Anti-hate speech bills likely headed for Diet consideration, but is it effective to protect ethnic Koreans.

Last year, the opposition parties submitted the bill for "Hate Speech Regulation Act", but voting was postponed because the diet came to conclusion "the definition of hate speech is unclear". Now, the ruling party (LDP and Komeito coalition) is submitting their own version of bill for "Hate Speech Regulation Act" to the Diet.
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As reported earlier, some cabinet ministers from LDP are befriending with notorious racist organization called "Zaitokukai" (right-wing nationalist).... It is skeptical if the ruling party is serious about protecting ethnic Koreans in Japan, the main target whom "Zaitokukai" attacks.
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Takashi Nagao, a cabinet member of LDP and the member of Japan Conference, explained about this bill at Channel Sakura (a Japanese TV channel and video-sharing website to promote Japanese right-wing and nationalist points of view. It hosted Abe and right wing politicians/intellectuals mainly to discuss topics about positive portrayal of Japanese imperialism, war crime denial, anti-Korean and anti-Chinese sentiments as well as attempting to present a "pure" Japanese cultural image.). The purpose of Nagao's presentation was to ease the fear of "Zaitokukai" like minded rightist supporters of LDP.
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Nagao explained them "no penalty for violating this law", "it is not like Human rights protection bill" and "no third party organization". However, the audience of Channel sakura was still complaining to Nagao thru SNS, "if it is illegal for Japanese to tell "get out" to ethnic Korean, it is dicrimination against Japanese." Nagao tweeted back, "this regulation is applicable if hate speech is meant to drive US soldiers out of Japan".
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The bill submitted by LDP has the provision that the law is applicable for the hate-speech against "foreign-born residents and their descendants in Japan", but the treatment of ethnic Koreans is in gray-zone . The majority of Koreans in Japan are Zainichi Koreans, often known simply as Zainichi ,who are the permanent ethnic Korean residents of Japan. The term "Zainichi Korean" refers only to long-term Korean residents of Japan who trace their roots to Korea under Japanese rule. ("Zainichi Korean" is main target of the attack by "Zaitokukai") Japanese nationality was forced to them under colonial rule. (as Korea was part of Japan at that time, it is vague if their status can be defined as "foreign born".)
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Anti-hate speech bills likely headed for Diet consideration
AJW by Asahi Shimbun : 6 April 2016


Debate over regulating hate speech targeting ethnic minorities in Japan is finally likely to begin soon in the Diet, with the ruling coalition expected to submit its long-awaited draft bill as early as next week.

Katsuei Hirasawa, a Lower House member of the ruling Liberal Democratic Party who heads a team to address the issue, on April 5 proclaimed the draft as “significant.”

“Although the bill does not come with a provision to punish violators, it is significant that we have shown our attitude against hate speech,” he said.

But it is unclear whether effective legislation will be enacted as many lawmakers acknowledge the difficulty in ensuring freedom of speech while regulating racism. The main opposition Democratic Party and other opposition parties submitted their own anti-hate speech legislation last May.
The opposition's version also does not include penalties for those violating the law.

The push to enact an anti-hate speech law follows a call by the U.N. Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination.

In a recommendation in August 2014, the committee urged the government to pass and enforce a law regulating hate speech by Zaitokukai and other groups blaring discriminatory and menacing taunts at their street rallies.

Zaitokukai, formed in 2006, is short for the Japanese name of the group that is roughly translated as a group of citizens who oppose privileges for ethnic Korean residents in Japan.

It has been aggressively criticizing ethnic Koreans, staging rallies in front of a Korean school in Kyoto and in neighborhoods that host ethnic Koreans in Tokyo and Osaka.

The LDP moved swiftly to set up a team examining the issue in August 2014, but it has dragged its feet until recently to regulate it.

The proposed legislation by the LDP and its junior coalition partner, Komeito, defines hate speech as “wrongful discriminatory words and deeds that are intended to fuel or encourage a sense of discrimination against so as to incite a movement to exclude (the targets) from a local community” targeting foreign residents and families.

