Be sure to read this characteristically intelligent piece in the Japan Times by David McNeill about the lurking racism in British and American media coverage of the Lindsay Hawker murder. A few extracts:
This story brimmed over with the best front-page ingredients: a violent crime with a hint of salacious color, a beautiful victim and a poisonous, clever villain who got away. It also had one other, more troubling component: race.
. . . To prove that underneath the stiff salaryman suit of everyman Japan lurks a slavering fantasist, several foreign journalists were dispatched to interview white hostesses in Roppongi, Tokyo's "social hub," as it was described in a British newspaper. After explaining that Hawker had been "repeatedly beaten over several hours" in a flat owned by Tatsuya Ishihashi (sic), The Daily Mail said that many of the hostesses were also worried about "weird" Japanese men.
"While some British women described the attitude of the men they encounter here as strange, uncomfortable and unpredictable, others talked of the awe and mystique Western women hold for the Japanese male," the reporter wrote.
The "taller" and "more liberated" British women have to "constantly put up with unwanted male attention ' such as the endemic groping on trains."
"They want you to belong to them, but there is a frustration there because they know they can't have you," said one hostess. "The Japanese are so very different to us that I wonder if we will ever really understand them," said another.
Step carefully through the minefield of racial cliches. The devious, inscrutable Japanese man too cowardly to come out and ask for what he really wants: to have sex with an Englishwoman. And ask the obvious questions: Why visit a club district to investigate the life of a language teacher; why should a place designed to exploit and magnify sexual fantasies for money yield honest insights into racial relations; and what did the men think? We don't know because the reporter never bothered to interview a single Japanese person.
. . . A group of agitated Japanese bloggers dubbed this "Japan bashing." A less kind description might be racism.
My own contribution to this debate is here. I agree with Dr McNeill about the vein of prejudice that ran through much of the reporting. Active anti-Japanese racism, in Britain at least, is much less noticeable than it was when I first visited Tokyo 20 years ago, as the recent visit of Emperor Akihito demonstrates. On his previous visit in May 1998, he was booed by former British prisoners of war and their families; this time around, he was virtually ignored. But there is still a will, close to an enthusiasm, to believe the worst about Japan for which tragedies like that of Lindsay Hawker provide an outlet; and a lazy contempt for standards of accuracy and analysis which would always be applied if this were a story out of the United States, say, or western Europe.
To me this was most obvious in the indifference to the correct spelling of the name of the suspect, Tatsuya Ichihashi. So far, I have seen the following variations on this not particularly difficult name:
Ishihashi (Sunday Mirror, Daily Mail)
Ichihachi (The Sun. Er, and The Times. Once - it wasn't me!)
Ichi-hachi (People)
Ichahachi (The Sun, again)
Ishihashni (Mirror)
Ichinashi (Daily Star)
One British colleague recounted to me how his editors continued to mis-spell the name even after he had corrected them. The British papers are prefectly capable of digesting Litvinenko, Ahmadinejad, Ronaldinho and Shilpa Shetty. Why such a struggle over four syllables which are written exactly as they are pronounced?
It is not, I suspect, that the British press hates Japan or despises it or feels actively superior. Almost as depressing, it just doesn't give a damn.
[Image above, of Hirohito looking remarkable like the Cat in the Hat, by Dr Seuss. The whole, very interesting story is told here.]