The Strange Story of Debito Ardou a.k.a. David Aldwinckle

Back in the early nineties a web forum called the Dead Fukuzawa Society (DFS) saw lively exchanges of opinions among foreigners living in Japan.

Some time in the mid-nineties we began to see DFS posts from an American teacher of English based in Sapporo, Hokkaido, called Dave Aldwinckle. Lacking anything relevant to say about Japan, he used to write at length about himself - his teaching activities, his bike rides around the island etc. In particular, he made a large fuss over how he had taken Japanese nationality, as if this made him more attuned to Japan than the rest of us. It also meant he could call himself Debito.

But for me he remains just Dave (if Nkwame Odinga Swahilli takes British citizenship I would still find it hard to call him Bill Smith).

One day we saw a post about how Dave had gone to the port and onsen city of Otaru (near Sapparo) and had met an onsen owner who had suffered 800,000 yen of damage when a drunken Russian sailor punched a hole in his wall and wrecked the onsen heating apparatus. (Then, as now, Otaru was host to dozens of small Russian cargo ships, many bringing in lumber from the Russian Far East and returning with used cars.)

The onsen owner was naturally unhappy about this and told Dave he wanted to ban Russians from his onsen. As I recall it, Dave went on to say how he had told the onsen owner that banning Russian sailors would be racial discrimination, and racial discrimination was a no-no. The lack of humanity and commonsense in Dave's attitude came as a shock. But at the time I saw it as no more than a harmless continuation of the nonsense we had seen in his earlier posts.

Some time later, however, we discovered that the nonsense could have real and harmful implications. Dave, and one or two friends, were now fulminating against an up-market onsen owner in Otaru who had actually dared to put up a sign banning all foreigners. They were going to take legal action. (Dave and his friends can be very litigious, at least where the sins of others are involved.)

I had been to Otaru several times and had made a point of visiting the wharves there, if only to have the chance to practice my Russian. But one look at the sailors (many well into their second or third bottles of strong alcohol), and their rust bucket ships, convinced me they would not be a great asset to any onsen owner, especially a quality onsen trying to create a relaxed, luxury mood for its upper-class clients.

Who would educate the Russians about Japanese bath etiquette, for example? And what happens when inflated bladders hit the warm waters? Few Japanese clients, luxury or not, would want to stay around after that to find out.

I posted something saying that the onsen owner's move to ban foreigners was inevitable given the problem of controlling the Russians and of distinguishing between Russians and other white-skinned foreigners. All I got for my efforts was a torrent of abuse from Dave and his gathering band of supporters, accusing me of racism.

The next thing I heard was that Dave and his friends had taken the unfortunate onsen owner to court and had had him fined several million yen for racial discrimination
Worse, they were so proud of what they had done that Dave went and wrote a book about his brave experience, in which, I am told (I have not read the book) I am now branded in formal print as a racial discriminator for having criticised his Otaru escapades.

One of his key points was how he had tried to enter the onsen and had been refused as a foreigner even though in fact he had Japanese nationality. How dreadful! How humiliating!. How clever of Dave to expose that evil racial discriminator in this way. And how stupid of the onsen owner not to realise that his clients would immediately recognise that Dave, stripped down for the bathtub, was a Japanese, and not a foreigner about to do strange things in their waters.

From then on Dave and his supporters were in orbit. Their blogs and websites set out to discover, and punish, any and every shop, bar etc in Japan which for one reason or another feels it has to keep foreign clients at bay. I used some editorial or blog space to counter their excesses, trying to point out that given Japan's unusual culture there would be times when attitudes seemed anti-foreign. But the same culture meant that at other times they would seem to go over-board to be friendly and tolerant of the foreigners in their midst. Anyone with maturity would match the two and realise that on balance Japan was one of the more tolerant of the non-Western culture societies. To focus on the negatives and ignore the positives was childish, racist even.

In particular there is the problem of Japanese sensitivity to atmosphere (kuuki) and their fussiness over observing correct rules and etiquette. We foreigners can handle, even welcome, the close presence of people very different from ourselves. The Japanese cannot, and since it is their country we should respect that cultural quirk, particularly since many other aspects of their culture work to our advantage.

Our culture often discriminates against people of different religion, political belief etc. Theirs does not. One way or another it all balances out. But for our racial discrimination fanatics our biases have to dominate, or else.

But for my pains I was even further villified as a racist, despite myself having a Japanese family, having opposed the Vietnam War (unlike any of that immature crowd) largely for its anti-Asian hatreds, and had been working hard for years to promote understanding of the Japanese. I had my website flamed. If they had effigies of me, I am sure they would have been into sticking pins.