The LDP was initially reluctant to define hate speech in the bill, citing potential gaps, but acceded at the prodding of Komeito.

The bill states in the preamble that “wrongful discriminatory words and deeds will not be permitted.”

The draft calls on the central and local governments to offer counseling services and programs to educate the public against hate speech and racial discrimination.

The opposition parties' draft bill prohibits “insults, harassment and other wrongful discriminatory words based on race and other reasons” and states that “no one should undertake wrongful, discriminatory statements and actions.”

Differing from the ruling coalition’s version, the opposition draft clearly spells out the government's responsibility in addressing the issue.

The opposition calls on a panel tasked with tackling racial discrimination to be set up in the Cabinet Office, probe important matters regarding discrimination and issue warnings to government ministries and agencies over suspected cases.

The opposition bloc seeks to hold talks with ruling coalition lawmakers to explore whether they can integrate the two bills.

Legislators acknowledge that they will have to work more to give teeth to the legislation.
Speaking of the ruling coalition's bill, Toshio Ogawa, the Democratic Party’s director-general in the Upper House and a former judge, said, “The police would have no legal grounds to deny an application for a rally that is aimed at spewing hate speech. And police would not be able to do anything at the site.”

Kiyohiko Toyama, a Komeito member in the Lower House, expressed concerns about the opposition’s legislation, citing possible infringement of freedom of speech.

“In an extreme case, police on the street could clamp down on (demonstrators) if they deem (their actions) as discriminatory,” he said. “It raises questions about the compatibility with freedom of expression.”

The central government, in its first-ever survey, confirmed 1,152 cases of hate speech demonstrations and campaigns between April 2012 and September 2015.

Although such incidences declined somewhat in 2015, the government described the situation as “not quietening down.”

http://www.asahi.com/ajw/articles/AJ201604060055.html

Infringing the Freedom to Hate
Shingetsu News Agency : 13 April 2016

SNA (Tokyo) — The global conversation on hate speech has seen a resurgence due to US presidential candidate Donald Trump’s appeals to racism, but hate speech does not exist only within the scope of US presidential elections — in Japan it has been largely unimpeded since the turn of the decade.

On April 8, the Liberal Democratic Party and Komeito jointly submitted to the House of Councillors a bill seeking to regulate hate speech targeting Zainichi Koreans (Koreans with permanent resident status in Japan). The opposition parties had already submitted a similar bill last May.


Last year’s opposition-sponsored bill crucially included a ban on racial discrimination — but this is not included in the bill submitted by the ruling coalition this month. Both bills fail to stipulate any specific penalties for engaging in hate speech. Even so, the ruling coalition is worried that the opposition’s approach would have been too heavy-handed, and would have infringed on freedom of expression, a right guaranteed by the Constitution.

Although hate speech is not an issue that receives a great deal of public recognition in Japan, violent and aggressive speech targeting resident Koreans has been prevalent in Japan since around 2012. On March 30, the Ministry of Justice released survey results on hate speech targeting specific races and found that from April 2012 to September 2015, there had been 1,152 demonstrations in 29 prefectures by organizations said to be engaging in hate speech.

Of these organizations, the most prominent is the ultra-nationalist Zaitokukai (Citizens’ Association That Will Not Permit Special Privileges for Resident Koreans).

In July 2014, the Zaitokukai was fined 12 million yen (about US$110,000) in reparations by the Osaka High Court — utilizing UN conventions that Japan had signed — for disturbing classes taking place at the Kyoto Korean School. The Zaitokukai reportedly used loudspeakers to make inflammatory statements such as, “Cockroaches, maggots, go back to the Korean Peninsula.” The Zaitokukai appealed the judgment to the Supreme Court, but this was rejected.

In August 2014, the United Nation’s Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination, after watching videos of anti-Korean demonstrations taking place in Japan, recommended Japan to ban hate speech. Committee members were reportedly very harsh on the Japanese government, claiming that a ban on hate speech would not infringe freedom of expression.

