Here’s another jewel from the Hunterfly Road Publishing vault. However this one did make it into the book, “Hi! My Name is Loco and I am a Racist”, as part of chapter 3. I’ve included this post in the series mostly because of the comments it generated at the time. It was one of the more [...]
First, a little about how this game was conceived… A while back, in an effort to maintain sanity amidst absurdity, I’d taken to avoiding looking at Japanese people by walking through the streets of Yokohama with my head down. Sounds ridiculous, I know, but I’m dead-ass serious! I still do it, sometimes. Enter, or sometimes even approach, [...]
Woman walks by a shop window and stops to check herself in her reflection. Amid a few adjustments she notices something in her peripherals. Something startling. She turns her head fully and takes it in. She’s aghast! She turns away quickly and begins to walk faster than before. She glances over her shoulder every 4 [...]
I could feel the awkward pressure against me, his bodily insistence that I move when moving was unnecessary; ample space awaited him in the other direction I discerned with a glance. If this were NY I would’ve thought he was a pickpocket or nutcase…but this is Yokohama, and the mere fact that he was touching [...]
A couple of years back there was a furor over a Japanese McDonald’s ad campaign featuring a white flunky japanophile who can’t manage to get nihongo (spoken or written) through his thick foreign skull…reinforcing this and other negative stereotypes about white foreigners, as if they needed reinforcing… Mr. Debito even compared Mr. James to Stepin [...]
You might remember last week I wrote a post called “What’s up, loco?” where I invited readers to ask Loco a question on anything related to Japan or on anything else for that matter. I’ve received several so far and have either responded or told the reader when they could expect a response. Here is the [...]
I was reading through my post from a year ago and came across a comment I wrote in response to a reader’s comment. I had written the post in response to a Japanese reader’s advice as to how I should respond to Japanese people who avoid me out of fear of me. My response was [...]
The thing is, since I’ve moved to Japan, in my heart and mind, America has become this oasis of tolerance in a desert of bias, a harbor of humanity in a stormy sea of chauvinism and xenophobia, and, at the risk of sounding President Bush-whacked, a beacon of freedom and diversity in a dark, putrid, pit of prejudice and [...]
“So, why do you know Swahili?” one of my more inquisitive students inquired. “I studied it in elementary school…” I replied. “I had to study it, the way you have to study English.” There were still looks of confusion on the students’ faces. The Japanese teacher looked as if it weren’t sitting well with her idea of how [...]
There’s an ongoing furor over a Japanese McDonald’s ad campaign featuring a white flunky japanophile who can’t manage to get nihongo (spoken or written) through his thick foreign skull…reinforcing this and other negative stereotypes about white foreigners, as if they needed reinforcing… Mr. Debito even compared Mr. James to Stepin Fechit. I don’t know about that. I thought it was ironic, [...]
...cuz we all need defense against the dark arts!
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Raw Like Sushi
