Journal: Counterattack to "The Dark Side of the PlayStation 3 Launch"

Well, I'd like to ask two questions.

1) If these 'poor Chinese' didn't say anything or the author doesn't understand Chinese, why could he figure out that the crowds are filled with Chinese people? Why not koreans, Vietnams, Thais, Laos, Malaysias, or other asian-looking people?

2) Why the 'poor Chinese' were appointed by the Japanese bosses? Did he talk to the Japanese guys and make clear the facts? Couldn't it be the Chinese merchants appointed the homeless Japanese old man to do that? Why not merchants from other countries?

I'm a Chinese foreign student now live in Tokyo. I've been in Japan for one and half years and I know much about the situation here. Japanese society, IMHO, are somehow against foreigners especially Chinese.

The biggest reason I think is the mass media. I don't watch TV news just because for a lot of times it intentionaly amplifies the dark side of Chinese people living in Japan. it doesn't objectively reflects the real situation of China and the life of Chinese people (honestly, mostly are students) here. It let me feel that if those bad Chinese guys prefer Japan and somehow they managed going there. You know, the visa application process of Japan is one of the most difficult.

Everytime I heard about Japanese media talking about Chinese economics, I could smell hostility and jealousy towards us. China is developing fast not because we have open policy or we have big market, etc. It's because we, our people, have been f**ked by our own government for too long time and now it's our time to recover and come back and join the global society. It's not 70s or 80s anymore and few of us of my generation would prefer to live in a hostile country just for greener pasture.

Somebody might say that Chinese media also sucks. Yes, nobody in China think we have no problem in our media otherwise he's just pretending not knowing. But this won't be the reason for the mass media in a democratic country to against us.

As a result, it won't be strange for the author to think that all the crowds are full of poor Chinese people. Where in Japan, anything bad related to an asian-looking foreign guy would possibly be associated with either Chinese or North Koreans.

Secondly, in the article, he said that there're a lot of Chinese exchange students. But AFAIK, if you're an exchange students in Japan, you will be funded with scholarship, and the tuition fee waived. There's no reason for an exchange student to line up for almost 12 hours - all night - to get the pitty 20,000 Japanese yen. At least, all of my friends are not that thrilled to buy a PS3 on its first release day.

In the article, he mentioned that a Chinese student got very excited about his new purchase. Well, PLEASE don't mix up these with others. First, any PS fan, who can get a PS3 on the first day will get thrilled, no matter what his purpose is. Second, if he put his PS3 on auction, it's his freedom and I could say it happens all around the world and it's a nice investment in the business point of view. So, you can't put them into the same category.

" These are the lucky Chinese kids in Japan, getting an education, and trying to get ahead in life. " I didn't quite get the meaning actually, does he think we cannot get good education in China? Or we are dooomed to have a poor life in China? Well, frankly, at lease the purpose for me to study abroad is to widen my horizon so that I could have some advantage in the future. It's because China is still a semi-close country managed by the government in a lot of ways. I could tell you that Chinese people are very kind - sincerely kind, not superficially kind - and very open-minded. A lot of my friends warned me not to go to Japan for historical reasons, but I insisted because I think we're still very close in culture and they have some merits I could learn from. I think I learned what I want and I'm pretty happy to return China and start my working career after my graduation.

For long time I tried to find reasons to explain why we do this, why we have that, etc. But now, after having seen so many unfair realities in Japan, I started to defend my people. It's not a shame if you have problems, just solve them, it's a shame if you cannot stand up when someone treats you unfairly or wrongly.

" The intent of this story is not to point fingers at hard-working Chinese nationals." However, this article is full of subjective assumptions and discrimination.