Unsurprising, but still BLERGHHH. Shortly after Nadeshiko Japan, the nation's women's soccer team, lost Thursday's game to the U.S. 2-1, the terms "Jap," "Pearl Harbor" and "Hiroshima" trended on the relentless shit soufflé that is Twitter. And why not? There's no better way to celebrate a victory than namecheck historical war tragedies (literally the opposite of the point of the Olympics uniting the nations of the world, by the way) that occurred at least 40 years before any of the players were even born, right? Right?
The tweets, some of which were collected on the Japan Daily Press, are largely along the lines of "That's for Pearl Harbor," but a few contain references to Hiroshima and Nagasaki. ("Haven't felt this good about beating Japan since..." et cetera.) "Long live the greatest country: America" adds one Twitter user— whose existence, ironically, is precisely what might make one question that statement. Go figure!
Last year was no better, apparently: when the Japanese women's soccer team took the World Cup against the U.S. in Germany, Japan Daily Press writer Adam Westlake remembers reading Tweets like: "Japan may have won the World Cup, but the U.S. scored the first two points with Hiroshima and Nagasaki."
So... yeah, WAY TO GO, racists! It's important to make every international event into an ugly and ignorant shitstorm.
'Japan's Olympic soccer loss brings out the Twitter racism' [Japan Daily Press]