During this time, when international pressure to ban hate speech was escalating, media sources reported a connection between the Abe Cabinet and the Zaitokukai. In late 2014, a photo of Eriko Yamatani, then the minister overseeing the National Police Agency, posing with Shigeo Masuki, a former official of the Zaitokukai, became a subject of controversy. In a press conference at the Foreign Correspondents’ Club of Japan on September 25, 2014, Yamatani was grilled by journalists on this subject. Yamatani responded that she did not have a relationship with Masuki, despite him saying that he had known her for fifteen years. She also failed to specifically reject the Zaitokukai’s worldview.

During the same time period, photos of Tomomi Inada, the Liberal Democratic Party’s policy chief, and Sanae Takaichi, Minister for Internal Affairs and Communications, posing with a leader of a neo-Nazi organization in Japan, also surfaced on the web.

Many voices within Japan’s ruling party have argued that banning hate speech raises concerns from the perspective of protecting the freedom of expression. Ironically, however, it is the Abe administration itself that is now becoming a focus of international concern regarding its own alleged attempts to intimidate the news media. For example, Minister Sanae Takaichi’s statement this February that the government could shut down “biased” broadcasters sits in an uncomfortable relationship to the view of some ruling party lawmakers that those who engage in hate speech may simply be exercising their free speech rights.

The bill submitted by the ruling coalition does not include a ban on hate speech, and probably does not satisfy the UN’s demands for decisive legislative action.
Nobuaki Masaki is a contributing writer to the Shingetsu News Agency.

http://shingetsunewsagency.com/2016/04/13/infringing-the-freedom-to-hate/

 

 

Resistance to Syrian Refugees Calls to Mind Painful Past for Japanese-Americans

Resistance to Syrian Refugees Calls to Mind Painful Past for Japanese-Americans
New York Times: 26 November 2015

Before the attack that changed the country, a group of girls would meet their 14-year-old friend, Yuka, at her house every morning. They would walk to school together and discuss their plans for the day.

 

But the morning after the bombs were dropped and people lost their lives, Yuka waited and waited. Her mother urged her to go to school on her own. No, Yuka insisted, they’ll be here.

They never came.

So she went to school by herself, only to discover that classmates she had considered close friends were suddenly ignoring her.

 

It was Dec. 8, 1941. The day after Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor. A Monday.   

           

This week, Yuka Yasui Fujikura, who was born in Oregon to Japanese parents, reflected on the backlash against Syrian refugees after the recent terrorist attacks in Paris. And her thoughts drifted back to one of her country’s most shameful chapters: when the American government indiscriminately criminalized tens of thousands of people of Japanese descent — most of them born in the United States — and forced them into detention centers during World War II.

 

“To judge someone by ethnicity or their religion,” said Ms. Fujikura, now 88, “it was wrong then, it’s wrong today, too.”

 

The dark memories of seven decades ago have bubbled to the surface in recent weeks for many other people who were sent to Japanese internment camps.

 

Since gunmen and suicide bombers with the Islamic State killed 130 people in Paris, there has been an outcry in some quarters to stop Syrian refugees from coming into the country. More than two dozen Republican governors have said they do not want Syrians escaping that country’s civil war to enter their states, fearing that terrorists would hide among them. Public officials have floated ideas that include surveillance of mosques, registering Muslims and setting up refugee camps.

 

What really disturbed Japanese-Americans was when the mayor of Roanoke, Va., David Bowers, a Democrat, suggested that barring Syrian refugees was prudent in light of the Japanese internment. “It appears that the threat of harm to America from ISIS now is just as real and serious as that from our enemies then,” he said. He has since apologized.

 

For Japanese-Americans of that era, it was a reminder of the days when the government forcibly removed them and their families from their farms, boarded up their businesses, put them on trains with the blinds drawn and shuttled them to remote prisons where they were held behind barbed wire, under the watch of armed guards.

