Jap is an English abbreviation of the word "Japanese". In some places, it is simply a contraction of the word and does not carry negative connotations[ citation needed ], whereas in some other contexts it can be considered a slur.
In the United States, some Japanese Americans have come to find the term offensive because of the internment they had suffered during World War II. Before the attack on Pearl Harbor, Jap was not considered primarily offensive. However, following the bombing of Pearl Harbor and the Japanese declaration of war on the US, the term began to be used derogatorily, as anti-Japanese sentiment increased. [1] During the war, signs using the epithet, with messages such as "No Japs Allowed", were hung in some businesses, with service denied to customers of Japanese descent. [2]
According to the Oxford English Dictionary , Jap as an abbreviation for Japanese was in colloquial use in London around 1880. [3] An example of benign usage was the previous naming of Boondocks Road in Jefferson County, Texas, originally named Jap Road when it was built in 1905 to honor a popular local rice farmer from Japan. [4]
Later popularized during World War II to describe those of Japanese descent, Jap was then commonly used in newspaper headlines to refer to the Japanese and Imperial Japan. Jap began to be used in a derogatory fashion during the war, more so than Nip . [1] Veteran and author Paul Fussell explains the rhetorical usefulness of the word during the war for creating effective propaganda by saying that Japs "was a brisk monosyllable handy for slogans like 'Rap the Jap' or 'Let's Blast the Jap Clean Off the Map'". [1] Some in the United States Marine Corps tried to combine the word Japs with apes to create a new description, Japes , for the Japanese; this neologism never became popular. [1]
In the United States, the term has now been considered derogatory; the Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary notes it is "disparaging". [5] [6] A snack food company in Chicago named Japps Foods (for the company founder) changed their name and eponymous potato chip brand to Jays Foods shortly after the Attack on Pearl Harbor to avoid any negative associations with Japan. [7]
Spiro Agnew was criticized in the media in 1968 for an offhand remark referring to reporter Gene Oishi as a "fat Jap". [8]
In Texas, under pressure from civil rights groups, Jefferson County commissioners in 2004 decided to drop the name Jap Road from a 4.3-mile (6.9 km) road near the city of Beaumont. In adjacent Orange County, Jap Lane has also been targeted by civil rights groups. [9] The road was originally named for the contributions of Kichimatsu Kishi and the farming colony he founded. In Arizona, the state department of transportation renamed Jap Road near Topock, Arizona to "Bonzai Slough Road" to note the presence of Japanese agricultural workers and family-owned farms along the Colorado River there in the early 20th century. [ citation needed ] In November 2018, in Kansas, automatically generated license plates which included three digits and "JAP" were recalled after a man of Japanese ancestry saw a plate with that pattern and complained to the state. [10]
Koto Matsudaira, Japan's Permanent Representatives to the United Nations, was asked whether he disapproved of the use of the term on a television program in June 1957, and reportedly replied, "Oh, I don't care. It's a[sic] English word. It's maybe American slang. I don't know. If you care, you are free to use it." [11] Matsudaira later received a letter from the Japanese American Citizens League (JACL), [12] and apologized for his earlier remarks upon being interviewed by reporters from Honolulu and San Francisco. [13] He then pledged cooperation with the JACL to help eliminate the term Jap from daily use. [14]
In 2003, the Japanese deputy ambassador to the United Nations, Yoshiyuki Motomura, protested the North Korean ambassador's use of the term in retaliation for a Japanese diplomat's use of the term "North Korea" instead of the official name, "Democratic People's Republic of Korea". [15]
In 2011, after the term's offhand use in a March 26 article appearing in The Spectator ("white-coated Jap bloke"), the Minister of the Japanese Embassy in London protested that "most Japanese people find the word 'Japs' offensive, irrespective of the circumstances in which it is used". [16]
Jap-Fest is an annual Japanese car show in Ireland. [17] In 1970, the Japanese fashion designer Kenzo Takada opened the Jungle Jap boutique in Paris. [18]
In Singapore [19] and Hong Kong, [20] the term is used relatively frequently as a contraction of the adjective Japanese rather than as a derogatory term. It is also used in Australia, particularly for Japanese cars [21] and Japanese pumpkin. [22] In New Zealand, the phrase is a non-pejorative contraction of Japanese, although the phrase Jap crap is used to describe poor-quality Japanese vehicles.
