Shintaro Ishihara
On Wednesday, February 2, 2022 I was happy to learn of the death of former Tokyo Governor Shintaro Ishihara (September 30, 1932 - February 1, 2022) at age 89. I don’t mean any un-Christian malice towards him. I mean that in the fullness of brotherly loving kindness I’m happy that he’s dead.
Ishihara was a smug and disgusting xenophobic neo-fascist former cabinet minister: a fine example of old men monopolizing power in Japan. He was a drooling old fogey prone to fall asleep in meetings, like Ronald Reagan. But he was a tenacious Japanese political creature. Also, kind of ridiculous the way he kept changing his stripes to take advantage of the political landscape. Ideology and principles meant nothing - only power. Good riddance. The world is a better place now.
My biggest memory of him dates from April 2000, when he delivered a speech to the Ground Self Defense Force’s (GSDF) Nerima garrison in Nerima Ward, Tokyo to mark the unit’s 49th anniversary. He told the gathered military to prepare for rioting by foreigners in the event of a major disaster in the Japanese capital. His remarks stem from a persistent, xenophobic Japanese fantasy of the violent foreigner. They also rest on the urban myth of ethnic Koreans massacring ethnic Japanese in the chaotic aftermath of the Great Kanto Earthquake of September 1923. Mass killings among survivors did occur, but the verified reality is that it was ethnic Japanese who massacred thousands of ethnic Koreans in the capital after that disaster. But in Mr. Ishihara’s mind (like Donald Trump), facts were mostly an inconvenience. What facts he possessed were more than a little jumbled, and the truth made no impression (and wouldn’t matter to him anyway). I think he might have seen reality mostly as a subjective fabrication than an objectively verifiable thing. In addition, like Donald Trump or Boris Johnson, he had no shame. I mean, it was not possible to shame him for anything he said. Accusations just rolled off him like rainwater off an umbrella. And, like all conservative Japanese politicians he also denied the Nanjing Massacre, putting it down as Chinese propaganda.
In April 2000, Ishihara’s exact words (in English translation) were, “Atrocious crimes have been committed again and again by sangokujin and other foreigners. We can expect them to riot in the event of a disastrous earthquake.” The Japanese term “sangokujin” is an insult for residents from the former Japanese colonies of Taiwan and Korea - sort of like if an American political leader referred to the Chinese as “Chinks” or Native Americans as “red skins.” In fact, Ishihara did that, too, by repeatedly calling China by the racist term “Shina,” and afterward stupidly claiming that he had nothing to apologize for because he didn’t know it was racist. The list goes on and on. He once said that he thought women beyond child-bearing age were a burden on society. He opined that foreign judoka practiced judo “like beasts,” French was unqualified to be an international language because of its counting system, and that the March 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake was a “punishment from heaven” because Japanese had become “greedy.” And more. You can look it up on the internet. What a dope. And yet, he was a career politician, popular enough to get elected and re-elected election after election. He’s the sort of character that few Japanese citizens admit voting for.
The incident with the Self-Defense Forces got me thinking about crimes committed by foreigners in Japan. Statistically, foreigners are more law-abiding than native Japanese, and the fact is that Japanese prisons are filled with Japanese convicts, not foreigners. So, I started a project that I kept up until he left office in 2012 - 12 years! Every week I snipped stories of heinous crimes committed by Japanese suspects from the English-language Japan Times newspaper. There was no shortage of those. I photocopied the stories and I mailed them by surface postal mail to his office at Tokyo City Hall in Shinjuku Ward. I used a red pen to underline the names of the crimes boldly, with a notation that it was “heinous crime.” Even though Japan has a reputation for being peaceful and law-abiding, there is still enough heinous crime going on for me to make a hobby of it. I’m confident that my submissions never made it beyond a secretary in the outer office, but I had fun doing it.