Urawa Reds stung for racism

The new story is here:
Reds ordered to play behind closed doors for racist banner - 窶突??愿ｺﾂ新窶｢ﾂｷ

One of the biggest J League teams, Urawa Reds have been ordered to play their next game in an empty Stadium following outrage at some of their fans who displayed a banner that read "Japanese only" above one of the stadium entrances.

The Urawa Reds have a bit of a track record with their fans chanting racist taunts amongst other things.

It is only a very small minority doing this, but the reaction by the mainstream Japanese press, social media the J League and the club itself is encouraging.

This action slams the club a lot harder than a few million yen in fines that they have previously been given.

The club will be down almost US$ 2 million from lost sales as a result of this fan shut out for the next game.
Probably even more hard hitting will be the almost 40,000 or so genuine (non racist fans) who will miss out on seeing their team play live. I bet they are not too pleased with the actions of these idiots amongst them and hopefully in future they will do something themselves to shut them up.

I wonder what the non-Japanese did to earn such attention from those fans. I've never really known any foreign person to care one way or another about Japanese sports.

I'm sure they were just trying to indicate that only Japanese was spoken beyond that point...



While this incident is disgusting and made international headlines, we shouldn't forget that racism in European football is a weekly occurrence and virtually endemic. Clubs are severly punished and often cooperate with anti-racism groups that try to reach out to the more extremist strata amongst their fans. I'm wondering whether such organizations exist in Japan too.

Based on the local Y I know, those organizations do exist in Japan. They're just not commonly reported in the news. The good news is that this story has a happy ending -- the courts ruled that it was じんしゅさべつ rather than ごかい or しゅうかんのちがい. Pretty good win there for racial relations in Japan.