[LINK] "Japan combats rise in hate speech"

[rfmcdonald]

Al Jazeera America's Daniel Krieger notes highly public xenophobia in Japan, targeted towards the country's small Korean minority.

Japan is the only developed country without anti-discrimination laws. Although the government has long maintained that racism and discrimination don’t exist in Japan, the reality has gotten harder to deny. The rise of Zaitokukai has led to the spread of anti-Korean rallies across Japan, which draw dozens to hundreds of supporters from a radical fringe. They have marched with imperialist Japanese flags, described Koreans as parasites and criminals and called for their death. At one of its gatherings two years ago in Osaka, a 14-year-old Japanese girl told a small group of demonstrators, “I hate the Koreans so much, I can’t stand it. I just want to kill them all now.” She then proposed a massacre like the Rape of Nanking, prompting cheers of approval.

In the last few years, however, Zaitokukai has encountered a backlash. Japanese people have confronted members at their rallies with larger counterdemonstrations, a few of which turned violent. And in an unprecedented decision, the Japanese Supreme Court upheld a groundbreaking ruling forcing Zaitokukai to pay about $100,000 to a Kyoto elementary school for harassing ethnic Korean students after members stood outside the school shouting through bullhorns that children were cockroaches and children of spies. This summer, a Zainichi woman in Osaka filed suit against her company and its chairman for distributing discriminatory materials about Japanese-Koreans at work. And there is Lee’s case: After the online attacks, she filed suit in the Osaka District Court against the Zaitokukai and its then-leader, Makoto Sakurai, for $45,000.

“When I realized that criminal charges were difficult,” she said in a recent interview, “I felt that I had no choice but to take civil action.” In response, Sakurai, whose real surname is Takata, told the Japanese press, “She should take a good look herself at what she said. We plan to countersue her for groundless articles she wrote online.”

Lee is also suing the website Hoshu Sokuho for about $183,000 for compiling what she said are hateful anonymous messages about her and highlighting them on the Web message board 2channel. The case still has a long way to go, and the stress of it wears on her. She is often fearful in public and makes sure no one follows her from the courthouse. Though the harassment hasn’t let up, she and other Zainichi have noticed that anti-Korean rhetoric has become tempered lately. It’s now more common to call Koreans guests than to be explicitly racist and, in lieu of death threats, to complain about the special privileges they supposedly receive.

In a statement that anticipated Donald Trump’s infamous diatribe about Mexican immigrants, Sakurai expressed his concerns about the Zainichi at a 2013 rally near Tokyo. “Many Japanese are losing their lives because of crimes committed by Korean residents. Murder. Robbery. Arson. We are just saying that people who don’t like Japan should go back to their own country. What part of that is hate speech?” he said. More recently, a Zaitokukai spokesman claimed to be unaware of the extreme tactics often employed by the group, saying, “That Zainichi are discriminated against is a delusion.”