[Amnesty International]�slammed Japan’s education minister on Tuesday for comparing human rights to fatty butter and saying too much would give Japan “human rights metabolic syndrome.”

“No matter how nutritious it is, if one ate only butter every single day, one would get metabolic syndrome,” Education Minister Bunmei Ibuki reportedly said at a speech in south Japan on Sunday. “Human rights are important, but if we respect them too much, Japanese society will end up having human rights metabolic syndrome.”

The offending remarks “ignore the human rights of citizens,” Amnesty International said in a letter sent Tuesday to Ibuki and Prime Minister Shinzo Abe. The group demanded Ibuki retract his remarks.

http://mdn.mainichi-msn.co.jp/national/news/20070227p2a00m0na029000c.html

Prime Minister Shinzo Abe on Monday downplayed criticisms over his education minister’s remarks a day earlier and said there was nothing wrong with the minister calling Japan an “extremely homogenous” country. “I think he was referring to the fact that we have gotten along with each other fairly well so far,” Abe said when asked to comment on the remarks by education minister Bunmei Ibuki. “I don’t see any specific problem with that.”

http://www.japantoday.com/jp/news/400113

In 1986, [then] Prime Minister Yasuhiro Nakasone described Japan as a “homogenous race” nation and faced strong criticism, mainly from Ainu indigenous people.

[Education minister Bunmei Ibuki] speaking at a convention of the ruling Liberal Democratic Party’s chapter in Nagasaki Prefecture, [echoed Nakasone by asserting], “Japan has been historically governed by the Yamato (Japanese) race. Japan is an extremely homogenous country.

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A local immigration official faces charges for driving government cars on about 250 occasions without a driver’s license, sources at the bureau said.

He was hired in January 1999 and was assigned to the Hiroshima Regional Immigration Bureau, where he was in charge of immigration control at Hiroshima Airport. He had been cracking down on illegal immigrants since he was transferred to the Osaka bureau in April last year.

http://mdn.mainichi-msn.co.jp/national/news/20070224p2a00m0na013000c.html

On what are called “entertainment” pages, there are photographs of foreigners and Japanese women embracing on Tokyo streets. One photo of a black man and a Japanese woman has the caption, “Hey nigger!! Don’t touch that Japanese woman’s ass!!”

[Shigeki Saka, editor of the magazine Gaijin Hanzai Ura Fairu or �Secret Foreigner Crime Files�] said that while he knew the term “nigger” is racist, he reckoned it would have a different nuance written in Japanese. “We used it as street slang, writing it in katakana. But if we had known that we would get such a huge reaction from foreigners, we might have refrained from using it,” he figured.

Saka said that although the book had been pulled from Family Mart, it is still available at some bookstores and on the Internet.

Hideki Morihara, secretary general of International Movement Against All Forms of Discrimination and Racism, said the magazine is only part of a wider problem for which the government is partially responsible.

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