Debito Arudou

Dr. ARUDOU, Debito, formerly Dave Aldwinckle, was born in Walnut Creek, California, raised in Geneva, New York, and graduated from Cornell University, the University of California San Diego, and Meiji Gakuin University in Tokyo. Trained in international relations, political science, public policy and business, he first visited Japan in 1986, staying in Sapporo permanently from 1991.

Dr. Arudou became known for his activism against discrimination towards foreign educators in Japanese academia. He later more famously got involved in a campaign against onsen (public hot spring baths) in a nearby city called Otaru in 1999. Several establishments there and elsewhere in Hokkaido had put up "Japanese Only" signs, refusing entry to all "foreigners" (including one of his Japanese daughters). When an Otaru onsen still refused Arudou entry despite his taking out Japanese citizenship in 2000, he sued for racial discrimination with a group of foreign plaintiffs, in a landmark case that went all the way to Japan's Supreme Court. Arudou wrote about this experience in book "JAPANESE ONLY" (2003) in English and Japanese, which came out in 2013 as an updated Tenth Anniversary Edition Kindle eBook.

So that others could follow in his footsteps and make a better life for themselves in Japan, Dr. Arudou co-wrote with legal scrivener Akira Higuchi the "HANDBOOK FOR NEWCOMERS, MIGRANTS, AND IMMIGRANTS TO JAPAN" (2008, 2nd Ed. and eBook 2013). He has also written since 2008 a regular monthly newspaper column for The Japan Times called JUST BE CAUSE, managed an award-winning web archive called Debito.org since 1996, and written about another important but understudied issue, child abductions after divorces in Japan, in his nonfiction novel "IN APPROPRIATE: A Novel of Culture, Kidnapping and Revenge in Modern Japan" (2011, eBook 2013). Awarded in 2012 an Affiliate Scholar position at the East-West Center in Honolulu, Hawaii, he received his Ph.D. in 2014 for researching Japan's understudied "Visible Minorities".

His latest book, "EMBEDDED RACISM: Japan's Visible Minorities and Racial Discrimination," was published in October 2015 (paperback 2016) with Lexington Books (Sociology: Minority Studies), offering unprecedented analysis of Japan from a naturalized Japanese citizen-scholar's perspective. It has been acclaimed by prominent scholars as "an important, courageous and challenging book" (Tessa Morris-Suzuki, Australian National University), "highly recommended" (Rotem Kowner, University of Haifa), and "a pellucid and provocative account of one of the country’s most urgent but neglected problems " (David T. Johnson, University of Hawaii at Manoa).