TBS has predictably claimed it was an accident, saying the photo was just laying around the prop room and intended to be used in another program. Abe spoke to the issue in a recent press conference that he was surprised and that he wants to believe it is much ado about nothing. This is not the first time that TBS has been implicated in “subliminal” broadcasting. In May of 1995, the Ministry of Posts and Telecommunications severely reprimanded the network for repeatedly interspersing split-second edits of the image of Aum cult leader Shoko Asahara during unrelated parts of a documentary piece about the cult. (There’s much more to TBS’s relationship with Aum — this is a good place to start.)

Ostensibly there is no relationship between Abe and the 731 unit that was being reported on, although the way that Japanese politics works, figures in power past and present can all be linked in much less than six degrees of separation. Just as the tip of the iceberg of these connections, chew on this:

Abe’s grandfather Nobusuke Kishi was a former Class A war criminal (never tried) who later became Prime Minister (1957-60). Kishi served his time for war crimes with Yoshio Kodama and Ryoichi Sasakawa. All three were involved with some shady goings-on in China before and during the war such as ammunitions and drug trading (Kodama and Sasakawa amassing large “war chests” in the process), and all three were released by the Americans for political reasons (ie. to help in the anti-communist fight). Kishi himself organized slave labor as part of his responsibility for “industrial development” in Manchuria. I don’t know if there is any evidence linking Kishi with Unit 731, which operated in Manchuria, but given that his was a leading member of the “Manchurian Clique” which included Hideki Tojo, it’s suspected that he at least knew of its existence.

I mention Sasakawa because later, around 1963, he became an important advisor of Reverend Sun Myung Moon and the Unification Church (aka “Moonies”) in Japan. Kishi himself was sympathetic to Moon and offered glowing tributes to him and his followers in the press at a time in the late 60′s when Moon was trying to get a foothold for his organization (er, church) in Japan. (Here’s a photo of the two.) In fact, the Japan headquarters for the Unification Church was built on land in Tokyo that had once been owned by Kishi (source). As reported on some blogs in June, this YouTube video shows two Unification Church wedding ceremony events in May to which Shinzo Abe apparently sent congratulatory telegrams (note that he is referred to by the speaker, Katsumi Otsuka, President of the Family Federation of World Peace and Unification in Japan, as Nobusuke Kishi’s grandson in addition to his Chief Cabinet Secretary title). (Just for the record, there are lots of other Japanese politicians — just as there are not a few American politicians — that have been involved in some way with the Unification Church, including Abe’s father Shintaro Abe and the current opposition Democratic Party of Japan leader Ichiro Ozawa.)

(If you are interested in more Unification Church connections, here’s perhaps a somewhat obscure one but rather curious as well. In this YouTube video clip, you can see the same Katsumi Otsuka who was presiding over the wedding ceremonies in the other YouTube video here opening a meeting of the UPF (Universal Peace Federation) Rally for the Restoration of the Homeland held in Yokohama (this year?). What’s interesting about this clip is that one of the dignitaries introduced is one Tadashi Kobayashi, Chairman of the Japanese Society for History Textbook Reform (Wikipedia link), a group that authored a controversial revisionist textbook on Japanese history that was published last year, and which predictably drew the ire of South Korea and China. The clip ends with some dignitaries, including the aforementioned Kobayashi, on stage being blessed rather strangely by two Koreans. Anyone know more about this?)

Not surprisingly, TBS was the only TV network I know of that ran a story about the Abe/Unification Church connection. I say not surprisingly because TBS has often been linked to Soka Gakkai, a Buddhist organization (cult?) that is rather powerful here in Japan, and therefore perhaps a media outfit with some sort of axe to grind against the Unification Church and Abe.

Maybe I’m just going through a bad patch of blog-surfing (not helped by the inherent inter-linking among sympatico sites), but there does seem to be something that’s gathering a bit of momentum here. What’s particularly of note here is that, contrary to what you might be thinking, this chatter I’m referring to is going on at English-language sites, sites maintained not by Koreans or Japanese but by foreign residents living in South Korea and Japan.

