Japan Newspaper Ad Revives Fears of Anti-Semitism : Bias: American group demands an apology for message linking economic troubles with ‘Jewish capital.’

A major advertisement in this nation’s leading financial daily drew fire Wednesday from an American Jewish group and revived lingering concerns about Japanese anti-Semitism, particularly in the business world and especially during a time of heightened global trade disputes.

Rabbi Abraham Cooper, associate dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles, demanded that the newspaper Nihon Keizai (Nikkei)--the Japanese equivalent of the Wall Street Journal--publish an apology for printing a one-third-page advertisement trumpeting a startling message.

“The stock crash, the high yen and the political turmoil (in Japan) are no coincidence,” screamed the ad’s headlines. “After defeating Europe, America and Russia, Jewish capital is now after Japan.”

The Tuesday ad sought to sell new books--including a three-volume series entitled “The Last Enemy: Shoot Japan”--that claim to unveil a Jewish plot to destroy and enslave Japan.

The ad, attempting to show how far the plot has progressed, shows an annotated illustration of a 5,000-yen note. It asserts that the picture that appears to be Mt. Fuji on the back of the bank note is actually Mt. Sinai; this, the ad says, is evidence that Japan’s Finance Ministry and the Bank of Japan are already under Jewish control.

A Nikkei official said the newspaper has a policy against running ads that are slanderous but that it did not believe that the notice from Daichi Kikaku, a small publisher of books on economics and stocks, was in that category.

“We don’t make any judgments on ideology, opinion, thought and beliefs in advertisements,” Shigeaki Umeda, the head of Nikkei, said in a written response to a reporter’s question.

Daichi Kikaku declined to discuss its volumes, particularly the work asserting that there is a Jewish plot to destroy Japan. “We are satisfied that the author checked his facts,” said Sumkio Furuta of the publishing house.

There have been anti-Semitic books in Japan since the turn of the century, although there are few Jews in this country. The literature has increased in popularity during economic hard times or when Japan has been under foreign pressure.

The Nikkei ad, apparently the most blatant to appear in a mainstream publication in recent years, could mark a resurgence of anti-Semitism in the context of a rise in general, anti-American sentiment, analysts say. “In hard times and in times of political uncertainty, people look for scapegoats,” said Cooper, who noted that--only in Japan--has anti-Semitism increasingly taken on the color of anti-Americanism.

Anti-Americanism “is the way (anti-Semitism) keeps its shelf life and its strange acceptability in mainstream areas” in Japan, Coopers said. “It would be laughable if it weren’t so tragic.”

As American pressure on Japan increases and trade tensions rise, there is a strong tendency among Japanese to look for explanations for their nation’s seeming global isolation. “The world seems to be against us and people wonder, ‘Who are the people behind this?’ ” said Yoshiji Nogami, the Japanese Foreign Ministry’s deputy director general for the Middle East. “It is easy to blame Jews.”

Nogami, who has launched a virtual one-man campaign to protest the spread of anti-Semitic works, said that opinion pieces he has written and published opposing such material bring in hundreds of angry letters--and almost no support for his position.

Although the Foreign Ministry officially has sought to correct Japan’s past bias for Arab countries and against Israel, pro-Arab sentiment remains deep. “Most business people say, ‘Why bother with Israel? We rely on Arabs for all our oil,’ ” Nogami said.

There appear to have been no cases of Jews suffering anti-Semitic attacks, and in a recent survey, only 1% of Japanese said they knew of or had ever met a Jew. Still, the Japanese have a strong attachment to conspiracy theories and stereotypes related to Jews.

Den Fujita, who built the immensely successful McDonald’s fast food chain in Japan, once wrote a book called “Jewish Business Methods: Controlling the Economy of the World.” He liked to call himself the “Jew of the Ginza” and once said he wished he had been born a Jew.

Anti-Semitic writings here lately have taken on a more paranoid tone, blaming Jews for all of Japan’s current ills. An article in the popular weekly Shukan Post last July argued that Japan’s stock crash was staged by Jewish brokerage houses using futures markets to seek revenge for global inroads by Japanese bankers.

“When a Japanese enterprise bought the Rockefeller building in New York, which was called the ‘Jewish castle,’ and Sony/Matsushita bought up U.S. motion picture companies, then Jewish capital with high pride could no longer be quiet,” a reporter wrote in the paper.

Nogami, of the Foreign Ministry, suggested that the Nikkei ad may also be related to the financial hard times faced by Japanese newspapers and the need to take whatever advertising they can get.