Asians Who Hate Asians

When I was back home in Singapore for summer vacation, I had the opportunity to eat lunch with a real, live Japanese-disliking Singaporean. His disdain for the Japanese was not a matter of ignorance...according to him, it was quite well-informed.

"First of all, they were very cruel to us during the war," he said. "Second of all, Japanese are actually very dirty people."

"I thought Japanese were very clean," I said.

He shook his head. "Very dirty. Only in public, they are very clean. I know. I lived there for years. Actually, they are very filthy."

"He doesn't really hate Japanese. He just talks, but it doesn't mean anything," his wife told me later. "If he met a Japanese face to face, he wouldn't hate him."

However, it seems that in area of prejudice, the Japanese are also fending for themselves. Here's an article from the New York Times on two best-selling comic books in Japan which portray Koreans and Chinese as backward and inferior people.