On what are called “entertainment” pages, there are photographs of foreigners and Japanese women embracing on Tokyo streets. One photo of a black man and a Japanese woman has the caption, “Hey nigger!! Don’t touch that Japanese woman’s ass!!”
[Shigeki Saka, editor of the magazine Gaijin Hanzai Ura Fairu or ?Secret Foreigner Crime Files?] said that while he knew the term “nigger” is racist, he reckoned it would have a different nuance written in Japanese. “We used it as street slang, writing it in katakana. But if we had known that we would get such a huge reaction from foreigners, we might have refrained from using it,” he figured.
Saka said that although the book had been pulled from Family Mart, it is still available at some bookstores and on the Internet.
Hideki Morihara, secretary general of International Movement Against All Forms of Discrimination and Racism, said the magazine is only part of a wider problem for which the government is partially responsible.