The word Jap is used in Dutch as well, where it is also considered an ethnic slur. It frequently appears in the compound Jappenkampen 'Jap camps', referring to Japanese internment camps for Dutch citizens in the Japanese-occupied Dutch Indies. [23]
In Brazil, the term japa is sometimes used in place of the standard japonês as a noun and adjective. Its use may be inappropriate in formal contexts. [24] The use of japa in reference to any person of East Asian appearance, regardless of their ancestry, can be pejorative. [25]
In Canada, the term Jap Oranges was once very common, and was not considered derogatory, given the widespread Canadian tradition of eating imported Japanese-grown oranges at Christmas dating back to the 1880s (to the degree that Canada at one time imported by far the bulk of the Japanese orange crop each year), but after WW2 as consumers were still hesitant to purchase products from Japan [26] the term Jap was gradually dropped and they began to be marketed as "Mandarin Oranges". Today the term Jap Oranges is typically only used by older Canadians.[ citation needed ]
In the UK, the term is variously seen as neutral or offensive. For instance, Paul McCartney used the term in his 1980 instrumental song "Frozen Jap" from McCartney II , maintaining that he had not intended to cause offense; the song's title was changed to "Frozen Japanese" for the Japanese market. [27] "Nip" is the term that is usually used in the UK when the intention is to cause offence. [28]
In Finnish, the term japsi (pronounced yahpsi) is frequently used colloquially for anything Japanese with no derogatory meaning, similar to how the term jenkki is used for anything American. [29]
This glossary of names for the British include nicknames and terms, including affectionate ones, neutral ones, and derogatory ones to describe British people, Irish People and more specifically English, Welsh, Scottish and Northern Irish people. Many of these terms may vary between offensive, derogatory, neutral and affectionate depending on a complex combination of tone, facial expression, context, usage, speaker and shared past history.
Sangokujin is a Japanese term referring to the various former colonial subjects of the Empire of Japan in the aftermath of World War II. This term particularly applied to Koreans and Taiwanese people, although it also sometimes was used for Ryukyuan people. The term is now generally considered antiquated and offensive.
Gweilo or gwailou is a common Cantonese slang term for Westerners. In the absence of modifiers, it refers to white people and has a history of racially deprecatory and pejorative use. Cantonese speakers frequently use gwailou to refer to Westerners in general use, in a non-derogatory context, although whether this type of usage is offensive is disputed by both Cantonese and Westerners.
Anti-Japanese sentiment, a form of racism against Asians, involves the hatred or fear of anything which is Japanese, be it its culture or its people.
Shina is a largely archaic name for China. The word was originally used in Japanese and had a neutral connotation, but came to be perceived as derogatory by Chinese people during the course of the First and Second Sino-Japanese Wars. As a result, it fell into disuse following World War II and is now viewed as offensive, with the standard Japanese name for China being replaced by 中国.
The Japanese American Citizens League is an Asian American civil rights charity, headquartered in San Francisco, with regional chapters across the United States.
Kaffir, also spelled Cafri, is an exonym and an ethnic slur – the use of it in reference to black people being particularly common in South Africa. In Arabic, the word kāfir ("unbeliever") was originally applied to non-Muslims before becoming predominantly focused on pagan zanj who were increasingly used as slaves. During the Age of Exploration in early modern Europe, variants of the Latin term cafer were adopted in reference to non-Muslim Bantu peoples even when they were monotheistic. It was eventually used, particularly in Afrikaans, for any black person during the Apartheid and Post-Apartheid eras, closely associated with South African racism. While originally not pejorative, it became a pejorative by the mid-20th century and is now considered extremely offensive hate speech. Punishing continuing use of the term was one of the concerns of the Promotion of Prevention of Unfair Discrimination Act enacted by the South African parliament in the year 2000 and it is now euphemistically addressed as the K-word in South African English.
