The Japanese combini, or convenience store, is a national institution — a cross between a corner shop and a miniaturised supermarket, with about as much floor space as the inside of a vending machine, but with something for all the family. Its tightly ranked shelves contain loo paper and sake, rice balls and condoms, cigarettes and dried squid flakes. And now, in their quest for inclusiveness, the convenience stores are catering for a new demographic: hate-filled racists.

Last week, the combini chain Family Mart set off a stir by putting on sale in its outlets a magazine with the title Foreigner Underground Crime File — 125 pages of profanity, xenophobia and scabrous racial invective to make Jade Goody sound like the Archbishop of Canterbury. Japanese comics and magazines contain plenty of naughty bits, but this is a long way from the kind of thing you expect to find on sale alongside the KitKats.

The magazine (what Japanese call a mook: the bastard offspring of a magazine and a book) expresses a notion that peeps discreetly between the lines of a lot of reporting even in the mainstream Japanese media — that rising crime rates in what used to be the world’s safest society are simply and straightforwardly the fault of foreigners. Not Caucasians, by and large, but Chinese, South East Asians, Africans, South Americans and people of the Middle East.

“City of violent, degenerate foreigners!” is the title of one article in Foreigner Underground Crime File about the lamentable state of contemporary Tokyo. “Catch the Iranian!” is another. One FUCF columnist debates the question of whether Korean women smell. Most startling of all is a series of photographs, shot at a distance through a telephoto lens, of Japanese women canoodling with foreign boyfriends, captioned with the Japanese equivalent of the F and C-words.

A consumer boycott of Family Mart is gathering momentum on the internet. The combini chain has apparently agreed to take it off the shelves . . . in one week’s time, which doesn’t send the strongest of all possible messages. Japan has its hard-core racists like any country, but it’s rare for them to rise this far above the radar, and racist incidents often have an air about them of incompetence rather than viciousness. There was the beer hall, for instance, originally modelled (before being hastily redecorated after clamorous denunciations) on a Nazi theme. But the extravagant offensiveness of FUCF is troublingly hard to explain.

You wonder about a psychological explanation — and there it is, in the captions of the photographs of foreign men sporting with Japanese women. “You sluts really think foreign guys are so great, huh!!” runs one. “We know Japanese guys are small, but . . .” And suddenly it all starts to make sense: not a surge of Japanese racism, nor an immigration crisis, but just a tormented male publisher somewhere in Tokyo who, in the words of the pop singer Lily Allen, is “small in the game”.

Times Recommends

• Fundamentalist brew: faith and power
• Big guns wheeled out for the marginals
• Wanted: new merchants of light