One would think that the famous Japanese politeness would also lead to some healthy sense of political correctness, but that seems to be not always the case. So you have the mayor of Tokyo publicly issuing very conservative (to put it mildly) statements about the role of women in society, and the prime minister infuriating China and both Koreas every year by visiting Yasukuni Jinja with all the class A war criminals enshrined there, and now I have to contribute to a racist dating site. The latest project I have been assigned to is an online dating service catering mainly to American soldiers and Japanese girls. I do not have a problem with that, but the fact that the company running this service will require the users to specify their skin colour and that this choice will be visible in the users' avatars seems more than a little tasteless.

I cannot help but think that they will be eventually forced to scrap this plan, it is just too bad an idea. In fact, I hope this will happen, as I am not enough of an activist to get myself into trouble by refusing to go along with this, but at the same time do not want to have helped bringing this beast to life. I also wonder if they have discussed this at all with any of their potential American customers, who are known to be extremely sensitive about these things (I could imagine this might even be illegal in the US). And even if they accepted the categorisation, many would probably not even know which colour to choose (there are only three options: Caucasian, Asian, and African-American, making it tricky for example for Latin-Americans). Is there even any need for this at all? I know nothing about the match-making industry, but in the classifieds section of a newspaper, people usually do not reveal much more than their gender, approximate age and their interests. Also, users of the site can (and will) upload their photos, so this particular piece of information is readily available anyway, albeit in a non-machine-readable (non-searchable) form, which in this case is actually good thing.