Nor were they impressed when I went back over the expired DFS website and discovered an incredible post by Dave boasting about an orientation lecture he had given to English teachers brought by the government to work in Japanese schools. He had warned them about Japan's discriminatory ways. As an example he said how he had been forced to upbraid a waitress, who, thinking he did not speak Japanese, had spoken only to the Japanese person next to him. When the same thing happened in a sushi shop he managed to have the offending person fired. He concluded that Machiavellian (his word) skills were needed to counter the various tricks and subterfuges by which their Japanese colleagues would try to undermine their position.

And the Japanese officialdom that had invited and paid him to deliver this racist spiel? They too were into Machiavellian tricks? Dave, I had to conclude, was a typically white, Anglosaxon racist to the core - totally contemptuous of the culture around him and demanding it confirm to his needs, not theirs. And there he was, out there, lecturing and badgering the Japanese on their alleged racial discrimination!

Later, one or two of the more intelligent of his followers came back to me, not so much to apologise but rather to say they had split with Dave because of his domineering, self-promoting and self-aggrandizing nature. One of them even had words of praise for my solution to the Otaru problem - creating a seamens club of the kind found in all major ports, where the problem of looking after rowdy sailors arriving after weeks at sea is neatly handled. But that would have undercut Dave's efforts to gain even more fame and kudos for his brave action in confronting the onsen racists of Otaru. Certainly he and his followers did nothing along these lines for Otaru. They were too busy filing more suits; this time against the city itself.

Thanks to fame gained from the Otaru escapades, Dave has been able to set up a small cottage industry peddling anti-Japan rumors, bias and half-truths to the large sub-class of foreigners here with problems getting adjusted to Japan (needless to say, more anti-Clark material is included). True, there is a market for someone providing hints to disoriented foreigners on how to cope with problems in Japan. But why the self-promoting, Rush Limbaugh-style, clattering? And why the constant personal abuse against anyone who seems to disagree with him? And why the constant anti-Japan bias?

Sadly, even educated foreigners were buying the nonsense. I discovered that even a serious book review site run by Paul Scalise and a rather literate Japanese lady had, in a review of Dave's book, dubbed me an 'apologist' for Japan and its racist ways. A protest from myself gained a reluctant acknowledgement that no educated debate should tolerate the pejorative word "apologist". They also hinted they had since become aware of Dave's personality problems. But they still seemed to believe they were fighting for right and justice.

But how can people claiming to want right and justice lack the humanity needed to realise and sympathise with the problems small-scale Japanese businesses might have in dealing with foreigners, and the harm done to their business by bad foreigner behavior - shoplifting, for example, which is so easy to do in Japan? Dave and company make a big deal about a shop in Monbetsu, Hokkaido, with a sign barring Russians. Have they ever visited a shop in Sakhalin, where most of those Russian hail from? Surly guards demand all bags be put in lockers before entry and check customers when they leave. Is that how the cottage industry people want Japan to become?

Japan with its assumptions of personal honesty happens to be a shop-lifters paradise. Are we to ask it to abandon those assumptions and become a pad-locked wasteland simply so Dave and his mates can get their self-promoting egos boosted further?

Surely Japanese harmed by foreigner bad behavior, and not just the problems of the atmosphere (kuuki), are entitled to defend themselves. The lack of commonsense and human understanding among these alleged fighters for right and justice is sad. Curiously, the cottage industry people did nothing about the large chain of barbershops that solved problems with signs denying service to customers who could not speak Japanese. They seemed to prefer smaller and more vulnerable targets.

Japan for a time suffered a rash of sophisticated lock-picking by mainly Chinese gangs operating on tourist visas and able easily to exploit Japan's easily pickable locks (those locks were another by-product from the attractive assumptions of personal honesty). When I endorsed a crackdown on these people (I was a member of the Justice Ministry's visa policy committee at the time) I had more abuse for alleged racism. When the Miwa Lock company advertised strong locks able to foil the foreign gangs even they too were accused of racism. Is there no end to their childish nonsense?

In their personal attacks Dave and his friends operate on two fronts. One is the ultra- Rightist approach of attacking someone through his/her's place of employment - in my case the Akita university where I served as vice-president (and where I did in fact also suffer ultra- Rightist attacks, as I mention in my website, ironically for pointing out Japan's racist refusal to recognise its wartime abduction activities in China and Korea - an area where Dave and company lack the guts to tread). They tried to denigrate both my appointment and my role there (relying largely on self-deprecating material I had already put on my website. I did not mention how I had played a key role in establishing the university in the first place, which is why they wanted me as vice-president).

Dave also flirted with the defamation law by including my Akita university (plus more of the inevitable abuse against myself) on his self-promoting 'blacklist' of Japanese universities allegedly guilty of anti-foreigner discrimination, claiming we refused to foreigners the tenure normally available to Japanese. In fact we had already made clear our policy of having all teaching staff, both Japanese and foreign, appointed initially on term contracts, with the promise of tenure as contracts ran out - a common US practice. And as we move into year five, this is already happening. We also happened to employ more foreigners, many as full-scale professors, than any other university in Japan. Some discrimination!

