Gil Asakawa's NikkeiView: When the JPNZ say "JAP"
In the past few months, Japanese American community groups have managed to change the name of a couple of byways from "Jap Road" to more appropriate names that honor the Japanese immigrants who settled near those roads. To be fair, it might not be out of prejudice that "Jap" has been used in the past. It is, after all, the most obvious abbreviation for "Japan." But even that's changing... Critics complain that this is all the result of pesky political correctness; those of us who feel a pit in our stomach when we see "Jap" in any context think it's the right thing to do... Unfortunately, this discussion of changing values doesn't quite translate to the Japanese themselves, or at least, not to all of them... I received a distressing e-mail from a JACL member who contacted a Japanese-run Web site for scuba diving news...She saw that the Web site's news headlines used "JAP" as an abbreviation for Japan, and sent an irate e-mail to the editor. Satoru "Stanford" Suzuki, the editor-in-chief, responded:
"Don't be stupid. You are not Japanese. You are American. So don't lecture me about what it means to be Japanese and how I should react to the word 'Jap'...For we Japanese, it's just a short form of 'Japan' and 'Japanese' equivalent to 'Brit'. If that's a problem for you, if you want to live in the past, if you want to cultivate some kind of a victim complex, if you want to get overly excited about a mere word, regardless of how it's actually used in 2004, we Japanese don't care. The war has been over for 60 years and we Japanese have moved on...For my part, the discussion is closed. I've got better things to do than entertain a dumb retro-Yank on a bad Jap trip...Peace and love from a modern Jap journalist in modern Japan."...more...
FG Thread: Groups Sue to Change Name of 'Jap Road'
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