idiot debito mentioned in TIME magazine

[Ketou]

It's gratifying to see Davie get the attention he needs. I suggest as an encore that he target foreigners acting as fake priests since they obviously perpetuate the image of gaijin as being moral.

That is perplexing.....they still think Christianity is moral.

[FG Lurker]

It's gratifying to see Davie get the attention he needs. I suggest as an encore that he target foreigners acting as fake priests since they obviously perpetuate the image of gaijin as being moral.

Fake priests representing imaginary sky men. It seems pretty reasonable to me.

[james]

Fake priests representing imaginary sky men. It seems pretty reasonable to me.

amen!

[Cyka UchuuJin]

[SIZE="7"][font="Arial Black"]A_FUCKING-MEN BROTHER!!!!!!![/font][/SIZE]

i'm a girl.

[okazakiOm]

oh dear. you're one of THOSE.

Back at ya. Although I'm probably not what you think I am.

japan might enjoy dressing up and trying to look like americans, but they never will be the melting pot of racial tolerance that you'd like to see it be.

Possibly not, but you have no authority to make such a final statement. You may be as wrong as me.

the global epidemic of 'white god syndrome', or as GG puts it 'zero to hero', is even more prevalent in japan than other countries (which is one reason why there will never be equality for whites or westerners), and it nearly always comes to bite them in the ass in the end when they leave with their j-wife who stops putting out the day after the ring on the finger and starts demanding the living beyond their means lifestyle. which is poetic justice, really, when it's happened to one of the WGS afflicted.

Relevance to the topic? I see none, and your parenthetical argument is not an argument at all. I really have no attachment to white rights per se (being Hispanic), just for NJ as a group.

*should* white people have equality in japan? maybe. will it ever happen? no.

WTF? "Maybe"? How do you justify that? I may be idealistic, but you seem to be a bit to the right of a Black Truck. Is hip cynicism the new fashion for Apologists these days?

I don't know what or where your Japan is, how long you've been here, indeed, anything about you at all, but you certainly seem sure of the absolute finality of your proclamations. Maybe a quick recap of your CV as a JapanMaster™]i'm a girl.[/QUOTE] Oh. Nevermind. You're one of THOSE. Now I understand dragging in ol' Charisma Man from out there in left field.

I'm really not trying to be snarky, but I still think somebody needs to be Debito. It sure as hell wasn't going to be me.

[Taro Toporific]

[quote="okazakiOm"]... Maybe a quick recap of your CV as a JapanMaster™] Sorry, did I miss your introduction in the New Members - Introduce Yourself! thread?

[Cyka UchuuJin]

Possibly not, but you have no authority to make such a final statement. You may be as wrong as me.

I'm really not trying to be snarky

you succeeding without trying then.

i like world peace dreamers like you. your naivety and ignorance is fun to watch.

as for what qualifies me to make such a statement, i think my life of being a dual passport holding russian who went through the change from communism to democracy, being educated in america, england, and russia, living on 4 continents, being in kenya since 2003, spending nearly 5 years commuting and living between japan and kenya, currently still residing in kenya and working in the middle east for a danish company might give me a bit more of a global overview on the state of the world and unlikelihood of cultural change in certain regions than your average cnn watcher. oh and i speak 7 languages and i'm travelling 200 days a year.

you're right, i could be wrong, dunno. but i kinda think i'm not talking out my arse when i reply to comments like yours.

and i'm far from an apologist. i'm the first one to tell gaijin in japan (or anywhere else) who bitch and moan about the place that they CHOOSE to reside in that there's always an exit door and no one is keeping them there if they hate it so much.

hip cynicism? no. realist? most definitely.

but you, you keep on dreamin, man. the world wouldn't be half as fun without dreamers and idealists like you.

[okazakiOm]

Sorry, did I miss your introduction in the New Members - Introduce Yourself! thread?

You might have. I think it was buried amongst my hundreds of posts on the old board, circa 2002-3.

I'll dig it up and repost.

