From: pierce@lanai.cs.ucla.edu (Brad Pierce)
Subject: "Hysterical Anti-Semitism" in Japanese tabloids
Organization: UCLA, Computer Science Department
Date: Sun, 3 Jan 93 23:09:56 GMT

Reprinted *without* permission from Los Angeles Times, Opinion Section,
Sunday, January 3, 1993, pp. M1, M6:
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Rant of Japan's Tabloids: Hysterical Anti-Semitism

Public opinion: The papers incessantly portray Clinton's victory as a
Jewish conspiracy, and the man-on-the-street [sic] seems too quick to
believe.

by David Williams

{David Williams, who taught Japanese government at Oxford in 1990-91,
is the author of "Japan: Beyond the End of History," to be published
this year.}

Americans and Japanese have not learned to hate each other since the
mid-1980s, but it has not been for lack of trying. U.S.-Japan relations
have lurched from one spasm of mutual irritation to another because
policy-makers and opinion leaders on both sides of the Pacific have
refused to think through the fundamental interests and needs of the
world's two largest economies.

There has been a surrender to cant and coarseness in both nations. The
doubtful joke that the only Japanese who regrets George Bush's defeat
is Prime Minister Kiichi Miyazawa's dry cleaner captures the new
chauvinist silliness.

Malevolence lies in the shadows of such silliness. "In many ways the
Japanese are wonderful people. They're hard-working, intelligent and
humorous. They have real integrity. But they are also the most racist
people on the planet." Thus speaks the only Japan hand in Michael
Crichton's best-selling novel "Rising Sun." The compliments merely
gift-wrap the nasty conclusion.

To this tawdry scene, Japan's sensation-mongering tabloids would add
fresh poison: hysterical anti-Semitism.

Since the Democratic Party convention last summer, hardly a week has
passed when one or more of Japan's tabloid weeklies have not carried an
article attacking Bill Clinton. Before the November election, this
reflected a preference for the "devil one knows" (Bush) rather than
Japan-bashing Democrats.

Now, a select group of Japanese editors and commentators charges that
Clinton's road to the White House has been paved by a conspiracy of
American Jewish political interests, world Jewish capital and Zionist
opinion leaders orchestrated from Tel Aviv.

A December issue of Shukan Gendai (Contemporary Weekly) carried the
cover story "President-elect Clinton's 'Jewish Strategy' towards
Japan.'" The six-page article declared that this is "the truth about
America that Japan's quality newspapers will not report."

Across two pages, the article's headline shouts, "Jewish capital that
pulls the strings in the Clinton Administration and its frightening
plans for Japan." The article asserts that "Jewish capital has
powerfully penetrated the new Administration. It has placed many of its
people in high places. . . . To mince no words, their goal is to
disguise America's troubles by attacking Japan, to exploit the
U.S.-Japan security pact to fetter this country, and, on the domestic
front, to shift blame for America's economic failure onto a Japanese
shoulders."

The unnamed Japanese author quotes the former head of the America-Israel
Political Action Committee, who was apparently insisting even before
the election that his group "was negotiating with Mr. Clinton over who
was to be named as the new secretary of state and national-security
adviser to the President."

According to Masatake Takahashi, one of Japan's legion of
self-proclaimed foreign-policy experts, the final ambition of the
"Zionists" is "to throw Japanese society into disorder." The article
claims that the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, the North
American Free Trade Agreement and Congress' anti-Japanese trade
measures are all weapons in the war. It even hints that Super 301
legislation, which permits Washington to impose tariffs of up to 100%
on imports from countries with closed markets, may be applied by the
Clinton Administration against China to prevent Japanese investors from
capturing too much of this huge market while America and China quarrel
over human rights.

For most readers, the flood of anti-Jewish writings that has poured
forth from Japanese publishing houses since the mid-1980s is just
*yomi-mono* (chewing gum for the eyes). Is this not the same taste for
chilling conspiracies that encourages Americans to read "Rising Sun" or
"The Enigma of Japanese Power"?

But such hopeful skepticism understates the degree to which
anti-Semitism, first lighted by the high-yen recession of the mid-1980s
and now reignited by Japan's post-bubble business downturn, is becoming
a whole climate of opinion. What else is one to conclude when a tabloid
sports newspaper warns that a popular Japanese pro wrestler is "the
target of Jewish capital" or a serious news magazine asserts that the
plot of a Woody Allen comedy turns on Jewish domination of American
radio broadcasting?

Japan-U.S. relations will not prosper while thousands of Japanese
readers snatch up books such as Ryu Ohta's "The Global Strategy of the
Seven Great Jewish Zaibatsu" or Go Akamas's "The Jewish-Christian
Conspiracy" or Masami Uno's "Understand the Jews and You'll Understand
Japan."

Uno's best seller appeared during the high-yen recession with the
subtitle, "As the time approaches when a hollowed out Japan will be at
the mercy of the Jews." Uno charges that the 1985 Plaza Accord aimed
not to correct America's trade balance with Japan but to gut Japanese
manufacturing.

But where Americans and Europeans rejoice in the curbing of prejudice
in the Western mass media since 1945, some Japanese see an attempt to
prevent their media from defending their economy against Jewish
manipulation.

The gap between U.S. and Japanese perceptions couldn't be wider. The
fact that Japan is not an heir to the humanizing influence of the
Renaissance and Enlightenment may explain why Japanese critics of
anti-Semitism are so few.

True, this terrible gap in perception has not prevented the Japanese
government from recently urging Arab states to ease their boycotts of
Israel. Indeed, official relations between Israel and the Japanese
Establishment have never been warmer.

But it is the opinion of the man-in-the-street that is the worry. When
Japan's anti-boycott call appeared, the manager of the local Korean
restaurant in my Tokyo suburb felt he knew me well enough to ask if it
were true that Clinton was the pawn of Jewish interests.

Americans, however, will never command the moral high ground on this
question as long as we continue to buy, quote and celebrate
conspiratorial books that tremble on the edge of racial defamation.
Chauvinism already tempts too many of our most influential commentators
on Japan.

In 1928, the French write Julien Benda, one of the most humane voices
of our century, concluded that "our age is the age of the intellectual
organization of political hatreds. It will be one of its chief claims
to notice in the moral history of mankind." A blood-drenched nightmare
stands between us and Benda's grim prophecy. Have Japan and America
learned nothing from it?

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