Ideas Behind Anti-Korean Prejudice Unchanged in 100 yrs: Japanese Author

The 1923 Great Kanto Earthquake that hit eastern Japan triggered massacres of Korean people, and it's clearly established that false claims were behind the acts. But in recent years, hate speech that outright rejects clear historical facts has become more widespread.

For nonfiction author Naoki Kato, 53, the situation shows that "the same ideas of discrimination that existed 100 years ago remain today." The Mainichi Shimbun interviewed him to find out more about his view of the current situation.

Mainichi Shimbun: As the author of "Trick: The people who want to deny the massacres of Korean people," (rough translation) what's your view on the largely online discourse to try to justify the killings?

Naoki Kato: At the time of the Great Kanto Earthquake, bonded warehouses in Yokohama were attacked by armed Japanese people. But, even so, there's no one out there saying, "All Yokohama people are violent, so it's fine to kill them," is there? Regardless of this, if it's Korean people, there are individuals who will be convinced and accept it if told, "They acted violently so we should kill them." It means the same ideas of discrimination that existed 100 years ago remain today.

Rhetoric about Korean people acting out violently was originally based on reports from the time that included fragmentary falsehoods. There was not a single Korean prosecuted for crimes of murder, theft or arson at that time in Tokyo.

NK: It was when former Tokyo Gov. Shintaro Ishihara used the term "Sangokujin" (a discriminatory word referring primarily to people from Taiwan, China and the Korean Peninsula that literally translates to "third country's citizens") in one of his speeches. In 2000, he said, "In the event of an earthquake, it's possible that Sangokujin will incite violence, so I want to be able to deploy the Self-Defense Forces (SDF)."

I imagined my Chinese friends having guns pointed at them by the SDF, and I couldn't stand it. I realized that these kinds of concepts may have triggered the massacres of Korean people, and so I began my research.

MS: The Tokyo Metropolitan Government has deemed some statements by conservative groups regarding the massacres of Koreans as hate speech.

NK: That's good news. It means that the denial of the massacres has been identified as inciting discrimination. Inventing false history and shouting that Korean people are "bad" is something you can often see at gatherings by hate groups. It is meaningful that this has been clearly identified as hate speech.

NK: By not believing in them. It seems that, in times of disasters, false claims concerning foreign nationals often emerge. During the March 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake, there were untrue claims that thefts by foreign people in areas affected by the disaster were rampant. When hearing information like that, it's important to what extent we are able to think, "Could this simply be a discriminatory delusion?"

Regarding the massacres that occurred after the Great Kanto Earthquake, a Sept. 1, 2019, Sumida Ward meeting of conservative groups including the "Kanto Daishinsai no Shinjitsu wo Tsutaeru Kai, Soyokaze" (Soyokaze, an association to tell the truth of the Great Kanto Earthquake) included statements such as "your (Japanese) relatives were killed by those lawless Koreans." In August this year, the Tokyo Metropolitan Government deemed statements by three people connected to the groups as hate speech, in accordance with provisions in its human rights ordinance.

(Japanese original by Mei Nanmo, City News Department, and Yoshiya Goto, Photo and Video Center)

I can't speak for the Japanese, but the South Koreans are a proud, humurous, and resourceful people, whose certain taste in food and liquour lead a lot to be desired.

They stole a lot of Japanese thunder in the recent decades, from Samsung to J-pop, and much of the reason is through being open to change. Their kids are well educated, generally fit, musical, and open to ideas. ( Strangely, the few North Koreans I have taught are often even more brilliant, especially in music)

I have tutored their kids for over 30 years, and I believe the key to their success lies in the Koreans decision to master ( or at least attempt to) English and send their kids to International schools ( the Japanese generally send their kids to Japanese schools when they live abroad).

Two other things. The Koreans, on the whole, are taught at an early age to "dislike" the Japanese. Second, if you are ever in Jeju, try, their local Makgeolli, a carbonated rice wine.

annyeong!

I lived in Japan for a couple of years as a kid, and the entire place gave me culture shock! I was nine when we moved there (my dad was Navy) and everything was so oddly foreign.

The three wheeled trucks. All the school kids in their uniforms wearing masks. The benjos that were simply a ceramic hole in the floor. The open sewers, the omnipresent smell of fish, sewage, and diesel exhaust. The Pachinco Ball parlors.

I found them to be fascinating, outwardly friendly, and very polite, though even then I knew, this was more part of their culture than reality. I was told they are just as mean and nasty as anyone else, but their culture prevents them from outwardly being that way.

When I moved to the Philippines after that, I read a great thick comprehensive book on the experience of Allied POW’s held by the Japanese, and I was stunned by the open and sadistic brutality. I had difficulty squaring that hole for a while. But the Bataan Death March was no fable, and the bleached white markers put up along the route (which my Boy Scout troop marched every year) was a testament. And the Filipinos disliked the Japanese intensely, even then.

But I liked the Japanese, and found them fascinating. We had a maid, Meikosan, who was an absolutely stunning, beautiful young woman in her twenties, and she taught my mother everything she would need to know to entertain, including the tea ceremony. They apparently became quite close, and she and my mother would go everywhere. We worshiped Meikosan, and she treated us as if we were hers. There was no faking it, and when we finally parted, there were real tears all around.