[Cyka UchuuJin]

but I still think somebody needs to be Debito. It sure as hell wasn't going to be me.

of course it's not going to be you. being hispanic, the japanese would take you even less seriously than they would a white guy.

btw, 'white god syndrome' is a generalised term for any foreigner who goes to another country and believes they are superior and the locals should thank their lucky stars they've come to grace them with their presence. the black guys who go to roppongi and amemura to pull j-girls who only want the big black cock are notoriously afflicted with the syndrome. as are banker/financial types in tokyo. and people like tiernan. but he's in a class of his own.

[okazakiOm]

i like world peace dreamers like you. your naivety and ignorance is fun to watch.

Oh, dear me. You couldn't have pegged me more wrongly.

as for what qualifies me to make such a statement, i think my life of being a dual passport holding russian who went through the change from communism to democracy, being educated in america, england, and russia, living on 4 continents, being in kenya since 2003, spending nearly 5 years commuting and living between japan and kenya, currently still residing in kenya and working in the middle east for a danish company might give me a bit more of a global overview on the state of the world and unlikelihood of cultural change in certain regions than your average cnn watcher. oh and i'm travelling 200 days a year.

That's a well-rounded set of experiences, but it is far from a unique one. And I hate CNN, btw.

and i'm far from an apologist. i'm the first one to tell gaijin in japan (or anywhere else) who bitch and moan about the place that they choose to reside in that there's always an exit door and no one is keeping them there if they hate it so much.

Saying exactly what you just said is the very sine qua non of an apologist. You've already taken that door it seems. I have a family, home loans and a job "keeping" me here eight months a year, thankyouverymuch.

hip cynicism? no. realist? most definitely.

but you, you keep on dreamin, man. the world wouldn't be half as fun without dreamers and idealists like you.

I prefer to call it "optimism".

[okazakiOm]

of course it's not going to be you. being hispanic, the japanese would take you even less seriously than they would a white guy.

Japanese perceive me as white anyway. Not every Hispanic looks like Evo Morales. I get all the privileges of passing with none of the liberal white guilt baggage!

I'm curious as to how seriously the Japanese take you. Being a Russian chick, and all, I would think that their stereotype would be ingrained even more strongly. Have you ever been to South Korea?

[okazakiOm]

You might have. I think it was buried amongst my hundreds of posts on the old board, circa 2002-3.

I'll dig it up and repost.

My bad - wrong board. Jiko shokai duly posted.

[Cyka UchuuJin]

Japanese perceive me as white anyway. Not every Hispanic looks like Evo Morales. I get all the privileges of passing with none of the liberal white guilt baggage!

I'm curious as to how seriously the Japanese take you. Being a Russian chick, and all, I would think that their stereotype would be ingrained even more strongly. Have you ever been to South Korea?

yes i have been to south korea. and i never said i was unique. i said that i do have the overview and first hand experience that qualifies my statements.

and yes, i do get the stereotype. but rather than bitch and moan about how the system should change around me, i work within and around it the best i can rather than waste my time and energy fighting it and expecting it to change just because i'm there.

even with a family, loans, and a job, you do choose to be there.

i could get into a much longer debate with you, but i'm already bored of it. especially after your blaring 'i've been on the fg board forever and will dig up my credentials' and then realising you were on the wrong board. that makes you not just one of THOSE, but one of the really really annoying THOSE.

[Ketou]

lol I got a red dot for my Christianity comment..........
If you thought that was bad you should visit this thread.

[okazakiOm]

Tsk. Blaring? I owned up to my error. Regardless, I've been here for five years. Compared to you, I have been here "forever", and I'm permitted a few memory lapses in that time.

It sounds like you have a comfortable justification for yourself not to "waste energy" for a common good, but that sounds like a cop-out to me. Really, you sound like a character out of Uncle Vanya. See, there I go stereotyping.

The woods, and the darkness, and the howling wind. Will the snows never cease? They seem to reach back forever!

Oops, that was The Young Ones, but you get the idea.

[Adhesive]

i think my life of being a dual passport holding russian who went through the change from communism to democracy, being educated in america, england, and russia, living on 4 continents, being in kenya since 2003, spending nearly 5 years commuting and living between japan and kenya, currently still residing in kenya and working in the middle east for a danish company might give me a bit more of a global overview on the state of the world and unlikelihood of cultural change in certain regions than your average cnn watcher. oh and i speak 7 languages and i'm travelling 200 days a year.