 

It was a time, several said, when the news media propagated fear by reporting conspiratorial rumors — such as that Japanese farmers were plowing their fields in a certain manner to send messages to the enemy.

“Such blatant lies started to turn the tide against us,” recalled George Ikeda, 93, a California native who was sent to an internment camp on Independence Day in 1942.

 

By order of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, about 120,000 people of Japanese ancestry living on the West Coast, most of them born in the United States, were detained without charges during World War II. People shouted slurs at them. They were forced to fill out questionnaires to test their loyalty to the United States. The government set a curfew for people of certain foreign ancestries, but it was mostly enforced against the Japanese because they looked different.

 

Out of that discrimination emerged leaders like Ms. Fujikura’s brother, Minoru Yasui, who purposely had himself arrested to challenge the curfew. His conviction was eventually vacated. Though Mr. Yasui died  in 1986 and the United States Supreme Court has never ruled on the constitutionality of the law he was fighting, his efforts received the ultimate honor on Tuesday when President Obama posthumously awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

 

“It makes me so proud that my grandfather is getting a Presidential Medal of Freedom for defying a presidential order,” said Chani Hawkins, a granddaughter of Mr. Yasui’s. “That gives me hope.”

With the debate over Syrian refugees coinciding with Mr. Yasui’s honor, it was a prime opportunity to address the equality he fought for, another granddaughter, Serena Hawkins-Schletzbaum, said. “I don’t know if it would have been heard as loudly if we weren’t in this exact moment in time.”

 

Ms. Fujikura’s father was among Japanese citizens detained by the authorities after the Pearl Harbor attack, with law enforcement saying “he’s a potentially dangerous enemy alien,” Ms. Fujikura recalled.

 

He came to the United States nearly four decades earlier, she said, settling in Hood River, Ore. The family owned land and orchards, she said, and her father also co-owned a general store with his brother. Ms. Fujikura recalled a sign that was placed on the door of the store: “Alien property closed for business.”

 

Ms. Fujikura, the youngest of nine children, said she was taken with her mother and another brother to a holding area in Pinedale, Calif., before being shipped off to one of the biggest internment camps in Tule Lake, Calif.

 

“When you’re 14 years old and somebody says, ‘Oh you’re going to be shipped to a camp,’ in my head I had envisioned something like a Campfire or Girl Scout camp,” Ms. Fujikura said.

But she quickly learned it was not like that.

 

Several people said they recalled being held on fairgrounds in smelly animal stables before being sent to permanent camps. Some remembered sweltering temperatures in their barracks. At Tule Lake, Ms. Fujikura said, she lived in a tar paper dwelling, and the walls between the units did not go all the way to the ceiling, so everyone could hear what was going on in the neighboring dwellings. The communal toilets and showers did not have doors.

 

By the time the last camp was closed in 1946, many families had lost their homes, land and all their belongings. They were generally discouraged from returning to the West Coast, so many settled elsewhere. Tensions surrounding Japanese-Americans remained high.

 

Ms. Fujikura said that she was accepted at the University of Oregon, but that the university sent her a letter warning she could “return at her own risk,” she said.

 

The camps left lingering anguish for some. Marielle Tsukamoto, 78, who lives in suburban Sacramento and was interned with her family for about two years, recalled the complete darkness of the camps at night, but for the occasional spotlight check. She had a hard time getting over her fear of darkness, she said, even after adulthood.

 

When one of her cousins, a star basketball player, returned to high school for his senior year after internment, teachers and students no longer looked him in the eyes, smiled at or acknowledged him, Ms. Tsukamoto said.

 

She does not want the United States to ever make the same mistake again, she said.

In 1952, internment camp survivors successfully lobbied Congress to allow people from Japan to become naturalized citizens. Ms. Tsukamoto was among many who fought for greater redress. The result was a congressional commission convened in 1980 that concluded that the mass incarceration was not done out of national security, but out of “race prejudice, war hysteria and a failure of political leadership.”

