"alien" more correctly captures the connotation. "gaijin" is very much a derogatory word. "gaikokujin" (person from a different country) is more neutral.
Gaikokujin is indeed the correct word for foreigner.
Gaijin is slang. It's not necessarily used with a derogatory meaning. Also it's important to note that it's mostly used for white people, they'll never call a Chinese or Korean "gaijin" for example.
> Gaijin is slang. It's not necessarily used with a derogatory meaning.
I think this is incredibly important here. People watch movies like Fast and the Furious and think it's always a bad, derogatory word when that isn't the case at all.
As with many words in our own language, context is incredibly important. Take for example, the English word 'foreigner'.
If I see a guy struggling to read a menu at a restaurant, I may say "Oh, he's probably a foreigner. I'm going to go see if he needs help". That's not a negative or derogatory usage. If I say "I wish those dirty foreigners would just go back to their home country", I've now turned the word into a derogatory one.
This is exactly how the word gaijin is handled. It can be used in a derogatory manner, but it's not inherently derogatory. It can be used in a non-derogatory way. It's a shame so many people get their cultural knowledge from Hollywood movies.
> they'll never call a Chinese or Korean "gaijin" for example.
Not true, "gaijin" can be used to refer to any foreigner/non-Japanese. It's just that there are many Chinese and Koreans in Japan, and the countries are neighbors, so it's common to use the more specific words "Chinese" and "Korean" when the nationality is known.
In the same sense that I might say "Eastern European" but a Hungarian would say "Romanian" or "Czech" etc.
Also, though gaijin used to mean "outsider", and that usage is still listed in dictionaires, it's basically obsolete. Nobody (in Japan) calls a Japanese "gaijin".
I was called hakujin once, by a very angry man--"iranai, hakujin ga kirai" was the exact greeting. Granted, I was a Mormon missionary knocking on his door to talk spirituality, but out of the thousands of doors I knocked, that one still stands out as pretty spicy. In comparison, gaijin never seemed that bad.
What makes people like you think it's a good idea to go and bother people in their home about your religious beliefs? Many people must find it frightening or just very annoying. Why subject people to that? It doesn't seem nice, let alone Christian.
> Rachel Underhill, 39, a florist who lives in Peacehaven, East Sussex, was brought up as a Jehovah’s Witness before leaving the religion in her twenties
[...]
> We weren’t allowed to make friends with anyone “worldly”, which meant anyone who wasn’t a Jehovah’s Witness, or do anything outside the religion, which they called “outside the truth”. It was incredibly isolating. We were brainwashed into thinking all worldly people wanted to abuse us, and this was confirmed every time we knocked on doors to try to convert people – you can’t imagine the damage it does to a child being constantly yelled at to go away.
This is why you might see me arguing against mocking religious people - it does nothing to convert them and may just strengthen their beliefs.
Well, that particular former Jehovah's Witness's experience doesn't match my experience with my own religion. In fact I grew up with JW friends, so I'm not sure it's even representative of their religion.
> This is why you might see me arguing against mocking religious people - it does nothing to convert them and may just strengthen their beliefs.
It's a good idea, and the same principle really applies to any person or group, regarding any framework, religious or not. From atheists to zookeepers.
If Christians truly believe nonbelievers are going to hell, it's the only loving response. The magician (and atheist) Penn has a great story about this [0].
It can only be viewed as a loving response if you think its effective, rather than alienating. If you believe unbelievers are going to hell, and believe (or observe) that that approach to evangelization is alienating, then its more than just rude...
I've never been a part of the goin't'hell group, but in my fairly extensive experience as a young adult in an evangelical religious group, I certainly got the impression that the high touch personal approach was taken as more effective. Most people don't really like doing the door-to-door salesperson routine[0]. But they do it because it seems to work - assuming anyone actually answers the door (which is the real rarity). Or at least is effective enough; conversion rates are, shall we say, low. It doesn't need to be high, though, since the risk and reward is so high (failure means more lost, success is a life).
[0] For introverts it can be extremely stressful - practice is the only thing that seems to make the terror go away for them. If the person at the door preachin' the word looks awkward and is stammering, be kind - they're more afraid of you than you are of them :)
> It doesn't need to be high, though, since the risk and reward is so high (failure means more lost, success is a life).
I think the risk:reward is often seen as higher than it should be even given the "going to hell" assumption, because the failure cost of the attempt is seen as capped at zero because alienation is not considered. This might make sense in a context where your particular door-to-door attempt was very likely to be the only exposure to Christianity that the target would ever have, but (since alienation of an unbeliever in that case would have the same effect as not making that particular door-to-door conversion attempt), but somewhat unlikely in the modern world.
