Banner of Segregation

Stupid guys are everywhere. True shame exists in ignoring them.

Above an entrance leading to the seats for the home team in a soccer game at Saitama Stadium last Saturday, someone raised a banner read “Japanese Only,” which accordingly rejected foreign fans. The host team, Urawa Reds, did not remove it until the end of the game. The Chairman of J League, Mitsuru Murai, posed the team a penalty of a no-spectator game later this month. Most Japanese were shocked and embarrassed by such a reckless emergence of discrimination and, moreover, by dishonest response of the host team.

The explanation of Urawa revealed their lack of seriousness. The President of Urawa Reds, Keizo Fuchida, described his recognition of banner as “an intention to appeal that the area was a holy place and he did not want strangers to enter.” Indicating recent troubles between Japanese fans and foreigners in the stadium, Fuchida admitted a sense of consideration for his customers. Urawa stressed that it summoned the man and confirmed his discriminative activities during the game, although he dismissed his discriminative intention.

The response of the team lost some points. Regardless the intention of the man, the team needed to consider the effect of the banner on other people. There was no sign that the team had considered how people feel about such a kind of message. The banner made no difference from the signs that segregated African-Americans in public space in Jim Crow era: “White Only.” An event with that discriminative message is no longer a soccer game, but an evil rally of racists.

If troubles were so frequent between domestic and foreign spectators, the team had to be more careful about such an intimidation. Leaving them uncontrolled leads the soccer league isolated from foreigners, families, women and kids. It also jeopardizes the Japanese soccer fans in foreign countries, exposing them to retaliatory and offensive environment.

Ordinary supporters for Urawa were serious about the event. Some accepted the penalty from the league chairman to be proper, because they felt it as fundamentally embarrassing. Another regretted it as happening in the year of World Cup Soccer in Brazil.

Most Japanese saw the same root as hate speech on the roads. One specialist on discriminative tendency in Japan told that hate expression in cyber space was emerging into the real world. Allowing such deeds directly connects to exclusive and uneasy society, in which even human rights would not be taken for granted.