Currently, there is a growing movement of far right Japanese xenophobes in the Land of the Rising Sun. And the leaders of these vocal racists openly model their crusade on America’s Tea Party. They largely consist of young Japanese men struggling to find security in the current economic crisis. Seeing their standard of living collapsing, these disaffected men are resorting to that tried-and-true tactic of right-wing populism: scapegoating.
According to The New York Times, the more than 500,000 ethnic Koreans living in Japan are a major focus of hate for these Japanese Tea Partiers, dubbed the “Net far right” by the Japanese press.
The demonstrators appeared one day in December, just as children at an elementary school for ethnic Koreans were cleaning up for lunch. The group of about a dozen Japanese men gathered in front of the school gate, using bullhorns to call the students cockroaches and Korean spies.
Inside, the panicked students and teachers huddled in their classrooms, singing loudly to drown out the insults, as parents and eventually police officers blocked the protesters’ entry.
While the US Tea Party has yet to stoop to such outrageous lows, the leader of the organization associated with this action, 38 year-old Makoto Sakurai, admits his affinity with his American counterparts:
Mr. Sakurai says the group [Zaitokukai, which means Citizens Group That Will Not Forgive Special Privileges for Koreans in Japan] is not racist, and rejected the comparison with neo-Nazis. Instead, he said he had modeled his group after another overseas political movement, the Tea Party in the United States. He said he had studied videos of Tea Party protests, and shared with the Tea Party an angry sense that his nation had gone in the wrong direction because it had fallen into the hands of leftist politicians, liberal media as well as foreigners.
Of course, there is nothing new in using the tactics of fear and irrationality in place of engaged, informed political activism — especially in times of true crisis. I’m not saying the rest of the world never imagined such things before the Tea Party came along either. But we do see a direct connection, and admittedly so. The Japanese version differs mainly in tone. In America, there are no references to the targets of the growing anger and discontent as being “cockroaches” or “barbarians.” Yet so much of the Tea Party outrage is directed toward some sort of “otherness”: Mexican migrants, Muslims/terrorists, a President with a foreign-sounding name, Liberals/Socialists/Communists.
The Japanese Net far right are admittedly a tiny fraction of the entire population in that country, and the public there strongly rejects such groups. But in America, a “kinder, gentler” version welds far more power and media influence — thanks in large measure to powerful financial backing that has an agenda all its own. And this is my point here.
It goes without saying the economic crisis is real. The discontent and anger are real. The question becomes, what is the best way forward? Do we take the easy way and harness these emotions into irrational scapegoating, leading to who knows where? I hope not.
Technorati Tags: Japan, Korea, racism, Tea Party, Zaitokukai