I suppose I should be grateful I don’t read 2channel (the most popular discussion forum/site here in Japan — see Wikipedia’s 2channel entry here which mentions the site’s relationship with things Korean) or whatever the equivalent is in South Korea, sites where I’m sure there’s more flaming and epithet-throwing than reasoned discussion. And I want to be clear that the discussions I’m referring to on these blogs are, as far as I’ve seen, free of racist remarks and for the most part lacking in extremist rhetoric. Rather what I’m seeing is a growing tendency to harp on the many manifestations of Korean pride — much of which, to be fair, does leave itself open to being mocked or derided (to wit, the South Korean reaction to their exit from the recent World Cup) — to the point where you start to ask whether the blogger is simply calling it as he/she sees it or whether there’s an additional axe to grind.

Much more disturbing than poking fun at Korean pride, however, is a distinct streak of historical revisionsism that I’ve been coming across lately. The site that seems to have formed the locus of many of these opinions is Occidentalism, maintained by an Australian living in South Korea [see comments]. The main writer, Matt (he seems to have recently opened up his blog to other contributors), claims in the FAQ to “tell the other side of the story, the one that the Korean media ignores or covers up or distorts,” and that his site’s purpose is to “oppos(e) Korean hate and extremism.” Not being privy to Korean mainstream media or having any idea what it’s like to live in Korea, it’s not for me to say whether there’s a legitimate beef here or not, though given that I do have some experience as a person living in a foreign land, I can certainly sympathize with his apparent frustration that the local populace doesn’t have the means — or the inclination — to seek a wider picture.

Nevertheless, there’s still something slightly repugnant about this site that I’m trying to put my finger on. If we look at the above-mentioned FAQ, he gives his answers to questions and comments which are all more or less the same, i.e. “This is a racist site.” or “Why are you anti-Korean?” (These may are in fact be actual emails/comments his blog has received or he may have made them up, who knows. [again, see comments]) His answers themselves could be boiled down to a single response, which is basically that “This site exists to provide balance.” and that “Anyway, I have my opinion. If you disagree, thats fine.” (Nevermind that on the same page he writes, “What is written on this site is true. You wont find many judgements from me unless there is plenty of reason to do it.”)

The FAQ is a kind of rhetorical conceit that plays on the idea that the site and its author can’t possibly be racist or anti-Korean because rather than ignore the complaints and abuse he’s received, he publishes it and answers his critics. I don’t mean to imply that the site is racist or anti-Korean (again, I don’t have the sufficient background to make a judgment), merely pointing out that his defensive posture as seen in the FAQ and the site as a whole seems to have pulled a page out of the book written by Little Green Footballs or Rush Limbaugh. (It wasn’t surprising that one non-Korea-related post on the site that I did come across was about that tired old bugaboo “political correctness.”)

The recurrent themes of Occidentalism (the site started about a year ago, here’s the first post) in a nutshell seem to be a) Koreans are still to this day using fake, doctored atrocity photos to drum up anti-Japanese hatred (see posts here, here and here); b) the whole issue of “comfort women” has been vastly inflated or distorted (no specific posts but see the end of this post plus various comments littered throughout the site); c) Koreans were not forced to serve in the Japan Imperial Army or as workers for Japan’s industrial giants, but rather volunteered (here and again in various comments); and d) that Japan’s occupation of Korea was not nearly as brutal as Koreans today make it out to be, that such policies as forcing Koreans to adopt Japanese names or banning Hangul didn’t happen, and that the developed South Korea of today owes a big debt to the colonization of Korea by Japan (see here, here, and here).

Not surprisingly, folks who take the time to comment in with opposing viewpoints are invariably shot down by Matt or by readers who share his opinions. It was more than a few times that I came across comments along the lines of “you must be Korean,” and in general the comments section takes on the feel of Limbaugh-esqe talk-radio where dissenters are either patronized or simply shouted down. As with most bullying blowhards with a pulpit, the site’s writers and serial commenters can usually run rhetorical circles around most any opposing viewpoint, and waste no chance in doing so (so much for that “Anyway, I have my opinion. If you disagree, thats fine.” part of the FAQ). (This thread, with Matt as predictable apologist for Japanese Prime Minister Koizumi’s visits to Yasukuni Shrine and contending that Korea has no legitimate reason to oppose them, is indicative of the kind of combative, unbalanced discourse one can expect at the site. Good luck making it through all 188 coments, though.) Given how these “discussions” usually work, the folks with the minority view who feel compelled to post will sooner or later either give up, or become increasingly frustrated and hysterical, like lambs before the slaughter.

