A new ultra-nationalistic group, Zaitokukai, is shocking mainstream Japanese society with its extreme racist tactics and outrageous antics. According to a story, “New Dissent in Japan Is Loudly Anti-Foreign”, by Martin Fackler in today’s New York Times:
The demonstrators appeared one day in December, just as children at an elementary school for ethnic Koreans were cleaning up for lunch. The group of about a dozen Japanese men gathered in front of the school gate, using bullhorns to call the students cockroaches and Korean spies. Inside, the panicked students and teachers huddled in their classrooms, singing loudly to drown out the insults, as parents and eventually police officers blocked the protesters’ entry.
The organization also had another lovely protest terrorizing a child:
The Zaitokukai gained notoriety last year when it staged noisy protests at the home and junior high school of a 14-year-old Philippine girl, demanding her deportation after her parents were sent home for overstaying their visas. More recently, the Zaitokukai picketed theaters showing “The Cove,” an American documentary about dolphin hunting here that rightists branded as anti-Japanese.
Zaitokukai was founded by Makoto Sakurai and is following the lead of a well-known American movement:
Mr. Sakurai says the group is not racist, and rejected the comparison with neo-Nazis. Instead, he said he had modeled his group after another overseas political movement, the Tea Party in the United States. He said he had studied videos of Tea Party protests, and shared with the Tea Party an angry sense that his nation had gone in the wrong direction because it had fallen into the hands of leftist politicians, liberal media as well as foreigners.
Isn’t it amazing that the homegrown Tea Party and its Japanese knock-off are never racist or xenophobic, yet keep saying things that sound, well, racist and xenophobic?
Meanwhile, the Tea Baggers held a massive rally in front of the Lincoln Memorial featuring Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin. The event, according to Peter at Right Wing Watch and Adele Stan of AlterNet, had an unusually religious tone for a Tea Party event. Indeed, at a FreedomWorks (this is Dick Armey’s outfit) gathering the night before the big rally , Beck appeared to sport a brand new God-complex. He told the packed house at Constitution Hall:
“My role, as I see it, is to wake America up to the backsliding of principles and values and most of all God,” said Beck. “We are a country of God. As I look at the problems in our country, quite honestly, I think the hot breath of destruction is breathing on our necks and to fix it poltically is a figure that I don’t see anywhere.”
Perhaps, the hot breath is that of Satan trying to pull Beck into hell before he can further screw up this country?
How much do you want to bet that Beck, an ego-maniac with a messiah condition, will eventually declare himself the grand political figure who is destined to be America’s magic savior?
