A sign outside a shop near a well-known historical scenic spot in Suzhou reads: "Japanese Not Allowed to Enter."

Most of the mainstream rhetoric in website discussions generated by the sign agrees that the shop owner is a hero.

The board in the middle reads "Japanese Not Allowed to Enter."

Of course the use of the word "mainstream" is challengeable because to obtain a real majority, we should not exclude the silent voices off the Net. And I do not believe such words are really what we Chinese people want to say to the Japanese.

But such signs are not exclusive to this little shop in Suzhou. They are in Xi'an, in Shenzhen, and in the minds of some people. The recent mustard gas incident in China's northeast may help one better understand the context of the remark.

The textbook purging, the comfort women, the Shrine, and now poison gas - any one of these is sufficient to offend an average Chinese. But what the shop owner has done is rather uncommendable.

I believe I have the freedom here to point out his irrationality in exactly the same way he has the freedom to put up the sign.

First, I wonder how he is going to distinguish who is a Japanese. By the language? But what if a Japanese just wanders in and looks around and his interpreter does all the shopping?

Second, I wonder what he is going to do if a Japanese does enter his shop. Shout "get out" at him - in Japanese? Or wield a broom as body language?

Third, will he welcome a Japanese who hates the Nanjing massacre and doesn't like the expurgation of the textbooks? I mean, if he ever makes a distinction of 'good" and "bad" Japanese. Last, I doubt if a Japanese could ever understand the meaning of the sentence written only in Chinese.

In a word, I wonder whose eyes on earth is the sign intended to attract? The Japanese or the Chinese?

Of course it would be arbitrary of me to accuse the shop owner of putting on an act or simply making a show. I do not want to do that. I only want to point out, in the context of its warm reception on the website, that such an act and many other similar acts, do nothing but manifest the irrationality, the ill-considered judgment and the groundless cheers of many of us, when reasonable people would just rush to hush it all up.

A few years ago, a Chinese student surnamed Feng, studying and working in Japan, sprayed paint on a monument after the Japanese prime minister had done something very bad. The Chinese student was convicted in a local court of damaging public property and put on probation.

When he returned to China, surprisingly and also unsurprisingly, many could not wait to roll out the red carpet for him. While I identify with his patriotic feelings and sense of justice, I deem what he did unwise and irrational. I find it hard to call him a national hero instead of a clumsy law-breaker.

I fully understand that there are Chinese people who had relatives who were the direct victims of Japanese soldiers in the War of Resistance against Japan (1937-45). According to the webnews, the shop owner himself had a grandmother who was killed by the Japanese.

But what we should do to vindicate that is another matter. I appreciate the work of those lawyers who have devoted themselves to litigation on behalf of "comfort women" and the poison gas victims. And I also appreciate a Japanese primary school teacher, who tells the true story to her pupils and who strove for years in the cause of revealing the truth.

But I do not think it wise to spray paint, to place signs or to do other similar acts, even if one day in China, laws are developed like those in the US to protect these "expressions" in the name of "the freedom of expression".

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