Information about our tenure policies is publicly available. Maybe Dave needs to start talking to his lawyer.

The other front was digging up the scurrilous, defamatory article about myself by a Murdoch journalist and published in The Australian in 1993, and which had been written in a clear bid to undermine my reputation back in Australia as a rival commentator on Japanese affairs. (I give the scruffy details in my Life Story on my website.) I mention there also how in 1993 I took legal action and forced the newspaper to run corrections of the more egregious errors and distortions.*

(*Some of the distortions are listed at the end of this post.)

However Dave and some of his friends had no trouble running the article prominently on their sites and blogs, without the corrections. They claimed they had taken the article from The Australian website and had full approval of the Australian to run the article. When I said they were using the article without the corrections, they leapt on this a proof of further Clark mendacity since they were sure that if there were corrections The Australian would have told them. One ugly result of this blitz attack was that the article came up prominently whenever my name came up on Google search.

The ugliest blow came when I recently ran a Japan Times article trying to put the discrimination issue into perspective, in particular the reasons why some businesses might have a need to keep foreigners at bay. The sub-editors there headed it boldly as "Japan has a Right to Anti-Foreigner Discrimination." (In fact the article only said that at times and in certain conditions - Russian sailors in Otaru for example - it was understandable if the Japanese did discriminate). This sent the cottage industry people into a frenzy, with no attempt to give the details and nuances of the article. Clark, they said, favored all anti-foreigner discrimination at all times.

Finally I decided it was time to do something about Dave, and about The Australian article to begin with. I contacted Sydney, asking them whether they were happy to have the article run without the corrections we had forced them to publish in 1993. For a while they seemed to want to fob off the question, saying the article was published long ago. Then suddenly out of the blue I received a strong, formal reply from their legal representative saying in effect that:

The offending article was never published online by The Australian. In fact The Australian parent company, Nationwide News, has complained to the offending Debito website about its infringement of copyright.

So there we have it. Dave is not just a self-promoter and a braggart. He is into mendacity and copyright infringement as well.

Nice guy. Now he really does need a lawyer.

*1993 article distortions, and corrections.

1. Clark was run out of Australia's Foreign Ministry for anti-Vietnam views.
In fact in 1965 the year he resigned, he was listed for appointment as Australia's representative on the UN Disarmament Commission. At age 29 he would have been the youngest appointee ever. He turned down the job partly because he did not want to spend the next two years of his life defending Australia's criminal policies in Vietnam.

2. Clark was employed as a mere teacher of Japanese at Sophia University.
In fact he was a fully tenured professor, teaching mainly development economics and Japanese society. True, he also had one course called Japanese economic readings. But this was aimed to improve reading ability of difficult business and economic texts - a prerequisite for employment in Japan's growing financial industry.

3. Clark was disgruntled about not being made ambassador to Japan, and not having his views on Japan listened to.
Presumably this implies I wanted to be appointed to the Tokyo ambassador post to match the ambassadorial position given in Beijing to Clark's former colleague, Stephen Fitzgerald, early in 1973. But at the time this was out of the question since, apart from any other problem, the Tokyo post, unlike the newly-opened Beijing post, already had a very senior ambassador, Mick Shann, still serving out his time. Even so, the Australian prime minister, Whitlam, in recognition of Clark's earlier activities in Australia, did go out of his way to have Clark made senior adviser to Shann's embassy in 1973.

On visits to Canberra, Clark was asked several times to give briefings to Japan-related bureaucrats and to attend 1974 talks with Japan's prime minister, Tanaka Kakuei.

One very reliable report (see Life Story) says Whitlam at one stage (we do not know when) did in fact want to have him made ambassador to Japan and Tokyo was even requested to provide the necessary agrement .

However any move to have Clark replace Shann was ended by Clark's 1974 appointment to a senior policy post in Canberra where he remained till 1976, and where he was able to be much more involved in Japan-Australia relations than he could have in Tokyo. The change in government in Canberra in 1976 then ruled out any further talk of Embassy links, which Clark welcomed anyway since by then it would have interrupted greatly his developing Japan activities.

Other problems with the 1983 article revolved around the use and misuse of confidential information.

One final and very personal point.

There is something very curious about Dave and his mates, many unable to do more than clutch the BAs and diplomas allowing them to be English teachers in Japan, venturing to pass judgement on the state of higher academia in Japan. Is this how they shake off their various inferiority complexes? It is a dangerous game. Intellectual pygmies wading into the complex world of academia can very quickly find themselves out of their depth.

Needless to say, they like to focus on yours truly. I am told I lack academic qualifications to be university vice-president (an Oxford MA back in the days before the PhD cult took over is not enough for them it seems). A glance at Life Story on my website will also explain my PhD situation. But do not expect any action from them there, except more spluttering as they wade even further into waters out of their depth.

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