During NHK’s 7 p.m. news, remarks by Donald Trump aired in response to President Obama’s Hiroshima visit shocked many viewers.
The comments carried racial overtones unacceptable to Japanese audiences and exposed the fragility of postwar assumptions.

May 28, 2016

Many people must have thought, “What are you talking about?” while watching NHK’s 7 p.m. news tonight.
It was when footage of Trump giving a speech was aired as a reaction in the United States to Obama’s first visit to Hiroshima as president of the United States.
Trump said something that made Japanese viewers doubt their ears: “As long as there’s no apology… I don’t care.”
Is it that Trump thinks like this—that the one renting a large space in the building he owns in New York is the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China, that is, China, not Japan, so Japan doesn’t matter, it has nothing to do with him?
When Trump said that Japan, being closest to North Korea and feeling the greatest fear, should simply arm itself with nuclear weapons, the fiction of the past seventy years collapsed with an audible crash.
The positions of the Asahi Shimbun and the so-called cultural figures who had aligned themselves with it collapsed in an instant.
In that sense, I wrote that Trump is a trickster of the postwar era, perhaps the greatest of all.
Of course, this is neither to affirm nor to deny Trump.
There is no way to judge in advance someone who may become the president of the United States.
But this particular remark is completely unacceptable. The same applies to his recent statement about imposing high tariffs on Japanese cars.
This remark carries a racially discriminatory odor—one that even calls to mind white supremacist thinking, which was one of the major causes that led to the Second World War—and for that reason it is utterly unacceptable.
As for him, we can only watch the results, but tonight’s remark was, for Japanese people, entirely unacceptable.
To be continued.