"Japan's Multicultural Multiethnic Future: Problems and Solutions for the 21st Century"

Arudou Debito, Hokkaido Information University

Arudou was born David Christopher Aldwinckle in California.  He attended Cornell University, first visiting Japan as a tourist.  Following this experience, he dedicated his senior year as an undergraduate to studying Japanese, graduating in 1987.  Aldwinckle then joined a small Japanese trading company in Sapporo.  It was this experience, he recounts, that started him the path of the controversial activist that he would later become.  In 1993 he joined the faculty of Business Administration and Information Science at the Hokkaido Information University, a private university in Ebetsu, Hokkaidō.  As of 2007 he is an associate professor.

Aldwinckle became a permanent resident of Japan in 1996. He obtained Japanese citizenship in 2000, whereupon he changed his name to Debito Arudou (有道出人, Arudō Debito), whose kanji he says have the figurative meaning of "a person who has a road and is going out on it."  

Arudou has written a book about the 1999 Otaru hot springs incident. Arudou originally wrote the book in Japanese; the English version, Japanese Only — The Otaru Hot Springs Case and Racial Discrimination in Japan, was published in 2004 and revised in 2006.  Jeff Kingston, reviewer for The Japan Times, described the book as an "excellent account of his struggle against prejudice and racial discrimination."

Discussant – John Ertl, Cal alum and Kanazawa University professor