"TOO EARLY FOR JAPAN TO HOST THE WORLD CUP"
By Arudou Debito
(submitted to several newspaper OP-ED columns on June 10, 2002)
It has been a full week of soccer up here in Sapporo, Japan, as the venue for three
games (including the controversial England vs Argentina match). Now that it is all
over including the shouting, it is time to ruminate on Japan's ability to host something
as international as the World Cup.
The inevitable conclusion is that, even with the excitement from Japan's team doing
well, its overall interest in soccer remains too low to justify its current receivership.
Most real soccer countries would be doing cartwheels to hold the event, and would
view certain externalities, such as rowdy fans, as they should: an unwelcome--but
small--side effect.
Not Japan. Since the public is not yet sold on the art of the "beautiful game",
Japan's pundits and personalities have wound up talking too much about the only thing
that came to mind: fuurigan (hooligans).
Months of media and police reports fueled the fear of soccer fans trashing a town
or two. Regular TV estimates were made on the number of Brits swarming and descending
on innocent municipalities. Prefectural police maintained, "There is no such
thing as being too careful," and watched budgets swell to match their efforts.
Translation companies did a brisk business producing exclusionary signs so that shops
could themselves safe from foreign clientele. A politician raised the spectre of
unwanted babies from foreigner rapes.
As a result, a sleepy Sapporo this past week found itself crawling with 7300 cops,
many imported from the mainland. Subways and streets were reminiscent of Greece in
the 1970s, sometimes with more police than pedestrians on the platforms. Three ferries
were chartered by Immigration to ship yobboes back to the mainland. Daylight spot
checkpoints were made on even local foreigners to root out possible troublemakers
(since, as a regional police chief stated to a group of volunteer translators, "Only
foreigners smash things when drunk.")
In the end, how many people were arrested in Sapporo during match week? Nineteen,
five of them Japanese, and not one charged for riotous behavior.
It is worse than proverbial storm in a teacup. Sapporo's afterglow is revealing a
more widespread social damage in Japan--a wholesale imaging-down of the outsider.
Life has become more difficult for foreign-looking long-term residents of Japan,
who, no matter how assimilated they become lingustically and culturally, will by
mere dint of their appearance have to live with the fearful neighborly glares, the
adjacent seats left vacant on public transportation, and the whispers of "fuurigan,
fuurigan".
All because Japan's government sought the World Cup without public consensus: it
needed an economic elixir for a decade-long recession, and in the end it did not
want to lose out to South Korea, its lesser-developed rival with a longer history
of the sport.
This was a mistake. At this point in time, Japan as a society neither understands
the sport nor the people who support it. Without some immediate soul-searching about
international communality and hospitality, Japan will wind up embarassing itself
worldwide by further exposing its institutionalized derision towards people of differences.
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506 words
BYLINE: Arudou Debito, 37, is a university lecturer, a 14-year resident of
Hokkaido, and a naturalized Caucasian citizen of Japan. His website can be found
at www.debito.org