Life in Japan as a foreign resident is much better today than it was back in the 80’s. The creature comforts, imported goods and so forth are better, as I have commented on before. But more than that, in the 80’s there was a notable racial component to things as well; foreigners were sometimes seen as a source of crime and disease; police often stopped foreigners for no immediate reason other than that they were foreign. That happened to me many times, usually riding my bicycle; the police would accuse you of having stolen it. In those days, with so much antipathy focused on foreigners, the bad news accentuated and the good news muted, you were sensitive to such things. I recall one day I was stopped near Musashi-Sakai Station for “bicycling while foreign,” and was actually surrounded by four or five cops. I remember seeing passers-by shooting glances at me, and guessed what they were thinking, that this scene confirmed the fears stoked by newspaper bias and politicians’ speeches shouted from the tops of loudspeaker trucks.

This happens a lot less today.

There are, however, some remainders from that time, and this week a few of them have popped up. One of them was an editorial from the Japan Times that was very reminiscent of the 80’s; in fact, it could be an exact clone of an editorial from that time. It comments on high crime rates of foreigners in Japan, but like so many similar reports in past years, it exaggerates quite a bit. It mentions high numbers of crimes, but it does not mention crime rates; and if one calculates the crime rates, one finds what has always been true: crime rates of non-Japanese in Japan have always been lower than that of the native population.

Another facet of the problem has been how the Japanese media gives weight to some stories and less so to others. I commented on the story of Yoshi Hattori, the young boy who was shot to death in the U.S., and how this was amazingly over-reported in Japan, the story dragging on for much longer than a year, while a story about an elderly Japanese woman shot in Japan was virtually ignored despite the unusual nature of the shooting.

Yesterday, a similar example of bias appeared in the news when an American sailor was shot on the streets of Hiroshima. Initial reports here in Japan not only failed to identify the assailant as Japanese, but omitted certain details–his basic description, along with the language he spoke, all information available from the start–details that would have suggested that he was Japanese, thus giving the impression (by local standards) that the shooter was probably another American serviceman. The story was given short thrift in the papers yesterday, and today’s Yomiuri has nothing about it at all. Only subsequent on-line articles reveal that the man spoke Japanese, and still fail to identify him as a national. Foreign publications, like this Stars and Stripes issue, give a more detailed accounting. Japanese newspapers, it should be noted, seldom fail to identify a suspect as a foreigner even if it was only a suspicion of such.

One thing that is clear: if the races had been reversed, and it was an American who had shot a Japanese, there would be no other news story for this day or any other for weeks; it would make international headlines, and Japan would be rife with protest and anger.