(Editor’s note: Debito wrote this piece, and even recorded it, quite some time ago. Unfortunately, for reasons we can’t quite fathom, the audio file has. . . well. . . apparently disappeared. This is the text of his Shasetsu, a bit late. We apologize for the tardiness of the publication, for the missing audio, and for dropping the ball on this one in general. Nevertheless, it’s a well-done piece, well worth reading and discussing and we hope you enjoy it.

The second part of Arudou Debito’s appearance on TPR Spotlight will be up before you can say “Vast Right Wing Conspiracy.”)

RUMBLE AT THE MINISTRY OF JUSTICE

A hearing on human rights is disrupted by right-wingers

In 1995, Japan signed the United Nations Convention against all forms of Racial Discrimination. By doing so, it promised “without delay” to take all measures, including legislation, to eliminate racial discrimination within its borders. However, more than a decade later, Japan still has not passed any laws against discrimination by race. And as the spread of “Japanese Only” signs and rules nationwide attests, laws are sorely needed.

So is the urge to come clean. Under this treaty, the Japanese government must submit a report every two years on what it is doing to eliminate racial discrimination. It is mighty late, filing its first report, due in 1998, in 2001. And it has filed no reports since then.

In preparation for the next report, and to avoid charges that the bureaucrats were not listening to the public, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs has held open hearings, attended over the years by NGOs and “concerned citizens”. The latest meeting took place yesterday afternoon, August 31, and I attended. It was, in a word, a disaster.

I attended with fifteen human-rights NGOs, led by a group entitled International Movement Against All Forms of Discrimination and Racism (IMADR). Also there, however, were about 20 other “concerned citizens”, who sat in the back and wouldn’t make eye contact. Something was brewing.

Representing the government were sixteen bureaucrats from six different ministries: National Personnel Agency, Education, Foreign Affairs, Justice, Health Labor and Welfare, and the National Police Agency. All were junior staffers in their twenties and thirties who could speak authoritatively on nothing. This is not unusual–our last meetings were much the same, with us making comments, and them sitting like the Sphinx and offering nothing but polished variations of “kentou shimasu“. With no feedback or answers from them in writing later on. Such is de rigueur for Japanese bureaucrats.

What was different this time was that trouble started immediately. Several old farts had come specifically to disrupt the meeting, and they were each going to take their turn denouncing something.

The first person was a sexagenarian who talked about his variant of “discrimination”: How the Zainichi generational foreigners had special privileges just because they had been born and lived in Japan for several generations. The government, he said, should abolish their “Special Permanent Residency” status. Make them all Regular Permanent Residents, since they had only come here to take advantage of Japan’s prosperity. This caused snickers from some, loud applause from others, and raised hackles amongst my Zainichi neighbors.

We made our points in turn as best we could, but whenever we spoke, we would get jeers from the bully boys in the back, and whenever they spoke we’d have to tolerate smear and epithet. We asked the chair to please put a lid on discriminatory comments, which he proved utterly incapable of doing.

Anyway, some of the points the disrupters raised were:

a) Discrimination, assuming it really does occur in Japan, is between individuals, therefore the treaty doesn’t apply. Likewise, domestic violence between international couples is something between a married couple. And rights for children should not be extended. Huh? We told the chairman to bring the focus back onto the treaty, to little avail.

b) Koreans are anti-Japanese and have odd ideologies–just imagine what trouble they would make if you gave them any power over Japanese? Any attempt to control or punish discrimination is the same as Stalinism and thought police. We asked the chair to stop this invective and discriminatory language towards Koreans, but he allowed the speech to continue.

c) Discrimination is justified when these foreigners shouldn’t be in our country anyway. The United Nations is not a body we should be listening to–for after all, we Japanese have our own unique culture and racial purity. Why should we let international treaties with their inappropriate standards influence our country? The government should show some balls and stand up for itself.

When a meeting has a chairman who doesn’t even have the cojones to clear the hall of people who even deny the primacy of the UN in a hearing about the UN, you know the fix is in.

The last straw was when one of the attendees referred to a famous Korean born to a Comfort Woman as a “bastard child” (shiseiji). Our side demanded the representative from the Ministry of Justice do something. It was within his ministry’s mandate to silence hate speech. He remained silent. At this point, one Zainichi had simply had enough. She stood up and demanded a retraction and an apology. The disrupters said they would offer no such thing, repeating the word several times for effect.

It almost came to blows. Even then, no security was called, and nobody was asked to leave. The meeting was brought to a close a half-hour early.

But here’s when it got really interesting. I was about to leave when one of disrupters actually came up to me with a smile and a friendly tone of voice. He turned out to be an assemblymember from Hino City, near Tokyo, and was quizzical as to why I was here.

After all, this is his view: White people in Japan have it good here because of Japan’s inferiority complex towards them. So discrimination cannot happen towards them. It only happens towards the lesser peoples of the world, and they’re only here taking advantage of the Japan we Japanese built up. They shouldn’t be here asking for anything. Therefore I as a superior Caucasian should have nothing to complain about.

I asked if he considered me a Japanese. He said yes. He saw that my Japanese was excellent, and I have citizenship. Good, thank you. So I mentioned the Otaru Onsens Case, and explained that despite my language level and citizenship, I had been refused entry by a public bath just because I am White. He had never heard of the case. I recommended he read my book on the subject, Japanese Only. He repeated that he had never heard of it. Clearly, since there was no way to reach this chap, I let it go and he shook my hand goodbye.

That’s the shortcoming of these kinds of people: Anything that has never happened upon their existence, or intruded upon their narrow view of the world, simply doesn’t exist.

Conclusions: I have the feeling we were played like a fiddle. The provocateurs knew how to wind us up, and kept on poking us until we poked back. Yes, a proper chairman would have cleared the meeting of those people. But barring that, if I was everyone in our camp, I would have ignored the heckling, made my points calmly, stomached the epithets (only calling for time limits on their speeches to be obeyed), and shown through the force of argument that our side was the stronger.

Then again, it’s entirely possible that a disrupted meeting is what the bureaucrats wanted. Holding these things are a nuisance. Now they can claim there’s no need to have any more, since they will only degenerate into shouting matches and potential fistfights. The bully boys managed to sluice things off, like any soukaiya at a shareholder meeting.

What’s next? Dunno. But it’s clear that we are getting closer to winning the debate–enough so that the Rightists feel threatened and need to shout us down. We’re going to have to develop a thicker skin.

And if coordinators don’t take a more aggressive stand at keeping their meetings calm and reasonable, we’re going to see more argument at the bureaucratic level to shut the public out preemptively. Plurality will be used as a weapon to narrow input on the most contentious policy issues, and the will of “the majority”, seen as paramount in Japan’s rather immature view of democracy, will used to justify policy at the expense of “the minority” all over again.

(Full report at Debito.org.)