Abstract
This study cites “casual racism” as it is suggested in the slogan “Racism. It Stops With Me” and aims to identify the characteristics of racism on Japanese websites that deal with international sporting events. With respect to the 2014 FIFA World Cup, about 670,000 web comments related to “Yahoo! JAPAN” news on the World Cup were collected. Of the comments, 16,236 were sampled, and the 289 comments that included “race-related words” were selected, classified, and evaluated into three types, depending on whether the content was discriminatory. In the analysis, the proportion of discriminatory comments was compared to all comments, and this was compared with year-round sports comments in Japan.
The results of the analysis showed that approximately 40.1 percent of the 289 comments were discriminatory about people of a different race. There were a particularly large number of comments about Koreans. Discriminatory comments about Chinese and Croatians also appeared although Croatians are rarely discussed in Japan.
The examination of the comments revealed the following characteristics: 1) Among the comments that were analyzed, the proportion of racially discriminatory comments that were only mentioned at the World Cup was low, at 12.9 percent. This suggests that international competitions are not a direct cause of racism on the web. 2) Discriminatory comments against Croatians arose from the criticisms by the Croatian national team against the Japanese referee of a match played by their country. Therefore, these comments were transient, although this type of casual racism is likely to occur repeatedly in international competitions targeting different racial groups. 3) Racism toward Chinese and Koreans is one of Japan’ s social problems. However, while this racism is considered to be serious, a part of the discriminatory web comments displayed the kind of casualness that is characteristic of casual racism.
