Black melon bread, Afro Tanaka and Debito Arudou

"Black melon bread" featuring Afro Tanaka

I submitted the following comment to a discussion on Debito Arudou's blog about someone who'd taken offense at a Japanese cartoon character called "Afro Tanaka" and his use advertising a product called "Black melon bread". Unfortunately Debito rejected this humorous comment, so I'm keeping it here.

This is my rejected comment:

What I'm wondering is, if you try to stop Mini Stop from selling this bread featuring an offensive racist haircut, would you say "Stop Mini Stop selling melon bread with racist haircut"? This might get a little confusing, because people might think you only wanted them to stop a little bit, like it was a "Mini Stop" rather than a real stop, a full stop if you will. So as a slogan I suggest "Stop Mini Stop Full Stop". If that doesn't make it clear to people, how about "Stop Mini Stop selling bread with a racist haircut full stop, don't mini stop stop selling it or even half stop stop selling it but full stop stop selling it or I'll stop going to Mini Stop, full stop". That could still be ambiguous for some people and less clear than we want, but it's better than letting Mini Stop get away with selling a picture of a Japanese man with an afro haircut masquerading as a black-coloured melon bread, an act which is obviously racist in nature.

While we're at it, I'd also like to protest about the kokutou sugar sold in Okinawa which is black sugar sold in pieces of an irregular size. It's just another ugly piece of racism. White sugar comes in cubes of a regular size and yet the black sugar is misshapen, as if to suggest that somehow black is ugly but white is beautiful. Note also the "KK" in the name of the sugar. Combine that with the K in Okinawa and you can see that there is a subliminal racist message. It's just like we are back in Uncle Tom's Cabin and the American civil war had never happened.

I also found an ugly racist video game on my son's Nintendo DS today. It pits an entire race of blacks against whites in a brutal conflict in which the blacks are mere pawns who are sacrificed to the evil "White Knights" not to mention the "White Bishops". This so-called "game" makes a mockery of the civil liberties gained since the 1960s. Did Martin Luther King die for nothing? I wouldn't be surprised if this hideous racist game of "chess" can be bought at Mini Stop, yet another reason to stop going there