Now again, it may be that all of what’s on this site is true and not merely historical revisionism. It may well be that the majority of South Koreans are brainwashed to a point that precludes reasonable discussion. It may be that Korea was an “ally” of Japan and not a colony, and that all these tales of forced labor, comfort women, and oppression have all been exaggerated by South Korea. As I’ve said a couple of times, who am I to say, never having been to South Korea myself, exposed to the media and mainstream thought there, and quite frankly, not very educated about the whole of Japan and Korea’s historical relationship. But sorry, I’m not buying.

Ordinarily I would welcome such a site that attempts to correct an inbalance, and expose lies and half-truths. And I would love to find a site that helped me create an informed, fair perspective on the Korean-Japan relationship. But the reactionary, revisionist, speak-louder-than-anyone-else tone tells me that Occidentalism isn’t the site I’m looking for. They would have you believe that South Korea is Andersen’s Emperor without any clothes on, but as I see it, it is they who are wearing the Emperor’s new clothes.

This past week there were two big meat-related stories of big importance in Japan, and elsewhere, related to whaling and the resumption of US beef imports. As someone who doesn’t eat beef nor whale meat, it would seem that neither of these stories would hold much interest to me, but of course there’s a lot more than meats the eye here.

Last week, employing a bribery strategy, Japan was able to buy enough votes to pass a “declaration” that said that the International Whaling Commission’s whaling moratorium was “no longer necessary.” It was a symbolic victory, having no immediate effect other than to perhaps soothe the wounds of a country that likes to view itself as the victim of a Western environmental bias that has no respect for Japanese cultural traditions. That’s the way the story is spun, at any rate. But as there is no real popular wellspring of sentiment to bring back whaling, or to eat whale meat, save for a few “whaling communities”, you have to wonder why Japan is spending so much energy — and money — bribing countries and turning oneself into a pariah of the international community that in another breath it so desperately wants to be a part of.

Also last week, Japan agreed to resume the import of US beef after effectively banning the product for the last two-and-a-half years. With greater success than it has been able to accomplish with the whaling issue, the goverment has managed to create an environment of fear related to to US beef and BSE to such an extent that even with the ban being lifted, it will be a long while before consumers feel comfortable buying it at supermarket shelves. (Yoshinoya, on the other hand, will probably enjoy booming business for its “beef bowl.”)

But as with the whaling issue, one can’t help but feel the ruling Liberal Democratic party is being disingenuous, if not downright cynical. In point of fact, Japan had it’s own BSE problem a few years ago. In Septemer of 2001, the government announced that a dairy cow in Chiba had tested positive for BSE. However, at first they took pains to cover up the story. They then launched a campaign insisting that domestic beef was safe, before yet another cow tested postive for BSE. By this point, the domestic industry — as well as beef imports from the US and Australia — had taken a hit. The government eventually came (somewhat) clean and implemented nationwide testing, though doubts remain about how thorough they followed through on that. The government instituted beef-buyback programs in order to get domestic beef off the shelves, which also led several companies in 2002 — Nippon Meat Packers being the most prominent — to try to pass off imported beef as domestic, rather ironic given what happened a year later.

In December of 2003, the Japan government was in effect gifted the discovery of BSE in a U.S. herd in a cow imported from Canada. Japan immediately imposed a ban on US beef imports, and was able to effectively shift the public’s focus away from the safety of domestic beef. The US did itself no favors though, in refusing to implement full-scale testing. Following up on its refusal to sign on to the Kyoto Protocol, to say nothing of its imperious foreign policy in Afghanistan and Iraq, it made the perfect bad guy to let Japan off the consumer-safety hook, alleviate concerns about domestic beef, and shore up Prime Minister Koizumi’s support among rural voters (eg. folks living in places where cattle is kept and rice is grown), always the key element in ensuring the LDP’s grip on power. And it allowed Koizumi to pretend — even as he was bowing to US pressure by sending Japan’s Self Defense Forces (SDF) to Iraq — to be standing up to Japan’s big brother. Both domestic and foreign media, for their part, have bought wholesale Japan’s stance as arising solely from health-safety concerns, obliging the government’s need to paint itself as altruistic in the matter.

