Debito Arudou's May 3 Just Be Cause column, headlined " Better to be branded a 'flyjin' than a man of the 'sheeple,'" provoked an online skirmish between contributors to the columnist's blog, Debito.org, and its self-proclaimed "debunker" site. Here are just some of the mails received at The Japan Times in response to the column.
Debito Arudou has a singular talent of viewing every occurrence in Japan and painfully contorting it into a not-so-subtle slight against foreign residents living in Japan - it is too bad that talent cannot be put to better use.
The modus operandi of his columns is to look at every event, incident, speech or advertisement and to find the ways in which the Japanese populace is insulting those who were born from beyond their shores. Often, this requires remarkable stretches of the imagination, such as his past attempts to speciously (and offensively) equate the contracted word "gaijin" with the N-word in terms of its vulgarity.