Insularity Breeds Anti-Semitism in Japan

Japan’s looming economic discomfiture and the possibility of the need for major retrenchment and restructuring are bringing with it an age-old Western bane and poison: anti-Semitism.

Anti-Semitism in Japan? An odd proposition in the Orient, where Jews have never been measured by more than handfuls. Yet it may be seen as a manifestation of the new global economy and the universalization of ideas, bad as well as good.

Because of Jews’ historic importance to nations’ economies, anti-Semitic campaigns in the Old World were frequently related to the economic difficulties that a country was experiencing. From England in the 13th Century to Germany in the 20th Century, blaming the Jews became a prelude to appropriating their property and expelling them from the national economy. Since Japan has no Jews to expel, the anti-Semitic campaign there would seem an anomaly. Yet it has its own logic.

Although the Japanese have massive economic and cultural contacts with the Western world, Japan remains a remarkably insular country with considerable xenophobia. Foreigners residing in Japan are fingerprinted and referred to as gaijin --literally, “outside-people.” (A remarkable linguistic similarity to the Yiddish goyim , meaning gentiles.) As late as 1985 it was impossible for a Japanese woman who was married to a foreigner to pass on her citizenship to her children. Even many third-generation Koreans whose grandparents were brought to Japan as forced laborers at the beginning of this century cannot attain Japanese citizenship.

And because most Japanese do not distinguish the nationality or the ethnicity of a foreigner--in Japan all foreigners remain gaijin--many of their perceptions about the people who reside outside Japan are based on wholesale stereotypes imported from the West. In fact, since the Japanese economy is so intertwined with the American that it is impolitic to attack Americans in general, “Jews” may well serve as a code-word substitute--economic scapegoatism on an international scale.

Chief among the current crop of anti-Semitic writers is Masami Uno, whose books are based on the “Protocols of the Wise Men of Zion”--a forgery by the Okhrana, the Czarist secret police. More than 650,000 copies of the books were sold in the last 12 months.

The basic premise of Uno’s books and others like them is that Japan’s current trade frictions with America and Western Europe are a part of a worldwide Jewish conspiracy. Uno asserts that Jews control all major American corporations--including IBM, Exxon, General Motors and Ford. Uno and his followers have thus created a simplistic explanation for the growing economic pressures brought about by the high yen and increased foreign demands that Japan open its domestic market.

The more vulgar manifestations of anti-Semitism in Japan began to surface during the allied invasion of the Soviet Union in the early 1920s. Japanese army officers who participated in the invasion of Siberia were influenced by their White Russian comrades who blamed the Jews for the Bolshevik revolution. When those Japanese officers returned home, they spread anti-Semitic ideas and quoted widely from the same “Protocols” that Japanese anti-Semites are citing today.

And of course during World War II, when Japan was an ally of Nazi Germany, anti-Semitic ideas thrived. Although Jews were not directly persecuted by the Japanese, more than 100 anti-Semitic books were published in Japan during the war.

As Japan continues to make the painful but necessary shifts from an export-based economy to one that is more internationalized and open, severe internal dislocations in the form of higher unemployment will undoubtedly occur. It is precisely this sort of changing, perhaps even chaotic, environment that could give rise to even higher levels of anti-Semitism.

For some Japanese, Jews remain an amorphous, omnipotent entity, a symbol that represents growing protectionist sentiments in Washington and financial clout on Wall Street. Even supposedly flattering accounts of Jews--like “The Japanese and the Jews,” which sold more than a million copies, and “The Jewish Way of Doing Business”--promulgate crass and appalling stereotypes that are accepted uncritically.

The fact that there are no Jews to persecute means that anti-Semitism will remain more theoretical than practicable in Japan. When in recent years the Japanese made much ado about the “internationalization of Japan,” imported anti-Semitism surely was not among the products included. The fact that Uno’s books have been able to gain such widespread attention is founded in Japan’s continued insularity and suspicion of foreign influence. It’s high time that the Japanese support their rhetoric with drastic shifts in their perceptions about the world outside and a willingness to open not just their markets but their minds.