Media Intimidation in Japan

A Close Encounter with Hard Japanese Nationalism by David McNeill, Foreign Research Fellow, Institute of Socio-Information and Communication Studies University of Tokyo.

Original quotes will be in italics.

This is a fascinating article as it deals with today's world and the ultra-rightists in Japan and how they are trying to get their extreme views across. He starts off talking about how he and his wife (a Japanese were on a radio show and talked about a trip they made to Nanjing/Nanking. Not long after the show a group of guys showed up to protest to the station manager that Nanjing had been discussed. Two days later they were told they were no longer to discuss politics on the radio show.

He said we would need to apologize over the air for the Nanjing comment. If we didn't, the men and their friends would drive their gaisensha, or black sound trucks, outside our sponsors (two ramen, or Chinese noodle, restaurants, a bar, and a couple of real estate agents) and harass them until they withdrew their support. Violence was unlikely, but he couldn't rule it out. He apologized again for asking us to apologize. He handed us a sheet of paper the station had prepared for us to read on the next show. It said that we humbly apologized for the "inappropriate comments" (futekisetsu na hyogen ) we had made the previous week.

Full censorship, full caving-in to the extremists in Japan. They got quite a bit of fax support, though, and ended up reading a few of those. The station's apology was not read.

This caused him to become interested in finding out just how significant a present the extreme right was in Japan.

The best estimates are that there are more than 100,000 far-right members in Japan belonging to almost 1000 groups throughout the country, 800 of which are affiliated through an organization called Zennippon Aikokusha Dantai Kaigi, or the National Conference of Patriotic Associations.

That's a lot of groups, Uncle Ed.

What complicates things is that some of the groups overlap with the yakuza.

Many yakuza groups transformed themselves into rightist political organizations from the 1960s after the Political Fund Regulations Law prohibited extortion, but allowed legitimate political groups to raise money and claim preferential tax treatment as long as they presented income and expenditure statements to the Ministry of Home Affairs. Ideologically, both uyoku, as the ultra-right are known, and yakuza see themselves to some extent as patriots and defenders of traditional codes of honor, although "genuine" right-wingers make a firm distinction between plain old gangsters and what they call minzoku-ha, or nationalists.

So crooks can become legitimate money raisers by claiming they are a nationalist group.

He also says that this growth in a 'new nationalism' has been since the 1970's. Emperor worship has been toned down. Anti-communism and patriotism are a common plank.

Ultra-right taboos include Nanjing/Nanking; comfort women/sex slaves; Unit 731 and any attempt to degrade the Emperor.

Yoshida Yoshihisa, a professor at Sagami Woman's University who helped to publicize the comfort women issue in Japan was hounded for two weeks by a convoy of vans after his name was publicly linked to the issue. "They drove round and round my university screaming at me to come out," he says. "I thought it would never end." War veterans who come forward to tell their stories can also expect the attention of right-wingers. Shiro Azuma, who served for four years in China and kept a detailed diary that he subsequently published, and Yoshio Shinozuka, a member of Unit 731 who agreed to testify in the current lawsuit brought by 100 surviving Chinese victims, both tell stories of threats and intimidation. A Chinese movie on Nanjing, which was screened in a single small Yokohama theater three years ago, was attacked and shut down at about the same time as the Japanese revisionist war movie Pride was showing in hundreds of cinemas nationwide.

Basically a full-scale denial of Japan doing anything wrong during the Chinese phase of WWII.

The mayor of Nagasaki, Motojima Hitoshi, a mild-mannered Christian, was threatened for months by right-wingers, egged on by academics and a handful of senior politicians, for suggesting that emperor Hirohito bore some responsibility for the war. He was eventually shot in the back, but survived, in January 1990, but not before 3.8 million people had signed a petition supporting what he said.

Violence is also one of their tools to deal with people who don't agree with them. The author says there have been thousands of such attacks Basically this is like the action of today's terrorists except they are doing it to people of their own country. It also, unfortunately, matches some of the growing extremist political 'discussions' that are going on in this country. What the Japanese media terrorists, to coin a phrase,sort of, is to act as terrorists themselves, trying to shut down anyone's saying anything that doesn't agree with their extreme beliefs. What is very unfortunate is that many politicians, even higher-ups, are agreeing with the extremists.

He wonders why the media caves in to the rightists.

A common pole of analysis is to suggest that the apparent failure of media gatekeepers in Japan to confront intimidation may be the result of the group-centered nature of Japanese society which translates into negotiation and ultimately compromise with elements within the system that threaten to disrupt harmony.

Much of Japanese society is based on the concept of the group. Single men making their own decisions on their own would be considered strange. Decisions are made on the basis of a group consensus, with an attempt to keep anyone from 'rocking the boat' pretty obvious.

One of the things the author notes is that the Japanese media is basically setting a limit on what can even be discussed and then censors anything that would upset the ultra-right.

Quoting the minister of Justice, Nakamura Shozaburo:

During the spring and early summer [of 1999] the Japanese government then did the following things one after another: it passed a law allowing the police to tap citizens' telephones (the Tsushin Bojuho); it legalized the rising sun flag (hinomaru) and made the prewar song celebrating the emperor's reign (kimigayo) the national anthem, and ordered them to be displayed and sung in schools; it established Constitutional Research Councils (Kempo Chosakai) in both houses of the Diet in order to study revisions to the "peace constitution"; it enacted legislation to support the new "Defense Guidelines" with the United States, giving the U.S. the power to take over Japanese airports, harbors, roads, and hospitals in times of an emergency in "areas surrounding Japan," a description that is said to be conceptual and not geographical; it forged a three-party coalition (the Ji-Ji-Ko alliance) giving the Liberal Democratic Party control of over 70 percent of the seats in the Diet and the ability to pass any laws that it wants to; and, in October 1999, it saw the newly appointed vice minister of defense, Shingo Nishimura, urge the Diet to consider arming the country with nuclear weapons.

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