The Jewish Protocols for World Domination, written under the pseudonym, Jacob Morgan. The newspaper defended its publishing the ad unapologetically and other major newspapers have run similar ads. It is puzzling that Japan, which has limited experience with Western religion and only a thousand or so Jewish residents, should be so obsessed with Jews. Goodman and Miyazawa offer a convincing and well documented explanation. They argue that Japanese scapegoating, as well as an often expressed admiration for Jews, is an outgrowth of insecurities caused by economic modernization and competition with the West.
Japan has a long history of beliefs that foreign religions seek to undermine Japan.
In the 19th century Tokugawa Japan developed an anti-Christian thesis that Japan was threatened by an occult religious conspiracy to undermine Japan spiritually and conquer it along with the rest of the world, partly through trade and finance. Early negative Japanese views of Jews were shaped in part by intense exposure to The Merchant of Venice, by far the most widely performed play by Shakespeare. It appealed to the Japanese anxiety about its own new commercial culture and about Japanese ethnic identity, under attack from racist treatment by Western nations. The earlier anti-Christian conspiracy theory was transferred onto the Jews as a result of the introduction of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion to Japan in the 1920s. Much of the development of Japanese anti-Semitic arguments from The Protocols was done by various Japanese Christians, among them Higuchi Tsuyanaosuke, a graduate of the Russian Orthodox Nikolai Seminary in Tokyo, and Sakai Katsuisa and Nakada Joi, who studied at the Moody Bible Institute in the United States.