The demonstrators appeared one day in December, just as children at an elementary school for ethnic Koreans were cleaning up for lunch. The group of about a dozen Japanese men gathered in front of the school gate, using bullhorns to call the students cockroaches and Korean spies.
Yes, you read that correctly. A dozen fully-grown Japanese men gathered outside a Kyoto elementary school to shout racial slurs at Korean children. As this NYT report from yesterday shows, they're part of a right-wing Japanese organization called the "Citizens Group That Will Not Forgive Special Privileges for Koreans in Japan", better known by its Japanese abbreviation, the Zaitokukai. They are only one of many such groups in Japan - and more people are joining these groups every day.
The NYT article reports the rise in right-wing nationalist groups in Japan. Japan has always had a very strong nationalist streak. As a general rule, they dislike foreigners (often referred to by the borderline slur gaijin) and are very proud of their culture and history. There have always been militant Japanese ultra-nationalist groups calling for the expulsion of foreigners and a return to an aggressive martial society. These groups are still active in Japan, but they have been on the decline for decades. Their membership is falling, and they are becoming more marginalized.
Protests like the one detailed at the start of this piece are the work of a new coalition of right-wing nationalist groups commonly referred to as the "Net Right" or "Net Far Right". These groups are populated primarily by frustrated young men who are unable to work high-paying of steady jobs. They blame both Japan's long economic decline and its loss of international standing on one thing: foreigners. Non-Japanese are taking their jobs, sabotaging the economy, and subverting the country through insidious left-wing political ideas.
There are many such groups like the Zaitokukai mentioned above, each organized primarily through the internet:
More significantly, the protests also signaled the emergence here of a new type of ultranationalist group. The groups are openly anti-foreign in their message, and unafraid to win attention by holding unruly street demonstrations.
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Local news media have dubbed these groups the Net far right, because they are loosely organized via the Internet, and gather together only for demonstrations.
Boy, those tactics sound familiar. All you need to do is add teabags and poorly spelled signs. That said, it would be irresponsible to link them with our own anti-foreign right-wing groups who often hold unruly street demonstrations. I mean, these Japanese groups didn't study the teabagger playbook when they decided to form their organizations, right?
Mr. Sakurai says the group is not racist, and rejected the comparison with neo-Nazis. Instead, he said he had modeled his group after another overseas political movement, the Tea Party in the United States. He said he had studied videos of Tea Party protests, and shared with the Tea Party an angry sense that his nation had gone in the wrong direction because it had fallen into the hands of leftist politicians, liberal media as well as foreigners.
Hell, they've even got the standard teabagger denial down: spend the morning calling Korean elementary school students "cockroaches", then loudly proclaim that they're not racist. Bravo.
The only good thing about these groups is that - so far - they've remained remarkably non-violent and most do not share the militant ideas of older RW groups. It's believed that many of the members of these groups are just looking for a way to vent their frustrations, and the easiest target is foreigners. That may be so, but even if their protests remain non-violent it's only a matter of time before someone takes their words to heart and decides to take the next step.
Edit: I'm not claiming that our particular brand of teabaggy craziness is being exported - only their tactics. Since both our Tea Partiers and groups like the Zaitokukai are nationalist RW groups, it's not surprising that they share many of the same basic beliefs.