is not just the Blackman and Hawker cases that invite this approach. The same ignorant stereotypes are rolled out at any opportunity. Newspaper reports of the Nomura sex discrimination case emphasise the fact that the bank is Japanese, even though sex discrimination is endemic in banking and companies of every nation are routinely sued for it. Television programmes seek out oddballs to portray as mainstream, eating live fish, doing cosplay or collecting hentai manga. And cinemagoers would be forgiven for thinking that every other Japanese was a geisha or a yakuza. Any half-informed piece of disinformation seems to suffice where Japan is concerned.
I have lived in Japan for nine years, I have a Japanese husband and son, and I can honestly say that the most striking thing about people here is how downright normal they are. They talk about mortgages. They worry about the flu. They walk the dog and coo at babies on trains. I have never felt threatened, have never experienced "unwanted male attention" or been assaulted. We have harassment and gender equality rules at work, all conscientiously observed. Ichihashi is viewed as a freak, and his picture hangs in police boxes beside those of the Aum cult members. This is modern normality, and if foreigners who came here actually bothered to learn the language and find out what people what ordinary Japanese people think they would appreciate that.
Is it such a big deal if the Daily Mail indulges a bit of mindless foreigner-bashing? I think so. It affects the way my husband is treated in Britain and may hamper my son's ability to integrate into British society. The stereotyping also speaks volumes about the western psyche. It suggests that westerners resent and fear successful non-white cultures and that they cope by denigrating and dehumanising them. What Britain chooses to see in Japan says more about its own insecurities than about the Japanese, and if Britain wants any role on the world stage in the future, attitudes will have to change as Asia grows.
Jenny Holt posts below the line as kikichan. She suggested this article in our recent the What do you want to talk about thread.
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