Published on September 17, 2019.
This essay criticizes IMADR, its anti-discrimination symposium in Paris, the Suiheisha Declaration, the Buraku liberation movement, UN human-rights advocacy, and related issues involving Okinawa, resident Koreans, and the Roma, arguing that such international activism has been used to denigrate Japan abroad.

September 17, 2019.
It is astonishing that there are Japanese people still talking about the Suiheisha today, as if this were the Meiji era, but to say such things in Paris, under the name of the United Nations—
The following is another article by this man, which I subsequently found.
IMADR Co-hosts an Anti-Discrimination Symposium in Paris.
Komatsu Taisuke.
IMADR Geneva Office, in charge of UN advocacy.
＊Speaking of Paris, recently a woman named Sasaki Kumi, whose face had been so heavily altered by cosmetic surgery that it no longer retained its original form, and who did not seem Japanese at all—anyone would probably think she was Korean—published a book in Paris saying that Japan is a country where groping is so terrible that women cannot live there.
Although 99.9 percent of the Japanese people had never heard of this woman at all, NHK broadcast for two nights a report in sympathy with anti-Japanese propaganda, saying that Paris citizens were looking harshly at Japan.
Readers will remember that at that time I denounced NHK and the citizens of Paris as harshly as possible.
When I was around twenty years old, I openly told people around me that Le Clézio, up to the time when he wrote The Ecstasy of Matter, was another self of mine existing in this world.
Yet I denounced him as well.＊
On April 18, IMADR held a symposium in Paris titled “Discrimination in the Past and Present,” co-hosted with its partner organization, the Movement against Racism and for Friendship among Peoples, MRAP.
From IMADR, President Nimalka Fernando, Deputy Secretary-General Catherine Cadou, and Komatsu Taisuke, who is in charge of UN advocacy, attended.
Here, the content of presentations by two of them and by Herbert Heuss of IMADR’s partner organization, the Central Council of German Sinti and Roma, is introduced.
MRAP originated in a resistance organization called the National Movement against Racism, MNCR, an underground resistance movement against Nazism and fascism, which was integrated in 1942 during the Second World War into the International League against Antisemitism, LICA.
After the war, in 1949, LICA branched into the International League against Racism and Antisemitism, LICRA, and MRAP.
Today, MRAP aims to eliminate racism and provides legal support for victims of racial discrimination, anti-racist education in schools, and support within France for refugees and asylum seekers, immigrants, Roma, Travellers [1], and others.
The symposium began with a presentation by Deputy Secretary-General Cadou titled “The Origins of IMADR in the Struggle of the Buraku People.”
At the beginning, Secretary-General Cadou read the Suiheisha Declaration aloud in French and explained the social exclusion and discrimination against the Buraku people that formed its background.
Deputy Secretary-General Cadou then introduced the history of the Buraku liberation movement, from the struggle for free textbooks and the promotion of the implementation of the Special Measures Law for Dowa Projects, to Ishikawa Kazuo’s ongoing struggle and the fight against discrimination in employment and marriage.
It was explained that IMADR was born as an international movement to oppose discrimination through encounters in the movement with people suffering similarly from discrimination around the world, such as the Dalits of India and the Roma of Europe.
It was also recalled that a campaign had been launched to have the Japanese government ratify the United Nations Convention on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination.
Finally, it was announced that activities are being advanced by Vice President Mushakoji and others concerned to have the Suiheisha Declaration registered in UNESCO’s Memory of the World, as an independent human-rights declaration by a discriminated community.
＊It is astonishing that there are Japanese people still talking about the Suiheisha today, as if this were the Meiji era, but these men continue to speak about such things in Paris, under the name of the United Nations.
Who on earth knew of this reality?＊
Next, staff member Komatsu delivered the presentation on behalf of board member Theo van Boven.
In addition to efforts at the United Nations Human Rights Council concerning Sri Lanka and the right to peace, and cooperation with Special Rapporteurs, IMADR’s activities in the Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination, CERD, were especially emphasized.
IMADR not only broadcasts the committee’s reviews by video on the internet, but also publishes a CERD usage guidebook for NGOs.
It was introduced that, in the review of Japan conducted last year, IMADR served as coordinator among domestic NGOs and helped lead to comprehensive and specific CERD recommendations to the Japanese government.
Finally, Herbert Heuss gave a report on the current situation of the Sinti and Roma people in Europe.
Mr. Heuss welcomed the European Parliament’s decision this year to designate August 2 as “Roma Holocaust Memorial Day,” while expressing concern that the exclusion of Roma people is progressing due to the rise of nationalism in Europe in recent years.
He stated that anti-Roma sentiment is markedly widespread even compared with far-right ideology and antisemitism, and introduced a recent case in which a court did not recognize an allegation concerning an “anti-Gypsy” election campaign as hate speech.
Regarding hate speech in the media, as a result of the Central Council of German Sinti and Roma filing 60 to 100 complaints every year, it is now able to work as a member of a media advisory body, but hate speech on the internet remains unchecked.
After this, the panelists and participants actively exchanged opinions, and it was confirmed that, in the present age when extremism is rising, the participation of the younger generation is indispensable in order to connect movements for the elimination of racism and racial discrimination.
[1] People with origins in Western Europe, unlike the Roma, who have origins in northern India.
Today, not all Travellers necessarily lead a mobile way of life.