The year 1990 might not seem so long ago, but for many reasons, and in Japan especially, it was a completely different world. There was no Internet. There were no mobile telephones. There was hardly any way to get up-to-date English information on places beyond Tokyo and Osaka except by going there. Outside those metropolises, Westerners were far and few between.
In April of that year, the first edition of The Alien, a free flier of satirical news reports and gag articles, was produced in Nagoya. Carter Witt, an American English teacher who had been in Japan a few years already — and who happened to be a fellow resident of the gaijin house I was staying at — devised and hand-wrote the first four-page issue. Photocopies were made (at a local Lawson's), and then the folded copies were distributed to a select number of English schools and gaijin bars.
The name was a pun on the "Alien" signs for the foreigner line at immigration when entering Japan, and the alien registration cards resident foreigners were required to carry. The "L" in The Alien masthead was symbolically printed with black outline and white interior, while the other letters were completely black.