Thank god

For a while there, I was beginning to think I was all alone:

Over a summer dinner, a Japanese colleague shook his head at the yet unsolved gunshot murders of three supermarket clerks in Hachioji in 1995.

"It had to be a foreigner that did it. No Japanese would commit a crime like that."

"Hello?" I knocked on the table. "Look at me, please." Was not his dinner mate a foreigner too? And might not foreigners be offended by such an indictment?

The man squirmed and said he meant to emphasize the "gun." Japanese crooks would never be so cruel as to shoot people in the back of the head with a gun.

Right. They might ram a car into a crowd and then knife everyone in sight, a la the killing spree in Akihabara this year. Or like child-abductor Tsutomu Miyazaki, they might drink their victims' blood*...Thomas Dillon in the Japan Times.

Live in Japan? Don't you know exactly how Thomas felt? Have you not been in the exact same conversation yourself?

Just as I have been trying ignore this kind of "thinking" and live in a fantasy world Japan where it doesn't exist... Some do, why not me too?

*There was also the fellow who used a shotgun to commit mass murder earlier this year, but perhaps that doesn't count since he did not simply shoot his victims in the back of the head.