Merging of Anti-Okinawa and Anti-Korean Hate

Verfassung  |  Hate
Quelle:  The Asia-Pacific Journal | Japan Focus Volume 17 | Issue 2 | Number 1 | Jan 15, 2019
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The Recent Merging of Anti-Okinawa and Anti-Korean Hate in the Japanese Mass Media
Shin Sugok
with Translation and Introduction by Joseph Essertier

Introduction
Shin Sugok is an advocate of human rights in Japan and a leader of “Norikoe Net,” an “international network to overcome hate speech and racism.”1 Norikoe Net's broad purview encompasses discrimination against Koreans, women, Okinawans, Burakumin, children born out of wedlock, the disabled, LGBT people, and other disadvantaged minority groups. In essence, their aim is to champion human rights in Japan as a universal value.
It is a great injustice that people of various ethnicities who were born and raised in Japan are often treated as outsiders. And it is especially unfair that many Japanese do not view the descendants of Koreans as locals or natives, no matter how brutally their ancestors were dispossessed and colonized by the Empire of Japan a few generations back, or if their grandparents contributed to building the Japan of today. (In this introduction and in the
translations below, the term “Zainichi Korean” is  used to refer to the migrants and descendants of people who originated in colonial Korea). Here we present two essays by Shin Sugok, the daughter of a Tokyoite, for English readers—a moving, and even disturbing, recent snapshot of a painful episode in one Korean woman’s life-long struggle to secure human rights in Japan. ...

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