japanese posters
Out of context: Reply #18
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- monokrom0
well, I didn't say racist, i said "a bit odd", and given the use of the word in earlier contexts (i.e. my wife's grandparents, aunts and uncles in camps in the USA in WWII), it seems to have more baggage attached to it than a geographical abbreviation.
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The internment of Japanese-Americans during WWII was a war crime on the part of the US govt and a horrible chapter in American history. Many have tried to justify the internment on various grounds, but I don't think that it's possible to explain it away.
That being said, your raising that issue at this point in the discussion is idiotic.
For one, it confirms the obvious - namely that "a bit odd" was simply a weasely way of broaching the "racism" issue. Setting the bait for trolls to jump in and decry the racist overtones of the abbreviation "Jap". If you want to accuse someone of racism, you should have either the sense to contact them privately (i.e. email Phunkstudio and feel them out before posting in a public forum) or the cajones to make an accusation outright instead of skirting the issue.
Secondly, recognize that not everyone on this board is American like you (or me). Phunkstudio are, if I remember correctly, based in Singapore. Even if "Jap" was once used as a taboo word / racist epithet for Japanese decades ago in the United States (it may have been, but neither you nor I were alive at the time and we'd have very few words left in the English language if we discarded every word that was ever used in a negative way at some point in history), the set of racist words for Japanese people used by residents of Singapore c. 1940's *may* have been different than those used in the United States at the same time.
FYI, several non-self-hating Japanese-American acquaintances of mine also use the abbreviation "Jap" to refer to Japanese or Japanese-influenced items from time to time, but, rest assured, I will be sure to inform them that a caucasian poster on a design-related msgboard finds the term offensive.