Mainichi Daily News Apologizes the Racist Column

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"WaiWai" was a popular column of the Mainichi Daily News (MDN), the English version of the Mainichi Shimbun, a major national daily in Japan. It was written by Ryan Connell, the Editor-in-Chief of MDN everyday, citing articles about sex in Japanese B-rated magazines. However, many of them were much different from the original articles. Today MDN published an official apology.

All articles of WaiWai were deleted, but some caches are collected in a Wiki site. For example, an article of WaiWai cites Cyzo, a popular web magazine：
From the successor of the government ministry that gave the world Pearl Harbor and the Rape of Nanking now comes a cutesy little girl cartoon character dressed as a maid with a hawkish stuffed teddy bear to give a simple explanation of Japan's defense policies, according to Cyzo (August).
The editors of Cyzo protested to the Mainichi that the original article didn't include such phrases as "the successor of the government ministry that gave the world Pearl Harbor and the Rape of Nanking" (in Japanese).

This is typical for WaiWai, which appealed to foreign reader's sexual curiosity and racial prejudice. Sadly such a stereotype still works. When Connell was laid off and WaiWai shut down, many foreign readers posted e-mails that regret the closing of the interesting column about Japanese life.

Such stereotype is flooded in Wikipedia, which describes Japanese Army "raped hundreds of thousands of Comfort Women during WW2". Even worse, western media such as NY Times and BBC copy such racist documents, as this blog reported.

WaiWai is merely part of the wide spread prejudice toward Japanese. More than sixty years after the war, western people love to picture Japanese people yellow, crude, and sexually-obsessed barbarians.

Comments

owenandbenjamin said…
"More than sixty years after the war, western people love to picture Japanese people yellow, crude, and sexually-obsessed barbarians."

This is an incorrect assumption. Many men in general, including foreign men, are attracted to stories (and pictures) regarding sex and women. That is why the MDN Wai Wai articles were popular.

Yes, they may have been innacurrate, but they were popular because they were about sex.
July 22, 2008 at 12:19 AM
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