The Dec. 14 shootings at a sports club in Sasebo, Nagasaki Prefecture, was sad and deplorable. The coverage of the TV media was just as bad. For almost 24 hours, some media repeated over and over again that the shooter was a "foreigner." Every time a gun is used in Japan the TV media seems to immediately spin their stories to foreign crime because of their assumption that no Japanese could possibly be involved in gunplay. It's no wonder that many law-abiding foreigners in Japan are continually treated like animals in a zoo, to be looked at from a distance and never to be associated with.

shawn barva