But now, with Koizumi more interested in a smooth exit from the Prime Minister’s office (he is stepping down in September) and a visit to Graceland with his pal Bush next week, the goverment is acquiescing to US pressure and signaling the return of US beef imports. Given the context of the US-Japan relationship in general, and Bush and Koizumi’s relationship in particular, only the naive would assume it was a coincidence that just as Japan was agreeing to resume US beef imports, Koizumi was announcing his decision to recall the ground SDF troops back from Iraq.

Although Japan has a long history of hunting whales, whale meat wasn’t really popular until the post-World War II era when it was a vital source of protein during harsh economic times. But this popularity has steadily declined over time, while the price has steadily risen (no doubt due in part to the IWC moratorium). Indications are that the general public — especially middle-aged Japanese and younger — are indifferent about whale meat. (According to the Independent, less than 1% of the population eat it regularly). And yet, consistently the government has tried to create the impression that eating whale meat is a sacrosanct part of Japanese culinary tradition.

What whale meat eating really is is a pawn in a larger nationalistic trend the LDP is only too happy to stoke (and pay for, especially to poor Caribbean countries). America and their minions in the IWC are the “culinary imperialists” trying to impinge on Japan’s sovereign right to hunt whales. There is a palpable air of don’t-tell-us-what-to-do that is not unlike how the Yasukuni Shrine problem plays out with South Korea and China. Meanwhile, like the “Koizumi is visiting the Shrine as a private citizen” loophole, Japan continues to catch hundreds of whales each year in the name of “scientific research,” which many maintain is a thinly veiled attempt to continue the supply of whale meat to high-end restaurants and supermarkets.

In both the row with America over beef, and with the continuing fight against the anti-whaling countries of the IWC, the purpose, once one gets past the rhetoric, seems the same: fostering for domestic consumption not steak or whale sashimi but rather the image of a tiny Japan not afraid to stand up to the big boys, especially the US. It’s a slightly pathetic effort, given that on just about every major issue, Japan does nothing but kowtow to its de facto protector. But biting the hand that feeds it — or at least appearing to — plays well to the masses, keeps the focus away from domestic concerns, and helps the LDP maintain its stranglehold on political power.

Further reading (not linked above):

Whaling
Japan, Feasting on Whale, Sniffs at ‘Culinary Imperialism’ of U.S., Calvin Sims, New York Times, August 10, 2000
Whaling Gone Awry, Mike Steinbaugh, November 14, 2000
Resave the whales, Clare Perry, Metropolis #637, June 9, 2006
The forces that drive Japanese whaling, BBC News, June 15, 2006
Japan’s whaling ways must end, Brenda Peterson, The Seattle Times, June 20, 2006
Japan’s whaling policy driven by resentment of the West, Gwynne Dyer, The Salt Lake Tribune, June 20, 2006

US Beef Ban
Our beef with Japan, Mindy Kotler, The Globe and Mail, Toronto, July 17, 2003
Japan officially bans imports over U.S. mad cow disease case, Joi Ito’s Web, December 28, 2003
Japanese Consumer Perceptions & Willingness to Pay for Tested Beef, Washington State University paper, October 5, 2004
Will Japanese be cowed by US beef?, Hisane Misaki, Asia Times, June 23, 2006

His political base, he said, is the 1,800 students he has taught here since 1988. He joked, “If you run into anyone around town speaking English with a Brooklyn accent, you know who taught them.”

“If I become councilman, I’m going to bust their chops,” says Bianchi, and with respect to his platform, adds,

“I am not going to do the typical foreign clown thing,” he said. “We want to get Council meetings on the Internet, broadcast on cable TV. Citizens don’t find out until things are decided.”

Buried in the article was this amusing nugget, which I think epitomizes Japanese tv:

“If I was a regular 44-year-old schoolteacher running for election, all this wouldn’t be happening,” he said, jerking his thumb toward a Japanese television crew and two reporters doing stories today about an American reporter doing a story about the American running for City Council.

…two reporters doing stories today about an American reporter doing a story about the American…

I’m not sure what I found more chilling, the article detailing the recent government report on human rights which looked at Japanese attitudes toward foreigners in Japan, or the sign depicted in this photo. Before I get to the sign, however, here’s the gist of the report:

Of the 3,000 adult Japanese who were surveyed by the Cabinet Office for the report from late January to early February of this year,

* only 30.4% “believe treating foreign residents unfairly because of their nationality is a form of discrimination.” This is down 10 percentage points from the previous survey, conducted in 1997.