Whenever a US Navy vessel entered Yokosuka that was either nuclear powered or suspected of having nuclear weapons, there would be large, well organized demonstrations outside the main gate of the base. Thousands of people carrying banners and signs, huge megaphones and loudspeakers blaring out unintelligible things, and on our side of the fence, hundreds of black dressed, fully equipped Japanese riot police with their body armor, face shields, and billy clubs there, standing motionless in lines, behind them several fire trucks at the ready.

Like giant Kabuki theater, the crowd would get louder, more unruly, and people would begin scaling the fence. The fire trucks moved in closer, sprayed fire hoses at them to knock them off the fence, then everyone would pack up in an orderly fashion and go home. It always looked like it would get out of control, but I came to understand it wasn’t even close to that. It was all theater.

After one of those, we had hundreds of Japanese riot police sitting for hours at a parade ground across the street from my house, and my brother and I went over and were walking amongst them. It appeared they were going to be there for several more hours waiting to be let go, and we invited three of them to come back to our house, where we set up an American “feast” for them...canned corn which we emptied into little bowls, that kind of thing. They didn’t speak English, and we had all these cans open and were serving, and my Mom came in. She took it in and hurriedly kicked them all out! I think I was 11 and my brother was 12 at the time...:)

One of my favorite stories was told to me by a former boss, that illustrated things perfectly. He had lived and worked in Japan as a businessman for 5-10 years, spoke Japanese fluently, and was the stereotype of a gajin. Big guy, black hair, very blue eyes. He went to a Japanese baseball game, and while he was sitting in the stands, two younger Japanese men in their twenties were baldly and obnoxiously badmouthing him in Japanese, making the assumption he didn’t speak the language.

At one point, he turned to look at them with his big blue eyes, and said, very submissively and non-offensively in perfectly accented Japanese: “I am very sorry my presence here has insulted you and interfered with your enjoyment of the game. I would be very happy to move my seat if you wish.”

He said the two men just looked at him with their mouths open, and simply got up in unison and left without saying a word to him or to each other, they were so shocked he understood him and so embarrassed at their own behavior.

I found the dichotomy of this country puzzling. They were capable of appreciating sensitive beauty, nature, things like that, but were also apparently capable of inhuman brutality. An officer aboard the USS Astoria found this same dichotomy when his cruiser made a special journey to Japan (carrying the ashes of a well regarded Japanese diplomat in 1939 who had died while serving in the US Embassy in Washington DC) and was heard to say: I can’t understand how a country that produces such beautiful and gentle women produces such mean sons of bitches in their men.”

Thanks very much! That was a very, very well-written summary of your experience, which is significantly greater than mine. I could’ve added quite a bit more, but allow me to offer a couple of examples of my experience.

I was an Army intelligence officer at the time and, although I was based in Yongsan, Korea, I spend very little time in Korea, but a lot of time elsewhere along the Pacific Rim. I grew to like and appreciate the Korean people, at least those who didn’t work for the US government, and they despised the Japanese. Likewise, the Phillipinos (especially Tagalogs) with whom I worked, along with the Taiwanese, Hong Kong Chinese, Thai and others, had a similar opinion of the Japanese. As a result, I became very adept at recognizing ethnic traits of different Asian peoples; Koreans, in particular become irate when they’re mistaken for Japanese.

For context, one of the people with whom I developed a close personal relationship was the DEA Attache in Tokyo, who was 100% ethnic Japanese; we’ll call him Wayne. Wayne’s parents emigrated to the United States in 1947 and he was born and raised in a very traditional Japanese household in the North Bay area near Santa Rosa. He spoke fluent, very proper Japanese (I speak no Japanese, but I do speak other Asian, European and romantic languages) and knew Japanese traditions, customs and norms better than many of the people his age who were born and raised in Japan.

On my first trip to Japan, my work was primarily in Tokyo at the US Embassy. I was on relaxed grooming standards and wore civilian clothes almost exclusively. That is, I didn’t look like an Army officer at the time. Following a morning meeting with some senior US officials at the embassy, I decided to walk around Tokyo a bit, walked down the steps of the embassy, crossed the street and started walking down a sidewalk. There was very little pedestrian activity at the time, but, as I approached a Japanese woman and (I assume) her daughter, the mother looked at me, said something to her daughter, turned and crossed the street. (I should point out that, although I didn’t have a military haircut, per se, I was well-groomed and wearing a suit.) I thought it odd, so I surreptitiously glanced at them from time to time and, when they were well beyond me on the other side of the street, they turned, came back to my side of the street and continued on.

When I returned to the embassy a bit later, I mentioned my experience to Wayne, who was soon to become a very good friend. Wayne launched into an expletive-laced description of how utterly racist the Japanese people really are. To put a fine point on it, he said that Americans tend to take the Japanese at face value and consider genuine their seemingly respectful and demure behavior, when everything they do is done in a disrespectful, derisive manner that only another Japanese would recognize.

He went on to describe their historical, incredibly cruel treatment of POWs during WWII, other Asian peoples and the horrendous experiments conducted by Unit 731 and other, similar Japanese units, the details of which are still classified to this day.

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