On Oct 6, 2009, at 4:59 AM, William Stonehill wrote:

> I don't think that the Olympic committee forgot very quickly
> about all the hotels in Nagano putting up "Japanese Only" signs and
> the tepid reaction to this by the Japanese government.

This fiction that Japan is brutally exclusivist towards foreigners has
been doing the rounds here for years. There is even a small cottage
industry looking in every direction to expose alleged anti-foreign
discrimination in Japan - including universities, which are pilloried
for not being nice to foreign employees by providing the tenure and
other conditions they often would not hope to get in their home
countries.

It began with some foreign activists protesting when a high-class
onsen in Otaru, Hokkaido, put up a Japanese Only sign to bar entry to
the many Russian seamen frequenting its waters (a rather natural thing
for an onsen to want to do if you have ever visited the wharves in
Otaru and seen the state of the rust-buckets arriving from Russia to
dock). The activists found it much easier to big-time themselves by
filing an anti-discrimination suit against the onsen rather than help
organise educational activities for the Russians, or to set up the
kind of seaman's club found in most large port cities.

One of the activists then used this suit as the basis of a book
entitled 'Japanese Only,' portraying himself as a brave battler
against those racist Japanese. The myth that Japan is riddled with
Japanese Only signs has been in circulation ever since.

A favorite activity among these self-styled anti-discriminators is to
discriminate viciously in blogs and elsewhere against anyone who
queries their self-promoting activities.

One of its offshoots is an another cottage industry seeking to pillory
alleged anti-female discriminators. It stumbled recently when its blog
was found to be carrying ads promising to find female partners for
deprived males.

Gregory Clark
Tokyo