THE LATEST RANGERS RACISM CONTROVERSY: AS SOMEONE WITH A JAPANESE PARTNER, HERE IS MY RESPONSE
- BY LIAM CARRIGAN
- 6 minutes ago
- 4 min read
When I saw the video this morning, I honestly didn't know how to react. Perhaps I felt an unreasonable, irrational level of anger.
It is the first, and I hope only time in my life, that I have felt an almost impulsive urge to attack and commit serious physical harm, against someone I've never even met.
To say I'm angry today is putting it very, very mildly.
Ok, I’ll admit, as someone with a Japanese partner, I am, perhaps a bit more sensitive to this than others. However, as disgusting as the comments on yesterday’s now deleted Rangers Rabble podcast were, they’re not exactly surprising either.
They have form for this. Just ask Kyogo Furuhashi.
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For those who don’t know, one of the contributors to that show, something of a Rangers fan analogue to ACSOM, albeit clearly with far lower production values, chose to describe Celtic’s Japanese players as “slanty-eyed”. When called out on it, he then claimed he had to say this because he “didn’t know if the guy was Chinese or Japanese”.
Celtic’s men’s team have only ever had two Chinese players in our entire history. The last one, Zheng Zhi left Glasgow 15 years ago, before the current Rangers even existed.
So, I’m going to go ahead and say that this person was lying when he claimed he didn’t know the nationality of either Shin Yamada or Daizen Maeda.
Sadly, his ignorance is part of a much wider problem that we all know is always just under the surface with that significant, yet all too vocal minority of Rangers supporters.
They represent a mob-mentality that has been allowed to racially abuse those of Irish descent on a weekly basis for decades, with little more than occasional, token condemnation from authorities.
If I walked up to an Asian person in the street in Glasgow and used the language that, now former, podcaster used last night, I’d be up on charges for committing a hate crime.
And my conscience would compel me to plead guilty as charged.
Yet if that same individual who racially abused those Celtic players, who come from the same country as my wife, walked up to me in the street and called me a “Fenian B*stard” that would just be dismissed as “banter and rivalry”.
Such nonsense is one of the main reasons why, as much as I sometimes miss Scotland, it’s highly unlikely I’ll ever willingly chose to live there again.
Japan has its own gaggle of racist halfwits too, don’t get me wrong.
I have, at times, had to confront these individuals in, shall we say, a somewhat robust manner.
However, they aren’t a major, ongoing problem for the 2 million foreign residents of Japan who go about their business as I do every day.
Perhaps this is because, unlike in Scotland, these mutants aren’t afforded a weekly forum to gather in their thousands and spew forth their bigotry and bile unchallenged.
Whenever I hear someone make racist, bigoted or otherwise hateful comments, I always try to understand why. I believe that racism, at a fundamental level, stems from a lack of intelligence and/or intellectual, emotional development.
However, the person who made these comments last night can’t be written off as a “stupid wee boy” or “educationally subnormal”. If he were, that would at least make his outburst, at some level, understandable if still totally unacceptable.
I guess we all have our own coping mechanisms for dealing with watching our team getting gubbed by a vastly superior side. And indeed, a vastly superior side who barely got out of 2nd gear.
For me, it’s usually video games, watching a film or TV show completely unrelated to football, anything fun really, that takes my mind off the result.
Oddly enough, despite the fact that Rangers have a squad that is probably even more racially and religiously diverse than Celtic’s these days, reflexive casual racism isn’t usually how I respond to seeing us lose, in Europe or to them.
At this point, I will say fair play to the other presenters of the Rangers Rabble who immediately called out this racism. They are to be commended for doing so, especially when you see how many of the pond life in the comments didn’t just condone the hate speech on show, they were actively cheering it on.
Days like today make me glad my wife doesn’t really speak English. In such cases, ignorance is bliss, and I am glad I don’t have to explain to her why anyone from Glasgow, a place she developed a great affection for when she visited a few years ago, would say such hurtful and totally unnecessary things about her race.