Europe, in its long history of invasion and internecine conflict, has often recoiled at the prospect--be it real or imagined--of marauding Visigoths, commandeering Teutons or other lust-crazed, destructive-minded infidels. Now Japan is currently going through just such paroxysms, at the thought of yobs from the England Tribe rampaging through Asia's heretofore sleepy suburbia.
"We must," says Takayoshi Konno, a politician from the ruling Liberal Democratic Party, "brace against unwanted babies being conceived by foreigners who rape our women."
The horror being referred to is not terrorism, nor Pan-Asian conflict, but the World Cup of soccer, which Japan is co-hosting this year with Korea (a country which Japan, incidentally, once conquered, enslaved, and made sex slaves from its women.) International soccer is not the calmest of sports--hooliganism is always a problem, and yes, in 1969 a war broke out after a match between Hondurs and El Salvador. But to be fair, most of the bad days are over. No one, apparently, has told Japan.
Japan is not exactly well-prepared for an influx of foreigners. As you know, it is a long way away...and expensive. There are a few ethnically non-Japanese living there (about 1% of the population), but most of these folk are Koreans and Chinese, and thus at least of a similar ethnicity, pigmentation and general appearance. And yet even they are marginalized (for instance: 100 years' residency, and no voting rights). There are tourists, of course, who brave the most costly metropolis in the world, but the government has taken more interest in mass-production than tourism. Put bluntly, there aren't a whole lot of Europeans in the country.
And that's the way many of Japan's male, septuagenarian governing lawmakers would like the country to stay. The governor of Tokyo, Shintaro Ishihara, has "support levels" of 78%, despite (or perhaps because of) statements in direct violation of Article 4 (a and b) of the International Convention for the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination. Specifically, he said that "The time has come for us to drive out this encroaching evil on our own, so as to prevent it from taking root in Japan and destroying our society to come." The evil that was encroaching? Chinese genes. Or, as he called them, "criminal genes."
The politicians are doing a good job in keeping the evil at bay. In 1999, for example, Japan accepted a total of 11 refugees, down from 16 in 1998. This is somewhat at odds with the findings of a UN study, which states that Japan needs 600,000 immigrants on average every year to maintain the current size of working-age population.
No matter. Xenophobia can always trump economics. The public has been terrorized already with stories about the victims of the evil Chinese--i.e. "a corpse whose skin had been viciously stripped from the face, leaving it completely unrecognizable"--so it isn't too difficult to create demon out of the next batch of interlopers, which happens to be the English football fans. Overkill seems to be the operative tactic in dealing with the Brits. A force of eight riot police and four police patrol cars was sent out to collar two men, who turned out to be in Hirono only because the Argentinean team was practicing there.
"A friend of mine," another Brit told the Japan Times, "was apprehended by police while walking in Tokyo on May 1 for the egregious crime of wearing a Bordeaux soccer shirt in public. After absorbing chest-poking one-word allegations of "hooligan," he was escorted to the nearest koban [police station] and detained for 45 minutes while the dedicated law-enforcers made telephone calls to try to clear up the (perceived) situation."
To help prevent such profiling, the Osaka Supporters Club has produced an "I'm not a hooligan" T-shirt to distribute to foreign football supporters. And Japanese railway companies are planning to help prevent violence by gluing down the stones that line their train tracks. Finally, and perhaps most entertainingly, police in Sapporo have staged mock riots for training, and acquired "net guns" that can ensnare hooligans in a Spidermanesque web. These rifle-like Contraptions, unveiled by the Oita prefectural police force, fire a nylon net and are capable of trapping two or three people at a time at a distance of up to 5 meters.
Despite Japan's clear willingness to think the worst of its citizens, the British Embassy has decided not to call up the gunboats. It has instead begun handing out 40,000 leaflets, printed in Japanese, which explain that while England fans may be big, loud and drink lots of beer, but they are really quite friendly really. The leaflet advises shopkeepers to use such phrases as: "England are a great team."
But then, the Japanese probably don't know the word 'crap'.