 

And they won their biggest victory in 1988 when Congress passed the Civil Liberties Act, requiring an apology and payments of $20,000 each to survivors. In all, the government paid about $1.6 billion to internment camp survivors.

 

“We thought that would prevent it from happening to another group in the future,” Ms. Tsukamoto said.

 

Mr. Yasui’s family noted that the Supreme Court’s 1944 ruling in Korematsu v. United States, which endorsed the executive order requiring Japanese detention, has never been formally overruled. And there is great concern among some Japanese-Americans that the sentiment regarding Syrian refugees has the country headed down a grimly familiar path.

 

“It’s people reacting in hysteria because of fear,” Ms. Tsukamoto said. “We’re better than that. This is a country that is based on welcoming immigrants.”

 

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/27/us/for-japanese-americans-resistance-to-syrian-refugees-recalls-long-ago-fears.html?ref=topics&_r=2

 

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Japan’s ruling party under fire over links to far-right extremists

Calls for LDP politicians to distance themselves from extremists come amid campaign of terror targeting academics
The Guardian: 13 October 2014

In this August, voting for 「Hate Speech Restriction Bill」,proposed by the opposite parties, was postponed in Japan. The Economist article described, "In Tokyo’s Shin-Okubo neighbourhood, home to one of the largest concentrations of Koreans in Japan, many people say the level of anti-foreigner vitriol—on the streets and on the internet—is without modern precedent." 　 I observe hate speech has drama...tically increased in Japan for these years.
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In fact, racists and arrogant nationalists are everywhere in the world (and its counter activists too). However, the problems lie in Japan are, the cabinet is not active to protect victims, and some cabinet members are befriending with the notorious racist organization.
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Japan’s ruling party is under pressure to distance itself from the far right, after senior politicians were linked to groups that promote Nazi ideology and hate crimes towards the country’s ethnic Korean community.

The calls for three members of prime minister Shinzo Abe’s government to distance themselves from extremists come amid a campaign of death threats and intimidation targeting liberal academics, which observers say is a symptom of Japan’s sharp turn to the right.

Eriko Yamatani, who as chairman of the national public safety commission is Japan’s most senior police official, is the third senior Liberal Democratic party (LDP) politician to have been linked to ultra-rightwing groups, after a photograph surfaced of her with Shigeo Masuki, a senior member of the Zaitokukai group.

Yamatani, however, has refused to condemn Zaitokukai, whose members have labelled ethnic Korean residents of Japan “cockroaches” and called for them to be killed.

The 2009 photograph, which Yamatani claims she does not recall being taken, became public soon after two of her LDP colleagues acknowledged that they had been snapped with Kazunari Yamada, the leader of a Japanese neo-Nazi party, in 2011.

Sanae Takaichi, the internal affairs minister, and the LDP’s policy head, Tomomi Inada, claimed they were unaware of Yamada’s extremist views at the time.

When challenged to condemn Zaitokukai, Yamatani said it was not appropriate to comment on the policies of individual groups, “Japan has a long history of placing great value on the idea of harmony and respecting the rights of everyone,” she said. Masuki, who has left Zaitokukai, told Reuters he had known Yamatani for more than a decade through their shared interest in education.

Zaitokukai calls for the end to welfare and other “privileges” afforded to about half a million non-naturalised members of Japan’s ethnic Korean community, many of whom are the descendants of labourers brought over from the Korean peninsula to work in mines and factories before and during the second world war.

Rightwing activists have been emboldened by the Asahi Shimbun’s recent admission that articles it ran in the 1980s and 90s on Japan’s wartime use of sex slaves – so-called comfort women –were false. The liberal newspaper’s articles were based on now-discredited testimony of Seiji Yoshida, a former soldier who claimed he had witnessed the abduction of women from the South Korean island of Jeju.

The Asahi’s erroneous reporting prompted Abe and other senior politicians to accuse it of damaging Japan’s international image, claiming that the foreign media had taken the inaccurate sex slave articles as the cue for their own coverage.