* only 54% “feel the need to protect foreign residents’ human rights at the same level as the natives.” Let’s reiterate that from the other angle: 46% of those surveyed believe the rights of foreigners living in Japan don’t need to be protected at the same level that Japanese’ rights are protected. The 54% figure is down from 65% who felt this way in 1997.

* 21.8% “believe foreigners should accept the fact that they do not have equal rights as Japanese.” 18.5% believed the same thing in 1997.

You’d have to be a pretty clueless foreigner not to realize that Japan is not the most hospitable country to its non-native residents, but nevertheless these figures really took me aback. Oh, and why the dramatic drop in Japanese attitudes towards foreigners? That old bugaboo, foreigner crime.

A Cabinet Office spokesman blamed the soaring crime rate for the public’s apparent lack of concern for their foreign guests. “The increase in the number of crimes committed by foreign nationals could be behind these figures,” the spokesman said.

Which leads me to the photo that accompanied the article and which I’ve reproduced here. The sign depicted, from Tokyo’s Nakano Ward, reads in Japanese:

chuui! rainichi furyou gaikokujin ni yoru, hittakuri jiken ga tapatsu

Which translates roughly to:

Be careful! Purse snatchings by foreign delinquents (hooligans) coming to Japan are occurring frequently.

A slightly clearer image of the same sign is available here. I found this link at The Community, an advocacy group “concerned about the treatment of non-Japanese in Japan.” This group was started by the well-known foreigners rights advocate — and now Japanese citizen — Arudou Debito. The Community site has a whole page about various signs put up by the Nakano City Police, and attempts to talk with city leaders about the misleading signs. Debito also has uploaded the text to two separate articles that appeared in the Asahi Shinbun last December about “foreigner crime” in Tokyo and whether or not there is really any substance to this oft-used bogeyman.

It’s funny, M commented on my post about signs for local dog owners that perhaps the Japanese who stare at me while I’m out walking the dog are thinking I stole the dog, and it made me chuckle. Seeing these signs, and reading the depressing results of this Cabinet Office survey, I’m not exactly laughing at the moment.

I wasn’t laughing too a couple of months ago when I was getting my hair cut, and I had to sit quietly and listen while my hairdresser went on and on about how America has so much crime because they allow all those immigrants in, and how Japan now has the same problem. My Japanese wasn’t good enough to refute her skewed perspective, nor give her a piece of my mind (probably a good thing!), but I did manage to tell her that my mother was one of those immigrants to America that she was referring to, which at least got her to shut up. I wonder if Kaika will ever have to invoke his father similarly, years from now.

Bringing back the advertising theme, the above poster is an ad for Japan’s New Komeito political party, found just around the corner from the house. The copy at the top of the ad reads majime ni hataraku hito ga mukuwareru shakai o, the exact nuance of which escapes me but perhaps something along the lines of “society will reap the benefits of hardworking people.” The tag line overlayed on top of the slice of bread reads seikatsu yotou, koumeito. yotou is the Japanese word for the “ruling government party,” and seikatsu means “life,” as in daily life (koumeito is of course the name of the party). Honestly I’m not sure how that is supposed to be construed (eg. something like “ruling party of everyday life people”), but like all advertisements, I suppose it’s a bit open-ended at any rate.

The origins of the New Komeito party go back to 1964, but in its current form, the party only dates from 1998. Japan’s 3rd largest political party, it has been a member of the ruling coalition goverment since 1999, with currently 54 seats in the Diet. It is led by Chief Representative Takenori Kanzaki, who is pictured in the lower left of the poster. The newly revamped website has a fair amount of information in English about the party’s history and platform. On the surface of it, sounds like a party I’d be interested in supporting. Oh yeah, forgot I had no voting rights in this country.

Because so much fish is being caught and sold within Japan, there are environmental concerns at stake:

[U]ncontrolled and unsupervised fishing is causing immense environmental damage in these fragile northern waters, threatening to wipe out whole species of fish. [...] “We have to think about the amount of sushi being eaten,” says Isamu Abe, a senior official at the Japanese Fisheries Association in Tokyo, one of the most powerful players in the global seafood trade. “It can’t go on like this. It shouldn’t.”