"A cynic knows the price of everything and the value of nothing." - Oscar Wilde

[Cyka UchuuJin]

"A cynic knows the price of everything and the value of nothing." - Oscar Wilde

did you borrow that from catone in that other thread?

[Iraira]

and working in the middle east for a danish company .

Pastries are popular in Dubai?

[Catoneinutica]

did you borrow that from catone in that other thread?

I thought the Wilde quote was, "The Japanese know the price of everything and the value of nothing."


-catone
-whichever. Wilde is endlessly quotable.

[Behan]

lol I got a red dot for my Christianity comment..........
If you thought that was bad you should visit this thread.

I tried to give you a green but couldn't because I had previously given you one.

[Cyka UchuuJin]

Pastries are popular in Dubai?

very.

[Iraira]

[quote="Cyka UchuuJin"]very. ]

Oh, wait, I meant to say pasties.....

[Cyka UchuuJin]

Oh, wait, I meant to say pasties.....

hehe, they like those too.

except not during ramadan. contrary to popular belief that they are observing the holy month and being sacrificial, they're just waiting for sundown to go full monty.

[TFG]

Debito may go overboard occasionally however, he does a lot of good work for foreigners who are fucked over in Japan.

Just what do you guys do apart from slag people who need assistance in dire situations? Yes, they may have gotten into trouble by themselves but that is irrelevant, anyone can make a mistake.

[Cyka UchuuJin]

Debito may go overboard occasionally however, he does a lot of good work for foreigners who are fucked over in Japan.

Just what do you guys do apart from slag people who need assistance in dire situations? Yes, they may have gotten into trouble by themselves but that is irrelevant, anyone can make a mistake.

please cite some examples of exactly what good work he's done for foreigners in japan? writing lots of articles and soapboxing hasn't changed any laws or made anything easier for anyone, at least not that i'm aware of.

and what do we guys do apart from slag people? i can't speak for anyone else, but earlier this month i helped someone who was denied entry into the japan get back to his home country after having been through the joy of j-immigration entry denial myself. and when i was getting fucked by my former business partner and landlord, many people here offered advise, links, information, and assistance to try to build a case against them.

i don't know this debito person personally, but everything i've heard about him is that he's a self appointed 'supergaijin' who just gets on his high horse taking issue with this or that, and moans about the plight of foreigners in japan. the culture and system is not going to change, he'd be much better off using his minor (very very minor) celebrity status to help people case by case within the system rather than stomp his feet and use people misfortunes/plights as his personal platform for noisemaking.

[BigInJapan]

please cite some examples of exactly what good work he's done for foreigners in japan? writing lots of articles and soapboxing hasn't changed any laws or made anything easier for anyone, at least not that i'm aware of.

I am by no means a fan of debito, but I first became aware of him as a result of the Otaru onsen incident 8 or 9 years ago. It seems that he heard about an onsen in Otaru, Hokkaido that was denying entry to gaijin, so he made it his mission in life to gain entry (before and after attaining Japanese citizenship), and the final result was that him and two other gaijin won a lawsuit against the city of Otaru for violation of the United Nations Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination - and apparently got one million yen each (which according to his personal Wiki page is $25,000, hmm, the exchange rate must have been REALLY good then).
From what I can recall, this was somewhat of a landmark case as it was the first time that a foreigner had sued a Japanese business for discrimination, and won.
I don't know that it has changed any laws, but perhaps it has made some Japanese people more aware of potential discrimination against foreigners.

