Has international media coverage of Hawker murder peddled an ugly strand of uninformed stereotyping?
The Guardian has featured a letter to the editor by Jenny Holt, a lecturer at Meiji University who believes that the international media has used the Lindsay Hawker murder case as an excuse to “indulge in practically the only form of overt racism still tolerated today – the demonisation and denigration, en masse, of Japanese men.” Here’s an excerpt:
The paper announced that the murder had “cast a sinister shadow” over Tokyo’s entire female expatriate community. “In Japan,” it proclaimed, “British women constantly have to put up with unwanted male attention – such as the endemic groping on the trains”. Later, it interviewed another British teacher who cautioned women to be “wary” before travelling to the country.
Others have also capitalised on this crude stereotype. In September 2008, Radio 4 broadcast a play by John Dryden and Miriam Smith entitled A Tokyo Murder, which was loosely based on the Hawker case and which trotted out the same xenophobic caricatures about an uptight society with an underlying streak of insanity that refuses to co-operate with western forces of reason and justice.
This year Clare Campbell included a discussion of the Hawker case in Tokyo Hostess, an investigation of the Roppongi bar scene and the Lucie Blackman murder – even though Lindsay Hawker had nothing to do with hostessing. As Susanna Jones commented in a review of Campbell’s book, the only thing the murders have in common is that Blackman and Hawker were “targeted by horrifyingly dangerous men”. To imply that the presence of two psychopaths makes a whole country dangerous for foreign women is to leap to the most preposterous of conclusions.
And it is not just the Blackman and Hawker cases that invite this approach. The same ignorant stereotypes are rolled out at any opportunity. Newspaper reports of the Nomura sex discrimination case emphasise the fact that the bank is Japanese, even though sex discrimination is endemic in banking and companies of every nation are routinely sued for it. Television programmes seek out oddballs to portray as mainstream, eating live fish, doing cosplay or collecting hentai manga. And cinemagoers would be forgiven for thinking that every other Japanese was a geisha or a yakuza. Any half-informed piece of disinformation seems to suffice where Japan is concerned.
Found via 空, which also directs readers to Jeffrey Levick’s “Japan in the U.S. Press: Bias and Stereotypes.”
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