In addition to organized crime, it should come as no surprise to anyone following this year’s myriad corporate scandals involving Japanese food companies (Snow Brand Foods and Nippon Ham are just two such examples) that large Japanese corporations are being implicated in the fish smuggling business as well:

Although foreign governments have long pushed Tokyo to crack down on this trade, a number of factors have prompted successive Japanese governments to drag their feet. To begin with, illegal imports suppress retail prices in Japan by almost a third–no small matter in the world’s costliest nation. Also, some of Japan’s biggest companies have profited from illegal fishing. In 1999, for instance, the giant trading firm Mitsubishi Corp.–which accounts for 30% of all Japanese tuna imports–publicly admitted handling illegally caught tuna.

The article also poignantly examines the effects any cleanup of the illegal fishing trade would have on Hokkaido.

Last week the Japanese government and the Bank of Japan announced that it would introduce three new currency bills into circulation in fiscal year 2004. The new 1,000-, 5,000-, and 10,000-yen bills are the first new currency designs in roughly 20 years.

Ostensibly the bills are being introduced in an effort to thwart counterfeiting, and will, according to Dow Jones, make use of state of the art printing techniques such as “holograms, advanced bar-coding and pearl ink – used to print semitransparent patterns that shift when viewed from different angles” to foil would-be counterfeiters.

There can be no denying as well that the government hopes the new issuance might give Japan’s moribund economy a shot in the arm. From a Daily Yomiuri article,

The government and central bank announcement raised expectations it would have a positive impact on the economy, since vending machines, bank ATMs, ticket machines and other machines that accept banknotes must be modified to handle the new bills, thus leading to more business.

Dai-Ichi Life Research Institute Inc. estimates that about 960 billion yen will be spent in the coming two years on such upgrades, pushing up the gross domestic product by about 0.1 percent.

Indeed, Finance Minister Masajuro Shiokawa was quoted as saying the new bills would “brighten the mood” among Japanese consumers. Whatever boost does result, it will not come cheaply. From a sampling in the Daily Yomiuri article of various costs involved, printing the actual yen notes will cost 317 billion yen; modifying ATM machines will cost 330 billion yen; and upgrading vending machines will run about 312 billion yen.

An intriguing angle to the story regards the personages chosen to grace the new 1,000- and 5,000-yen notes, which will feature Hideo Noguchi and Ichiyo Higuchi respectively. Noguchi was a microbiologist who isolated the cause of syphilis. Higuchi, shown in the image accompanying this post in a prototype of the 5,000 bill, was a Meiji-era novelist and poet who died of tuberculosis at only 24 years of age. She will be the first woman to grace the front of a Japanese banknote.

The Asahi Shimbun recently delved into the irony of choosing these two figures to grace the new money, given that both came from poverty-stricken backgrounds where by necessity they piled up many debts. Regarding Higuchi, “[i]n her desperate quest for money, she made requests for loans even to people she was not acquainted with.” According to Asahi’s article, Noguchi does’t come off much better: “[He] was loose with money. He would ask his friends and relatives for loans, spend the money quickly and go back to them for more, apparently with no intention of paying them back.”

Naturally the goverment spun the choice of these two a different way. According to Finance Minister Shiokawa, Higuchi and Noguchi were chosen out of consideration for gender equality, “as pioneers of modernization” and because they had “difficult-to-counterfeit faces.”

The 10,000-yen note, though part of the anti-forgery printing plans, will not be getting a new personage gracing its front. Speculates the Asahi Shimbun,

What is a bit worrisome is that the portrait of Yukichi Fukuzawa, a prominent author and educator of the Meiji Era (1868-1912), will be retained on the 10,000-yen bill, although the bill will be redesigned like the notes of lower denominations. The retention of Fukuzawa, who founded Keio University, could feed speculation that it may have resulted from close ties between two Keio alumni – Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi and Finance Minister Masajuro Shiokawa.

An interesting story at the New York Times about the various right-wing (or uyoku in Japanese) sound trucks that ply their message at near-deafening levels in the streets of Tokyo (and I’m assuming, in other major Japanese cities as well). The article puts forth the suspicion on the
part of some that the groups that these trucks belong to, which appear so fringe and dismissed, actually enjoy quite cozy relations with the police, and perhaps with the ruling Liberal Democratic Party as well.

Former far-rightists, retired policemen and historians say [...] that they are not just noisy pressure groups. These observers contend that many of the nationalists disturb the peace and intimidate people freely because of their deep ties to the country’s conservative political elite.

