Asiaweek.com | JAPAN: Crossing The Line Again
Daniel Santos
APRIL
28, 2000 VOL. 26 NO. 16 | SEARCH ASIAWEEK
Tokyo governor's big mouth gets him in trouble once more
By TODD CROWELL and MURAKAMI MUTSUKO Tokyo
Ishihara Shintaro is an infuriating man. On April 9, he caused a ruckus by using a derogatory term, sangokujin, to describe foreigners living in Japan. The civilian governor of Tokyo was speaking at the Ground Self-Defense Forces base at Nerima in the western suburbs when he said, "time and time again sangokujin, who illegally entered this country, [have] committed atrocious crimes. In the event of an earthquake, riots can be expected, and the army might be called on to maintain order."
The governor never explained why he connected rioting to Asian foreigners. During the Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923 it was the Japanese who ran amok, killing several thousand hapless Koreans who were falsely accused of setting fires or poisoning wells. During the 1995 Kobe earthquake no foreigners or anyone else rioted. Indeed, they helped each other in the aftermath. To that Ishihara replied by saying, "the quantity and quality of foreigners here [in Tokyo] is different from those in Kobe."
| The Art of Being Obnoxious: A few examples of Ishihara's mindset "Sangokujin": Literally meaning "third-country people," the term was used in postwar Japan to refer to those who had arrived from Taiwan and Korea under Japanese colonial rule. Some scholars say it was first used by Gen. Douglas MacArthur's occupation forces. The word carries the connotation of "second-class citizens," which is how many Asians feel they are treated in Japan. Ishihara claims he was using it simply to mean "foreigners." "Shina": An antiquated word for China, no longer used by ordinary Japanese but repeatedly uttered by Ishihara. Last year, his public use of the term elicited a formal protest from Beijing. "The Rape of Nanjing is not true": Ishihara has always claimed that the death toll of the infamous 1937 occupation of the city by Japanese troops is exaggerated. He accuses the Chinese government of making political capital out of the issue. |
Naturally, the governor's comments raised a storm of criticism, especially from those groups representing ethnic Koreans. "The remarks imply that foreign residents pose a danger, and this will only arouse people's prejudices," said a spokesman for the pro-Seoul Korean Residents Union in Japan. "Ishihara should have called for citizens to live side-by-side with foreign residents," said Tanaka Hiroshi who teaches about Japan's relationships with Asia at Kyoto's's Ryukokyu University.
Ishihara did issue a kind of an apology and promised never to use the term sangokujin again, but mostly he stood his ground. He quibbled over the way some of his remarks were, he claimed, distorted by the media. He said he was most concerned about actions of illegal aliens, not ethnic Koreans native to Japan. But he refused to retract his remarks about the military maintaining public order during natural disasters.
It would be nice, of course, if Ishihara were some kind of buffoon, like the unlamented Knock Yokoyama, who recently resigned as governor of Osaka following charges of sexual harassment, or the ineffective cipher who preceded him as governor of Tokyo. But he was emerging as a strong, effective and innovative administrator of the world's largest city .
Until the sangokujin remark arose, Ishihara was on a roll. His plan to tax bank profits in Tokyo in order to stanch the city's massive debt was proving hugely popular with the voters, his fellow governors and just about everybody else in the country except for the national government and the banks themselves. It sailed through the Metropolitan Assembly in late March with scarcely a dissenting vote.
But Ishihara's undeniable brilliance is balanced by a deep- seated xenophobia that extends in all directions. His famous booklet The Japan That Can Say No (to the U.S.) gives an idea of what he thinks about the U.S.-Japan relationship and possibly about Americans in general. Many felt his campaign plank to close the U.S. Air Force Base at Yokota in Tokyo's western suburbs, was code for anti-Americanism. He makes no secret of his disdain for China, or at least of the Communist government that runs the country. Before the dust had settled on the sangokujin controversy, an interview the governor gave the German magazine Der Spiegel surfaced. In it he said Japan should treat China as a "threat" and urged its breakup into smaller states. The remarks infuriated Beijing.
Even before he was elected governor, Ishihara publicly downplayed the Nanjing massacre, which is usually the hallmark of extreme reactionaries. He goes out of his way to befriend people Beijing dislikes. Right after the big earthquake in Taiwan, Ishihara flew to Taipei to meet with President Lee Teng-hui. And he invited the Dalai Lama to meet him during his visit to Japan this month (his Holiness decided this was a meeting better ducked).
The crucial question is how many of these views reflect Ishihara's own eccentricities and how many are genuinely popular? One clue was the remarkable outpouring of citizens' opinions and comments in the week following the controversy. The city government's office for receiving public complaints was never busier. As of April 17, it had taken 7,234 telephone calls, faxed or written letters. About 70% of the comments backed the governor, while 26% criticized him.
Much of the increase in crime in Japan - still low by international standards - in the past decade is popularly attributed to the increase in the number of foreigners living there: Asians, such as Chinese and Vietnamese, but also Iranians, Ghanaians and others. Tokyo has also seen the rise of criminal gangs led by disaffected Korean, Chinese and Vietnamese youths that are more randomly violent than Japan's home-grown yakuza.
A cursory look at statistics reveals that a disproportionate number of crimes nationwide are committed by foreigners. In 1997 they accounted for about 2% of the arrests but made up only 1% of the population. But the numbers are misleading. Out of the 9,850 foreigners picked up by the police in that year, 7,123 - roughly two-thirds of the total - were charged with immigration offenses. On the other hand, a little more than half of the 251 people arrested for particularly vicious crimes were non-Japanese.
Ishihara is a cultivated man. He won Japan's most prestigious literary award, the Akutagawa Prize, when he was only 23 years old. He served in the Diet for more than 25 years, becoming transport minister and chief of the environmental agency. In 1995 he resigned his seat, claiming that national politics was hopeless. He ran for governor in 1999 as an independent, garnering 31% of the votes in a field of six serious candidates.
He made no overt racial or even nationalist campaign appeals (save for his call to close Yokota). He proposed instead complex plans to end the city's gaping budget deficit, by, among other proposals, creating a new market for trading bonds of the city's small and middle-sized high-tech companies. He capitalized on his strong roots in Tokyo, high name recognition and a popular desire to have a more assertive governor after four years of drift.
Love him or hate him, one can't ignore Ishihara. No other Tokyo governor has used this previous backwater post as such an effective political stage. He is a genuine maverick in the intensely group-oriented country. If Japan ever had direct election of prime minister, Ishihara might win by a landslide.
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