Little Things that Irk You 4Ever

[danholo]

We don't forget our war past so why should others forget theirs?

I'm not talking about memory. I was talking about proper context.

[Asura]

for those living in Japan, does a Japanese person find the term 'Jap', offensive?

Yes. I've asked, during a somewhat uncomfortable conversation about WW2. The history teacher at a school I taught at brought it up, and I took the opportunity to ask the question to a few people. They all said that whilst the term was somewhat meaningless to them, they still were aware it was offensive and disliked it.

Race in Japan is a difficult conversation to have, because the terms can be ambiguous. It comes from "Japanese" being both a race and a citizenship, where the vast majority of people who are Japanese citizens are also of Japanese race. Consequently (certainly to the people I knew) they often made quite sweeping generalisations based on things like nationality and race.

[pentarou]

Think you've got a tough job defending this one! No one's incriminating anyone, it's more of a 'why don't we just use JPN?'. It's just as convenient and nobody gets offended. Win win.

Indeed. When a word has its roots in being a racial slur and there are a wealth of non-offensive alternatives, I don't see any point in trying to justify the use of it.

[Neon Ignition]

Pretty much see it outright as a context issue. If someone on here was discussing the nations people using the term 'Jap', especially in a negative manner it would raise an eyebrow with me but if someone listed a game in the trade forum using the letters to denote region I don't think it would warrant mention or thought. Intent is the real key and I can't imagine it's a common issue on here to warrant constant policing, just raising with the mods where there's a genuine concern.

[danholo]

The majority wins.

Like I said, I won't use the term because I don't want to hurt anyone's sensibilities and I don't think I've ever used it in normal posts.

Having said that, my opinion stands.

[nakamura]

I agree on here it's all context but if a word is that offensive, why use it at all just to be lazy?

Japanese. Pretty easy to write.

[Dogg Thang]

A good friend of mine who passed away last year was Japanese-American. I have no idea what Japanese living in Japan think of it but I can tell you with certainty that the term was hurtful to large numbers of Japanese people living in the US because it goes part and parcel with them being demonised during the war, being bombarded with anti-Japanese propaganda and having their families rounded up and put in internment camps and treated like prisoners even though they were American citizens with jobs, businesses and were just part of their normal American communities up to that point. That was never made right and the term is a reminder of that.

[nakamura]

The staggering amount of hateful comments I saw on the net after the Tsunami a few years ago was staggering. All stating the 'Japs deserved it for Pearl harbour '

[Asura]

The majority wins.

A big part of racial sensitivity is that whilst the majority may say or do something, they can consider being sensitive to the feelings of the minority.

Otherwise people would still be saying words like

->Open Spoiler<-

"Dago"

. There are very few people in the UK who are actively offended by it (I mean I'm not Spanish), but I still think people shouldn't use it.

[wakka]

Most ill advised forum argument of the day award goes to.......Danholo!

Come on down!

[briareos_kerensky]

Qnap mobile apps always show a 4-bay NAS even when the connection is for a 2-bay model.

[Dogg Thang]

I understood a few individual words in that post.

[QualityChimp]

Qnap mobile apps

Have you not been following this thread?! :O

It's Qnapanese mobile appanese!

[danholo]

Most ill advised forum argument of the day award goes to.......Danholo!

Come on down!

Thank you, thank you!

*waves and bows*

[ShadowDancer]

To this day I have used the 'JPN' from way back since using JPNGames. I say this because, I was on rllmuk, they had an error with some of the sales threads, and my thread was actually changed (not by me) to state Jap instead of Jpn (then it was locked and I couldn't change it! this was probably 8 years ago and I need to say...), if anyone saw that, it wasn't me that changed it.