A parliamentary question on hate speech exposes a recurring pattern linking media rhetoric, staged incidents, and international pressure. This essay examines how narratives are constructed and amplified beyond Japan.

2016-03-18

While watching NHK, a live broadcast of the Diet session began.

Yoshifu Arita, a man who once made his living appearing on television variety talk shows and is now a Diet member of the Democratic Party of Japan, was asking questions about hate speech.

As I listened to his questions, I became convinced of the correctness of my own commentary.

He was referring to the people I have mentioned—right-wing figures unknown to 99.9 percent of the Japanese public; people who stand next to yakuza, and for whom “right-winger” is virtually synonymous with “yakuza.”
It is also common knowledge that most yakuza members are ethnic Koreans residing in Japan.

Arita laced his questions with such terms. He claimed that these right-wingers, who had shouted through loudspeakers at places such as Korean schools, had spoken of the Nanjing Massacre and Nazi Germany’s gas chambers.

This content also connects to the conduct of so-called cultural figures who act as proxies for South Korea and keep saying “learn from Germany,” as well as to the behavior of outlets such as Asahi that have acted like proxies for China.

Ethnic Koreans attack other ethnic Koreans while reciting the stock phrases used by forces that seek to portray Japan as a malicious country.

This is filmed, and so-called civic groups immediately go to the United Nations to have human rights recommendations issued against Japan.

The United Nations is an utterly absurd organization in which China—a country that is the world’s largest and worst human rights suppressor and has no freedom of expression—has continued to sit as a permanent member of the Security Council for seventy years since the war.

And given such an international environment, there is no reason why governments of countries like South Korea and China, which make anti-Japan propaganda a matter of state policy, or the CIA, would not seek to exploit it.