As you may already know, Japan Probe has been calling for a boycott of FamilyMart and other Japanese convenience stores that sold a racist magazine called “Foreigner Crime File.” We have the following news to report:

FamilyMart Co. has officially responded to my inquiry about the Gaijin Hanzai Ura File, and apologized:

Dear James,

Thank you very much for your valued comments regarding the Gaijin Hanzai Ura File magazines and bringing this serious matter to our attention. We placed an initial order of this magazine from the publisher prior to fully confirming the details of the material content matter. However, after this magazine went on sale beginning Jan. 31st, we discovered that it contained totally inappropriate, disrespectful, and offensive verbal comments and visual effects. Therefore, we notified all of our stores on February 5th demanding immediate removal of this magazine from the store shelves. However, to our regret, it is true that a ceratain number of stores have missed the instruction, and have continued to keep the magazine on the shelves, followed by our second instruction on Feb. 7th. Although we will keep trying to fulfill this mission by ourselves without fail, if you will find the book at any store of FamilyMart from now, could you please give us the exact name of the store so to enable us to take immediate action with special attention. Your warmful undestanding and kind cooperation shall be highly appreciated.

We truly regret this unintentional oversight that caused you to have such an unpleasant experience and offended so many of our valued customers. We would like to convey our apology by showing our action of the withdrawal at each FamilyMart store, and by responding to each customer who kindly gave us this sort of advice. We are taking active steps to ensure that future similar incident do not occur again and appreciate your continued support of our FamilyMart stores.

Respectfully,
Yoshiaki kato
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Yoshiaki kato
Customer Service Department
FamilyMart Co.,Ltd.
26-10 Higashi-Ikebukuro 4-Chome,
Toshima-Ku, Tokyo 170-8404, Japan

customer@neo.family.co.jp
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

I suppose that some people could look at this mail and conclude that this mail isn’t very sincere, but we find it to be a satisfactory apology. After some discussion with the other Japan Probe editors, we’ve decided that this apology and the fact that Family Mart has removed the magazine from its shelves is enough for us to call an end to the boycott. There are several other convenience stores who have yet to apologize for their sale of the magazine in question, and we are hoping that they will soon follow FamilyMart Co.’s example, so we can resume our patronage of their stores again as well.

Thanks to everyone for writing to FamilyMart with your complaints, and let’s not forget to keep watch on their magazine racks to see if they make good with their assurances!