[Cyka UchuuJin]

I am by no means a fan of debito, but I first became aware of him as a result of the Otaru onsen incident 8 or 9 years ago. It seems that he heard about an onsen in Otaru, Hokkaido that was denying entry to gaijin, so he made it his mission in life to gain entry (before and after attaining Japanese citizenship), and the final result was that him and two other gaijin won a lawsuit against the city of Otaru for violation of the United Nations Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination - and apparently got one million yen each (which according to his personal Wiki page is $25,000, hmm, the exchange rate must have been REALLY good then).
From what I can recall, this was somewhat of a landmark case as it was the first time that a foreigner had sued a Japanese business for discrimination, and won.
I don't know that it has changed any laws, but perhaps it has made some Japanese people more aware of potential discrimination against foreigners.

so he sued japan and made a profit for himself. did he use the money to open a 'welcome one and all' onsen? i doubt it. is that onsen that he sued now admitting gaijin? unlikely. have most hostess bars started allowing in gaijin? for sure not. has a single japanese person who disliked foreigners before seen that case and it's results and thought 'oh, i'll start thinking gaijin are really great people and i shouldn't think of them as nasty, troublemaking, greedy people who come here to cause noise'? if so, i'd really like to meet that person.

reading his wiki page just makes me dislike him even more, and i completely agree with alex kerr's opinion that his openly combatitive attitude just reinforces that gaijin are difficult to deal with. if debito really wanted to make some kind of difference, he'd use his new citizenship to run for some kind of office. or work with the university that he's a professor at to possibly create an 'changing cultures' or 'social integration studies' course. there are plenty of ways to work from within the system to try to bring about change. and as someone who went to the length to gain citizenship, he should have somewhat of an understanding of the japanese mentality and culture and should know that the soapboxing and in your face offensive articles is not going to make anyone in japan want to hear his views out. the only way you beat someone at their own game is to learn their rules and then find the weaknesses that you can use to your advantage. if you really want to hit someone where it hurts in japan, you go for the kill in making them lose face. do you think this onsen or town lost any face in having to pay him? doubtful. and they do have a good point...ethnically white people, even with a naturalised citizenship, could come across to ethnic japanese as a return to allowing in the drunken sailors who were causing trouble. (btw, the sign on that page in russian reads 'asking foreign citizens to please not enter in the area). if he wanted to go for the fairness law in that, then he should have insisted that they change the sign from 'japanese only' to something like 'management reserves the right to refuse entry to anyone for any reason'.

i'm not saying that the racial discrimination and xenophobia in japan is morally or legally right, but it is how it is and it is their country where even naturalised citizens are still going to be discriminated against based on physical appearance. thinking that having a japanese passport automatically makes you one of 'them' is just ignorant and stupid. blatantly throwing the 'give me rights' into their faces isn't going to change anything. everyone knows the police target foreigners for id checks, so if you look like a foreigner but have a japanese passport, just shut the fuck up and show them your passport instead of making a big deal out of why you shouldn't have to show it. every coloured person in russia who is married or naturalised goes through the same thing. white people in kenya are immediately assumed to be rich foreigners and the police find any reason at all to get increased bribes out of them, even when some of these whites are 2nd generation kenyans who haven't got 2 pence to rub together.

as for the mister james complaining he's doing...he needs to just shut up. how many people in other countries have protrayed japanese as idiots who don't know the difference between 'L' and 'R' or as bumbling camera toting tourists? people poke fun at everything. look at the 'i'm a mac/i'm a pc' campaign? how many microsoft users took offense at being shown as comb-over pocket protector nerds when those came out?

debito actually makes things worse for gaijin. and his motives are not for anyone but himself.

[Mulboyne]

Debito is always going to divide opinions. My own opinion is divided and I think others have written on this board that they feel the same way. On the one hand, I think it's quite good that there is a public loudmouth out there taking people to task where the interests and sensibilities of foreigners in Japan are unfairly ignored. I'll admit that's partly just my sense of mischief which occasionally enjoys seeing someone ruffling feathers. People don't like his tactics but there is no single "Japanese way" of airing grievances and there are plenty of disgruntled locals who are prepared to be a pain in the arse or use the courts to make their point.

Against that, I don't think he is particularly effective because he doesn't have any coherent set of goals. One side effect is that he has lent his name to some causes which don't deserve support and has made more than a few arguments which simply don't stand up to cursory analysis.

[Greji]

drunken sailors who were causing trouble. (btw, the sign on that page in russian reads 'asking foreign citizens to please not enter in the area)

Hmmm, drunken Russian sailors causing trouble?

Now here's a guy who is trying to protect you and your shipmates and you diss him...
What was your home port anyway?

[Cortana]

posting in legendary debito thread #13. Old people on forum come out of woodwork.