The English word squaw is an ethnic and sexual slur, historically used for Indigenous North American women. Contemporary use of the term, especially by non-Natives, is considered derogatory, misogynist, and racist.
Profanity in Mandarin Chinese most commonly involves sexual references and scorn of the object's ancestors, especially their mother. Other Mandarin insults accuse people of not being human. Compared to English, scatological and blasphemous references are less often used. In this article, unless otherwise noted, the traditional character will follow its simplified form if it is different.
Kichimatsu Kishi was a Japanese immigrant to the United States who worked as a farmer and businessman. Along with fellow immigrants from Japan, his impact on rice farming in the southern United States would change the agricultural industry of the region. Kishi would establish an agricultural colony in Southeast Texas and would own an oil company. Born as one of eight children to a Japanese banker, he attended Hitotsubashi University in Tokyo, Japan, but was taken from his studies in 1904 to fight in the Russo-Japanese War.
Jjokbari is a Korean language ethnic slur which may refer to Japanese citizens or people of Japanese ancestry. A variation on the slur, ban-jjokbari, meaning literally "half-jjokbari", has been used to refer to mixed Japanese-Korean people, as well as Koreans in Japan who returned to the peninsula.
The following article focuses on the movement to obtain redress for the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II, and significant court cases that have shaped civil and human rights for Japanese Americans and other minorities. These cases have been the cause and/or catalyst to many changes in United States law. But mainly, they have resulted in adjusting the perception of Asian immigrants in the eyes of the American government.
Wog is a racial slur used to refer, in British English, to black and South Asian people, and, in Australian English, to people from the Mediterranean region. Whilst it is extremely derogatory in British English, in Australian English it may be considered non-offensive depending on how the word is used, due to reclamation and changing connotations.
Nip is an ethnic slur against people of Japanese descent and origin. The word Nip is an abbreviation from Nippon (日本), the Japanese name for Japan.
The Heart Mountain Fair Play Committee was a group organized in 1943 to protest the draft of Nisei, from Japanese American concentration camps during World War II. Kiyoshi Okamoto formed a "Fair Play Committee of One" in response to the War Relocation Authority's controversial loyalty questionnaire in 1943, and was later joined by Frank Emi and other inmates of the Heart Mountain camp. With seven older leaders at its core, the Committee's membership grew as draft notices began to arrive in camp. To challenge their forced "evacuation" by the government, they refused to volunteer or participate in the draft, but the Committee required its members to be citizens loyal to the United States willing to serve if their rights were restored. By June 1944, several dozen young men had been arrested and charged by the U.S. government with felony draft evasion. While the camp at Poston, Arizona produced the largest group of draft resisters, at 106, the Fair Play Committee was the most prominent inmate organization to protest the draft, and the rate of draft resistance at Heart Mountain was the highest of any camp. The number of resisters eventually numbered nearly 300 from all ten camps.
Anti-Vietnamese sentiment involves hostility or hatred that is directed towards Vietnamese people, or the state of Vietnam. This may be due to negative perceptions created by historical tensions, ethnic negative perceptions, wars, or xenophobic sentiments that emerged from the event of refugee Vietnamese. National or regional discrimination can also occur.
Koto Matsudaira was a Japanese diplomat who served as an ambassador to the United Nations from 1957 to 1961.
Cherry Kinoshita was a Japanese American activist and leader in the Japanese American Citizens League (JACL). She helped found the Seattle Evacuation Redress Committee and fought for financial compensation for Japanese Americans who had been incarcerated during World War II.
Mako Nakagawa was a Japanese American educator, director of the Japanese American Cultural Heritage Program and the Rainbow Program, and influential member of the Japanese American Citizen's League.