On August 28th, the New York Times published an article about the emergence of a right wing citizens movement clumsily named, “Citizens Group That Will Not Forgive Special Privileges for Koreans in Japan.” Known as Zaitokukai (abbreviated name) by its Japanese members, this organization is dubbed by its founder, Sakurai Makoto (not his real name), as a Japanese Tea Party-like movement. The article relates the recent incident in which members of the Zaitokukai protested outside an elementary school for ethnic Korean Japanese in Kyoto where threatening language and anti-Korean verbal assaults were blasted at absurd levels through megaphones. The incident resulted in students and teachers alike cowering in fear of physical violence being directed at them by the Zaitokukai members outside their school. The incident got so out of hand that polices officers had to arrive on the scene to prevent the forced entry by these protesters into the school building.
The Zaitokukai are different than many traditional right wing organizations. Presently there seem to be no connections to the Yakuza (Japan’s organized crime syndicates) which have traditionally enjoyed being the scions of guarding Japan’s national character against the threat of all “bad foreign influences.” Instead, Zaitokukai’s founder, Sakurai Makoto, is an unassuming white collar worker in Tokyo who works out of a small office rented in the Tokyo electronics district of Akihabara. Sakurai claims that he feels angered by what he perceives as the general degradation in Japanese morals, national strength, and demographic cohesion. These problems are suggested as being symptoms of a China-US conspiracy to critically weaken the economic and military strength of the Japanese state as well as the result of increased immigration of Chinese, South Asians, South Americans, and the continued presence of Japan’s large ethnic Korean minority. But, perhaps unique among the usual suspects of xenophobic intolerance found in Sakurai’s movement is the firmly anti-Western sentiment which is often absent among many right wing groups in Japan.
Zaitokukai includes many young Japanese workers who have been laid of from their contract worker positions. In the last two years, large numbers of Japanese contract workers have found themselves to be the first among the Japanese work force to face the cost cutting axe as the world financial crisis weakened an already recessionary sick Japanese economy. Up to a third or more of Japanese workers are now temporary or contract workers; job security, once the vaunted pillar of Japan workplace, is now no longer something that anyone considers as a given in today’s economy. While many Japanese have been laid off, even more foreign workers have lost their jobs. But, just as in the US where hard economic times have set off anti-immigrant rage under the perception that American jobs are being stolen by foreign workers, the same “outrage” seems to be being stoked by the Zaitokukai.
The question whether or not the Zaitokukai have a point needs to be asked in this case. Taking into consideration that all labor statistics indicate an only greater precipitous rise in the need for workers in the coming years as the present baby boomer generation retires, the fears which are underpinning Zaitokukai’s xenophobic fear mongering have little substance in economic reality for long term. At the moment, the job market has become tight, but the many jobs that immigrants do are often not in direct competition with the Japanese workforce. While it is true that in the case of certain manufacturing jobs immigrant labor has replaced former Japanese held jobs, many of these jobs in general are considered to be ones which are dangerous and not appealing for Japanese laborers. Few Japanese want to work in farms in rural Japan, and many Japanese do not want to do “the three D jobs”: the dangerous, dirty, and difficult jobs which many unskilled and immigrant laborers are hired out to perform in Japan‘s factories. In the coming years the as Japanese economy exits from its long recession, there will be a new giant demand for labor caused by the departure of millions retiring Japanese baby boomers from the work force. But, because there will be such a great need for workers, one should not be surprised to see a great influx of more foreign workers to fill up jobs which there will not be enough native Japanese to fill. Consequently, I do not foresee a stop to xenophobic groups, because the debate about foreigners and jobs, is not one as much about economics as it is about the character of Japanese identity for the coming future.
What is particularly troubling about this organization’s existence is that its main reason for political activity is to head off the internationalization of Japan. In other words, this is the first vocal round shot in the coming political war within Japan over the future of demographics which will consume Japan increasingly more as Japan grays and more foreign workers and their families enter Japan in ever larger numbers. That the first round has been shot by the far right and not by citizen groups promoting integration and a level headed national debate is worrying because it indicates that there is potentially not enough organizational cohesion on the side of pro-immigration citizen groups within Japan.
Sakurai’s ideology is not particularly stunning or new when viewed in the context of Japan’s long tradition of xenophobic nationalist groups. These groups have existed largely since the fallout of the American Commodore Perry’s arrival in 1853 and had their ideology first truly formulated in a coherent fashion under the Mito Domain School of political thought which promoted the concept of Sonno Joi, or “Revere the Emperor and Expel the Barbarians," as the main battle cry for all true Japanese patriots of the waning days of Tokugawa Japan.
There has been a long history of right wing groups in Japan before and after World War II. In fact, if one were to look at the international and domestic political history of Japan from the 1870s onwards, one would see that these groups have consistently been tied formally and informally to the Japanese state. In their heyday, right wing groups had as many as perhaps 600,000 members during Japan’s postwar period. But since the 1960s these numbers have continued to drop, and there is no reason to think that this movement, which is fundamentally different in character than these past groups, represents a sudden revival of right wing groups across the nation. Traditional rightwing groups were often militant, and had a leader who was usually a skilled teacher of kendo or another Japanese martial art. These groups often were not interested in going out in protesting but instead were keen on fighting with labor and teacher union members, Japanese Communist Party members, as well as left wing student groups across the nation. Zaitokukai, for all of its inflaming rhetoric and behavior has yet to demonstrate that it is in any way in the vain of these older right wing nationalist groups.
What makes Zaitokukai different from the normal right wing nationalist groups is that it is organized in a much more grassroots manner than the typical nationalist group that tends to be small and rides around in black vans blaring out old martial music and political rants on megaphones. In the case of Zaitokukai, because its members are more typical white collar men albeit very conservative young citizens, the methods of traditional political protest demonstrations seem to be their preferred avenue for political action.
According to the Times article, Zaitokukai has about 9,000 members across Japan. It is hard to tell just how well organized the group is and how capable they are at fielding their numbers in sizable groups, or if most of their activities are done by local chapters. While Sakurai may enjoy likening his group to the Tea Party movement, and in terms of ideology he is perhaps vindicated in making this comparison, Sakurai’s group in its two years of existence has not caught on among Japanese citizens at any comparable level as the Tea Party movement has across the much larger United States. Although Japan at one time experienced a proliferation of political citizens groups of equal fervor as those found in the US, these groups mainly died out by the early 1970s as economic prosperity and consumer society values subdued many Japanese into political complicity. Certainly the times in Japan again are those of political and economic instability as Japan flounders in a 20 year long recession. But as of now, there still is no evidence that large numbers of Japanese are preparing to leave theirs homes and participate in leftist movements, let alone highly controversial and conservative movements such as that of Zaitokukai