Nicely put. This is exactly why there was (is?) quite a lot of effort in finding effective alternatives to the door-to-door method. There's still a lot of people who aren't modern (and the 'no person left behind' policy dictates that you'd continue to do door-to-door to sweep them up), but alternatives are needed.
In terms of moral introspection, I perceive a continuum of information quality from vague suspicion to almost complete certainty.
Morally, I would have a very, very difficult time making life-changing affirmative moral arguments to complete strangers without almost complete certainty.
And, I could never, never ascribe almost complete certainty to a piece of information not complying with the vacuum intellect test (i.e. could an intelligent person not exposed to culture reasonably be expected to arrive at a similar conclusion, if given sufficient resources for independent experimentation).
So, quantum mechanics, as weird as it is, could pass the vacuum intellect test. Could I personally see a vacuum intellect reinventing the tenets of Christianity including the concept of hell? That seems completely implausible to me. Sure, one could argue divine intervention (again) -- but that violates the vacuum constraint.
So, question: By what moral thesis does one permit one's self to venture out into the world and attempt to convince other people to redirect their limited resources onto something which is not almost completely certain?
I was never a part of a group that believed in hell (hope that doesn't give me away...), so I can't speak for that.
But, if you relax the rigor and you're willing to settle for what you personally qualify as overwhelming circumstantial evidence, it's not too hard to meet that level of confidence (the Anthropic Principle is very powerful). These people are often True Believers.
It's a whole different mindset, and worth spending the effort to wrap your head around. I'd bet it's a sufficiently different frame of mind that you'll have a hard time relating. It's easy to just gloss it over as a fool's thinking, but it really can be quite complex and deep (after all, without that moral vacuum, there's a lot of core axioms to keep straight). And that's not bad; just be warned that it can be a bit of a memetic virus, but it's certainly not too hard to quarantine. Usually at a very low level there's an assumption made about the way things are, and enough evidence is brought in to make that assumption feel reasonable; that's not science but rather more of a judicial argument. If it feels a bit boot-strappy, you're a bit on track. Typically once the mindset is settled, that rationalizes the initial bootstrap; I think often those who preach worry that many will not be exposed to the needed bootstrap, and feel a moral imperative to help others through that process. And that's how you get the evangelism. (Clearly there's a gross amount of glossing over here :)
And it'll help a lot in pleasantly/tactfully dealing with such individuals. People are just folk, and most are sincere. Just not always as... rigorous as folk like yourself.
I agree. More layers of complexity than short term memory slots is a mandatory property of belief systems -- as more effort will be required to find the contradictions then is likely to be allocated.
And certainly handling such individuals with kid gloves is important to mitigate the intransigence reflex. I only ask because I wish to discover some more effective strategy to aid some of the more zealous individuals to improve their moral consistency. Fear is far more powerful than reason, however.
It's the theological equivalent of "eat your vegetables". The link to Penn's commentary explains it reasonably well: no one wants to tackle another person, but you'd do it to stop someone from getting hit by a truck. Likewise, if you're sincere in thinking educating others of the theological risks can save their life - like you're not just going through the church-on-sunday motions, personal feelings take a back seat. To them it's too important to let petty things get in the way.
Naturally, this can backfire pretty hard. But that's the cost of taking the faith seriously.
Not to comment on the actual benefits (or not) of the process, but the enduring presence of Jehovah's Witnesses (and Mormons) is a sort of natural selection proof that their methods at least work to maintain their population.
Most adults have settled views on religion which they are unlikely to change during their life. A Muslim, Jew, mainstream Christian or a person of any other religious persuasion is just as likely to be totally uninterested in the preachings of a Mormon.
I lived in Japan for 20 years. The problem is that gaikokujin is too polite. Only dicks like Arudo Debito want to force everyone to use it, for reasons of political correctness, when in most cases the word gaijin is much more natural, and is not meant offensively. When Japanese people get to know you better they use your nationality as an identifier. Of course, the word gaijin is also used by gaijin to identify themselves.
Hear hear. The worst part is I occasionally see Japanese people self-consciously using "gaikokujin" because they heard somewhere that foreigners will take offense if they say gaijin. It's manufactured and it's damned silly.
Yep, it's simply the informal word for "foreigner". In theory there's a sense of "outsider", and that meaning is listed in the dictionary, but in practice one never hears the word used in reference to a Japanese person who's an outsider in some other context.
