New Dissent in Japan Is Loudly Anti-Foreign - Founder Modeled after Tea Party

[RamboLiberal]

KYOTO, Japan — 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.

Inside, the panicked students and teachers huddled in their classrooms, singing loudly to drown out the insults, as parents and eventually police officers blocked the protesters’ entry.

The December episode was the first in a series of demonstrations at the Kyoto No. 1 Korean Elementary School that shocked conflict-averse Japan, where even political protesters on the radical fringes are expected to avoid embroiling regular citizens, much less children. Responding to public outrage, the police arrested four of the protesters this month on charges of damaging the school’s reputation.

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Since first appearing last year, their protests have been directed at not only Japan’s half million ethnic Koreans, but also Chinese and other Asian workers, Christian churchgoers and even Westerners in Halloween costumes. In the latter case, a few dozen angrily shouting demonstrators followed around revelers waving placards that said, “This is not a white country.”

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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.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/29/world/asia/29japan.html?src=me


Tyler Sipe for The New York Times
An armband worn by a member of the Japanese group Zaitokukai. The red characters say “The Volunteer Corps Against Lawless Koreans”; the black characters say “Expel barbarians.

Now there never has been any lovelost between Japanese & Koreans, but still amazing how this hatred is rekindled & the founder of this bunch of Japanese KKK looked to the Tea Party for inspiration. Damn are we reliving some part of the 1930's?

[proteus_lives]

1. Not a new thing. The Japanese have always treated the Koreans like dirt.

[RamboLiberal]

2. We have also been anti-black and anti-Mexican

along with a number of other minorities of the day. Still this is 2010.

Believe me having studied Korean martial arts for 25+ years under a Korean martial arts master I'm well aware of the history of Japan and Korea and the Japanese consquest and subjugation of Korea.

[Lightning Count]

3. Not remotely similar.

Xenophobia and Japan are practically synonymous. Their population for the most part is homogeneous.