Those who have studied them say that they are useful in bullying opponents of the long-governing, and conservative, Liberal Democratic Party and that many of them are actually members of criminal gangs that use their influence and protection to practice extortion.

Regarding the supposed conspiracy the Italians were quick to claim, my wife found a Japanese site yesterday that puts forward the intriguing claim that a Korean fan with a laser pointer was trying to mess with the Italians’ heads. So far I’ve found nowhere else that has picked up on this other than my favorite World Cup blog, whom I sent the item to last night. There’s a mpeg video (1.27MB) of one point in the match in particular where Italian Francesco Totti grabs his face in pain for no apparent reason. The video is inconclusive (to say the least) as to whether a dastardly laser pointer was to blame, and frankly what I think it shows is Totti’s attempt to draw a foul when no foul has been committed (as he later now infamously did later in the match which resulted in him being sent off). Nevertheless these kind of “only on the Internet” stories fascinate me.

More interesting is that despite the “lets go Korea” in the above site’s URL, it isn’t a fan site for the Korean team but rather a site that attempts to take down what its author views as the overbearing pride and nationalism of the Korean side. This should make the laser pointer claims that much more suspect, but it also points up what is emerging as a recurrent theme during this World Cup, which is the competition between the two host nations. It was inevitable that having two countries with a history of occupation and deep-seeded animosity host the mondial would lead to a “who’s a better host” competition off the field and a “who can field a better team” competition on the field. When Japan was eliminated earlier on Tuesday, the crowd of fans that had gathered in one of Seoul’s major squares to watch the later Korea-Italy match cheered. And no doubt having made it through to the quarterfinals when Japan didn’t played no small part in the Korean celebrations of Tuesday night.

For all of Japanese enthusiasm for this World Cup, it’s unimaginable that the fans that had tickets to the Japan-Turkey match would have shown up in identical blue t-shirts the way that 40,000 Koreans did (in red t-shirts). Or that Japan organizers would distribute white placards on seats before the match so that fans could later spell out messages to the Turkey side, like South Korea did when fans spelled out “Again 1966″, a reference to the upset of Italy by North Korea in the 1966 World Cup. Or that Japanese fans would hang banners that read “Welcome to Your Tomb” like the “Welcome to Azzuri’s Tomb” banner the Koreans hung. Or that the Japanese would hang banners proclaiming that Japan would beat Turkey 5-0 as the Koreans did. To say nothing of the “Porta Dell’ Inferno!!! Fossa Dei Giganti” (“Gates of Hell! Grave of the Giants”) messages in Italian above the “Corea 5 : 0 Italy”. (I note that “Fossa” also happens to be the name of Italian captain Paolo Maldini’s wife).

And what to make of Korea spelled with a C in the various banners and in all those red scarves that seemingly every Korean fan had? Well, not surprisingly this is how the Italian language spells Korea. But it goes deeper than that, and takes us back to the notion that in some ways beating Japan in the hosting competition is as important as beating Italy or advancing to the quarterfinals. According to this site, the spelling of the country’s name with a K is a vestige of Japan’s annexation of Korea in the early 1900′s, when Japan couldn’t accept it’s colony coming alphabetically first in the parade of nations.

Japan is still coming to grips with its Imperialist past, and except for some very fringe and vastly ignored extreme right-wing groups, overt displays of nationalism are anathema to most Japanese. Therefore if Japan had beat Turkey, or Italy or anyone for that matter, it’s highly unlikely that Miyagi statium would have seen even 1/10th of the emotion and pride and nationalism that was on display in South Korea. This reserve has it’s flipside in sites like the “let’s go Korea” one, where envy of the Korean’s pride mixes with distaste for what many Japanese see as a country that can’t get over itself or it’s various grudges big and small (witness Ahn Jung-Hwan’s speed-skating dance during the South Korea-US match).

Again, none of this is surprising given the two country’s history and Korea’s perennial underdog status, both on the pitch and in geopolitics. Right from the get-go of the opening night ceremonies was the off-the-field competition engaged, when in a bit of psychological projection the Koreans exaggerated the “rising sun” of the Japanese flag to mythic proportions (take a look at this photo here, and compare the Japanese flag in the picture with what it should look like here. (Apparently Japan’s World Cup association JAWOC complained to the Koreans during rehearsals for the ceremony but the Koreans didn’t correct the flag).