Former Asahi journalists who work in academia have become the target of a campaign of bomb and death threats by the far right designed to hound them out of their jobs.

Activists have posted online the names and photographs of the children of one former Asahi journalist, Takashi Uemura, denouncing them as the offspring of a “traitor” and urging them to kill themselves. Uemura had written articles on the sex slave issue for the Asahi 20 years ago.

“[The government’s] lukewarm attitude towards hate crimes by the revisionist right is in itself a reason why we need to criticise the government’s handling of this [intimidation] issue, even if it isn’t directly orchestrating what is happening,” said Koichi Nakano, a politics professor at Sophia University in Tokyo.

Hokusei Gakuen University in Sapporo, which employs Uemura as a part-time lecturer, has postponed a decision on whether to rehire him for the 2015 academic year. Another former Asahi reporter declined a position at a university in western Japan after receiving threatening letters.

“Abe and other leaders’ outlook is encouraging the rightwing to conduct even harsher attacks on those who are critical of the history of the Japanese empire,” said Jiro Yamaguchi, a professor at Hosei University in Tokyo.

Abe’s recent cabinet reshuffle has raised fears that Japan is veering sharply to the right amid rising tensions over history and territorial claims with China and South Korea.

Yamatani, Takaichi and Inada are close allies of Abe and share his revisionist views of Japan’s wartime history. They have questioned the consensus that Japan forced tens of thousands of mainly Korean and Chinese women to work in frontline brothels between the late 1920s and Japan’s defeat in 1945.

Fifteen of the 19 members of Abe’s cabinet belong to Nippon Kaigi, a group launched in 1997 to promote patriotic education and end Japan’s “masochistic” view of its wartime campaigns on mainland Asia.

Abe played a prominent role in pressuring the education ministry to remove references to the comfort women from school textbooks.

Yamaguchi said the rightwing campaign had echoes of the 1930s, when militarists carried out purges of liberal academics. “If Hokusei [University] gives in to this pressure [to sack Uemura], that would mean academic freedom and freedom of speech is undermined, even under a democratic constitution,” he said. “This is a watershed moment for Japanese society.”

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/oct/13/japan-ruling-party-far-right-extremists-liberal-democratic

Spin and substance: A troubling rise in xenophobic vitriol

Spin and substance: A troubling rise in xenophobic vitriol
The Economist: 25 September 2014

IN OSAKA’s strongly Korean Tsuruhashi district, a 14-year-old Japanese girl went out into the streets last year calling through a loudspeaker for a massacre of Koreans. In Tokyo’s Shin-Okubo neighbourhood, home to one of the largest concentrations of Koreans in Japan, many people say the leve...l of anti-foreigner vitriol—on the streets and on the internet—is without modern precedent. Racists chant slogans such as “Get out of our country”, and “Kill, kill, kill Koreans”.
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Perhaps for the first time, this is becoming a problem for Japan’s politicians and spin doctors (to say nothing of the poor Koreans). The clock is counting down to the Tokyo Olympics in 2020, and lawmakers are coming under pressure to rein in the verbal abuse and outright hate speech directed at non-Japanese people, chiefly Koreans.

 Japan has about 500,000 non-naturalised Koreans, some of whom have come in the past couple of decades but many of whose families were part of a diaspora that arrived during Japan’s imperial era in the first half of the 20th century. They have long been targets of hostility. After the Great Kanto earthquake of 1923, Tokyo residents launched a pogrom against ethnic Koreans, claiming that they had poisoned the water supply.

So far the abuse has stopped short of violence. There have also been counter-demonstrations by Japanese citizens in defence of those attacked. But the police have been passive in the face of verbal assaults. And there is clearly a danger that one day the attacks will turn violent.

