The Community Page received a large number of responses to Debito Arudou's last Just Be Cause column on the use of the word "gaijin." Following is a selection of readers' views.
That Arudou and others dislike the word "gaijin" and would prefer its retirement, I can understand. What I cannot understand (and I doubt Arudou really believes it either) is the insistence that the word is also an "epithet" comparable to "n--ger," and that Japanese willfully use the term toward (mostly) non-ethnic Japanese in order to berate, abuse or express hostility towards the listener (what "epithet" means).
"N--ger" carries all kinds of baggage and was used to define second-class human beings. I cannot — and I am certain Arudou cannot either — imagine being part of a race who were abducted from their homes, transported like cattle across the Atlantic Ocean, forced to work as slaves for centuries, only then to be "freed" into a country that informed them they could not share the same public facilities, restaurants or schools with "whites." Decades of institutionalized poverty, discrimination, and abuse followed. To suggest a meaningful comparison between the word "n--ger" and "gaijin" on any level exists strikes me as being in very poor taste. Indeed, it starts to trivialize history.