In response to the latest "Just Be Cause" ("Visible minorities are being caught in police dragnet") column, I wrote:
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Dr. ARUDOU Debito wrote:When asked what he was doing, he said he was meeting friends. When asked his nationality, he mentioned his dual citizenship. Unfortunately, he carried no proof of that.
There’s a huge omission in these three sentences. According to Asahi’s article, which Dr. Arudou cites as his source, the “[mentioning] his dual citizenship” did not occur on the street as this and the later paragraph would lead you to believe; the chronology between the escorting to the station and the discovery of his nationality is backwards in this article.
According to the Nikkei article, which Dr. Arudou also sourced, this information became clear only later, at the station, via interpreter. It’s curious that Dr. Arudou decided not to mention that they needed to use an interpreter to discover basic facts that would exonerate him.
In the Asahi article, which Dr. Arudou also sourced — implying he read it — it said that the suspect, when initially approached, spoke “broken Japanese” (“katakoto no nihongo”) when saying “I came to see a friend” etc (“tomodachi ni ai ni kita” nado). THAT (the broken Japanese and inability to articulate his nationality in Japanese) was the reason they asked him (they did not arrest him yet) to voluntarily accompany the officers to the police station. It is very curious that Dr. Arudou left out this key detail.
I suspect the reason Dr. Arudou omitted all the details regarding communication difficulty is because it ruined his desired narrative angle: the police’s decision to detain this poor fellow was based entirely on his “physical appearance” (mentioned four times) and had nothing to do with poor basic communication skills (mentioned zero times in Dr. Arudou’s article, yet referenced in both the Asahi and Nikkei articles [edit: as well as news24, mainichi, & jiji]).
Perhaps Dr. Arudou is so obsessed with “race”, due to his thesis focus, that he failed to consider that there are possibly other reasons why the police suspected he didn’t have Japanese nationality: he wasn’t able to speak (or understand) Japanese well enough to tell the police he was a Japanese national.
It’s very true that it is possible to be a legal Japanese national and not be able to speak a lick of Japanese or speak it poorly (although statistically very unusual). As the police implied in their apology, they need to take that possibility into account for future encounters.
It’s a shame that Dr. Arudou omitted (Japanese language communication problems) and distorted (by reversed the chronology of) these important facts from his article.
Additionally, Dr. Arudou appears to have made some translation errors reading other news reports:
Dr. ARUDOU Debito wrote:the cop … took him in for questioning — for five hours. Then they arrested him … according to a Nikkei report … and interrogated him for another seven.
Doing the math, that means he was interrogated/questioned for twelve total hours.
However, reading the Nikkei and other sources, we see that he was arrested at 5 p.m. (or more specifically, around 5:05~5:10 p.m.) and only held for seven hours. In other words, Dr. Arudou misread / mis-translated the Japanese news sources: he probably thought it said FIVE (5) HOURS (not “o’clock”) PLUS (+) an additional SEVEN (7) hours.
It is regrettable that Dr. Arudou misread / mistranslated / misreported his sources.