So the government is under pressure to act. In July, the UN’s human-rights committee demanded that Japan add hate speech to legislation banning racial discrimination. Tokyo’s governor, Yoichi Masuzoe, has pressed the prime minister, Shinzo Abe, to pass a law well before the games.
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The courts, too, are beginning to move. In July Osaka’s high court upheld an earlier ruling over racial discrimination that ordered Zaitokukai, an ultra-right group that leads hate-speech rallies across the country, to pay ¥12m ($111,000) for its tirades against a pro-North Korean elementary school in Kyoto. At least one right-wing group, Issuikai, which is anti-American and nostalgic for the imperial past, abhors the anti-Korean racism. Its founder, Kunio Suzuki, says he has never seen such anti-foreign sentiment.

The backdrop to a sharp rise in hate-filled rallies is Japan’s strained relations with South Korea (over the wartime issue of Korean women forced to work as sex slaves for the Japanese army) and North Korea (which abducted Japanese citizens in the 1970s and 1980s). But, says Mr Suzuki of Issuikai, the return of Mr Abe to office in 2012 also has something to do with it. The nationalist prime minister and his allies have been mealy-mouthed in condemning hate speech.
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Even if Mr Abe’s Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) bows to the need to improve Japan’s image overseas, the message is likely to remain mixed. Earlier in September a photograph emerged of Eriko Yamatani, the new minister for national public safety and the overseer of Japan’s police, posing in 2009 for a photograph with members of Zaitokukai. The government says she did not know that the people she met were connected to the noxious group. Yet Ms Yamatani has form when it comes to disputing the historical basis of the practice of wartime sex slavery.
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Many reasonable people worry that a new hate-speech law, improperly drafted, could harm freedom of expression. But one revisionist politician, Sanae Takaichi, said, shortly before she joined the cabinet in September, that if there were to be a hate-speech law, it should be used to stop those annoying people (invariably well-behaved and often elderly) demonstrating against the government outside the Diet: lawmakers, she added, needed to work “without any fear of criticism”. Ms Takaichi’s office has since been obliged to explain why, with Tomomi Inada, another of Mr Abe’s close allies, she appeared in photographs alongside a leading neo-Nazi. Some of the hate, it seems, may be inspired from the top.
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http://www.economist.com/news/asia/21620252-troubling-rise-xenophobic-vitriol-spin-and-substance?zid=306&ah=1b164dbd43b0cb27ba0d4c3b12a5e227

From Wikipedia:
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Japanese law covers threats and slander, but it "does not apply to hate speech against general groups of people". Japan became a member of the United Nations International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination in 1995. Article 4 of the convention sets forth provisions calling for the criminalization of hate speech. But the Japanese government has suspended the provisions, saying actions to spread or promote the idea of racial discrimination have not been taken in Japan to such an extent that legal action is necessary. The Foreign Ministry says that this assessment remains unchanged.
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In May 2013, the United Nations Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (CESCR) warned the Japanese government that it needs to take measures to curb hate speech against so-called "comfort women", or Asian women forced into sexual slavery by the Japanese military during World War II. The committee's recommendation called for the Japanese government to better educate Japanese society on the plight of women who were forced into sexual slavery to prevent stigmatization, and to take necessary measures to repair the lasting effects of exploitation, including addressing their right to compensation.
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In 2013, following demonstrations, parades, and comments posted on the Internet threatening violence against foreign residents of Japan, especially Koreans, there are concerns that hate speech is a growing problem in Japan. Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and Justice Minister Sadakazu Tanigaki have expressed concerns about the raise in hate speech, saying that it "goes completely against the nation's dignity", but so far have stopped short of proposing any legal action against protesters.

On 22 September 2013 around 2,000 people participated in the "March on Tokyo for Freedom" campaigning against recent hate speech marches. Participants called on the Japanese government to "sincerely adhere" to the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination. Sexual minorities and the disabled also participated in the march.
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On 25 September 2013 a new organization, "An international network overcoming hate speech and racism" (Norikoenet), that is opposed to hate speech against ethnic Koreans and other minorities in Japan was launched.
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On 7 October 2013, in a rare ruling on racial discrimination against ethnic Koreans, a Japanese court ordered an anti-Korean group, Zaitokukai, to stop "hate speech" protests against a Korean school in Kyoto and pay the school 12.26 million yen ($126,400 U.S.) in compensation for protests that took place in 2009 and 2010.
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A United Nations panel urged Japan to ban hate speech.

SoftBank's Son stands up to anti-Korean bigotry in Japan

SoftBank's Son stands up to anti-Korean bigotry in Japan
Nikkei Asian Review: 27 August 2015

TOKYO -- SoftBank Group Chairman and CEO Masayoshi Son has long been discriminated against by Japanese because he is ethnically Korean.
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Even in his early childhood, he was attacked verbally and physically by Japanese classmates. In kindergarten, he was jeered at for being Korean. Once, another child cut his head open with a stone. Today,... he finds himself the target of malicious comments on the Internet. In a recent interview, Son talked about his experiences and his decision to be open about his background.
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Q: Why did you choose to use your Korean family name instead of your Japanese one?
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A: I used to go by Masayoshi Yasumoto before I went to the U.S. at the age of 16. After I returned from the U.S. and decided to start a business, I had a choice before me -- whether I should go with the Japanese family name Yasumoto, which all my family and relatives use, or the ancestral surname Son.
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It is undoubtedly easier to go by Yasumoto when living in Japanese society. A number of celebrities and professional athletes use Japanese family names in their chosen professions. It is not my intention to criticize such a practice. But I decided to go against the tide and become the first among my relatives to use Son as my family name.
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I won't go into the reasons and the origin of this issue, but if you are born into one of those families of Korean descent, you are subject to groundless discrimination. There are many children who undergo such hardship. When I was in elementary and junior high school, I was in agony over my identity so much that I seriously contemplated taking my own life. I'd say discrimination against people is that tough.
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Then you might ask why I decided to go against all my relatives, including uncles and aunts, and started to use the Korean family name, Son. I wanted to become a role model for ethnic Korean children and show them that a person of Korean descent like me, who publicly uses a Korean surname, can achieve success despite various challenges. If my doing so gives a sense of hope to even just one young person or 100 of them, I believe that is a million times more effective than raising a placard and shouting, "No discrimination."
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Q: Your coming out as an ethnic Korean risked involving the rest of your family, right?
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A: I met with fierce objections from my relatives, who had hidden their real family name to live their lives in a small community. One of my relatives said, "If you come out as a Son from among us, that will expose all of us." People would start saying things like "They are ethnic Koreans" or "Your nephew is a Son, not a Yasumoto. So, you, too, are part of the kimchee clan." That's why they tried to dissuade me. But I told them: "What I will do may disturb you all, uncles and aunties. If so, you don't need to say that I am a relative of yours. Just pretend that I am not related to you."
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Q: I hope there will be more success stories like yours in Japan. What do you think is necessary for that to happen?
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A: Currently, many Japanese companies are losing confidence. They are losing out to competition and have collectively become introverted. In such circumstances, even if we are the only one, SoftBank has risen to the occasion and taken on much bigger rivals in the U.S. And if we survive ... that will create a ripple effect and inspire even one company or 10 companies. I think that's a form of social contribution.
Son speaks before an audience. The slogan in the background says, "Challenge yourself and new horizons will emerge."
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Not just us, but Mr. Tadashi Yanai (chairman and president of Fast Retailing) and Mr. Shigenobu Nagamori (chairman and president of Nidec), and Rakuten, DeNA and other companies are working hard to challenge themselves. If young business leaders can set a couple of successful precedents, that could give a much-needed boost and help revive the Japanese economy.
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While it is important to oppose a move toward widening the wealth gap and put in place a social safety net, I think there is no need to stand in the way of other people's success. It is unnecessary to gang up and lash out at those who are successful. Successful people can serve as a light of hope for others. Personally, I think it is important to create a society where we can praise success and successful people. That will help keep alive Japanese dreams and create Japanese heroes.