Japanophobia

Why anti-Japanese feeling runs strongest in Korea and China

Anti-Japanese feeling ranges from animosity towards the actions of the Japanese government during the Second Sino-Japanese War and the Second World War, through disdain for Japanese culture, to racism against Japanese people. It is likely strongest in Korea and China, because of atrocities committed by the Imperial Japanese military, and the dehumanising element in it was fed by Allied wartime propaganda that was frequently racial in character.

Passions settled after the surrender in the Pacific, but they still rise over the perception that the Japanese government has done insufficient penance for the past or has sought to whitewash it. Compensatory measures have been made, and the animosity attached to Imperial Japanese aggression persists alongside them.

Specific grievances keep it alive, and each of them has a number or a name attached:

• more than 700,000 pieces of chemical weaponry buried in China at the end of the war on the Japanese government's own count, still dangerous to life and to the environment, and slow to be cleared
• Yasukuni Shrine, which enshrines all those who fought and died for Imperial Japan, including 1,068 convicted war criminals, and where the former prime minister Junichiro Koizumi paid his respects annually to heavy criticism from South Korea and China
• history textbooks produced by right-wing nationalist groups that whitewash the atrocities, and the recurring controversies over them, which draw hostile attention from abroad

Why Meiji modernisation did not win Japan acceptance

The older layer of the sentiment carried an accusation of barbarism. After the Meiji Restoration of 1868 Japan set out to adopt Western ways deliberately, with the aim of joining the West as an industrialised imperial power. A lack of acceptance in the West complicated that integration, and Japanese culture was viewed with suspicion and disdain regardless.

That sequence matters for reading everything after it. The country did the thing it was told would earn admission, and the reception did not change.

How Brazil wrote Japanophobia into immigration law

The Brazilian elite of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries wanted to whiten the country's population. Governments encouraged European immigration and met non-white immigration with considerable opposition, and Japanese communities were treated as an obstacle to that project, criticised for forming their own districts and for marrying among themselves. The jurist and sociologist Oliveira Viana described Japanese immigrants as being like sulphur: insoluble.

The magazine O Malho ran a cartoon on 5 December 1908 whose caption complained that the government of Sao Paulo was stubborn, that after the failure of the first Japanese immigration it had contracted three thousand more, and that it insisted on giving Brazil a race diametrically opposite to its own. On 22 October 1923 the representative Fidelis Reis produced an immigration bill whose fifth article prohibited the entry of settlers of the black race entirely and capped Asian immigration at 5 per cent a year of those already resident.

Under President Getulio Vargas the state went further, beginning a forced assimilation of people of immigrant origin. A constitutional amendment approved by a large majority in 1933 set immigration quotas without mentioning race or nationality and prohibited immigrants from concentrating in one area: no more than 2 per cent of the total received from each nationality over the previous fifty years. The Portuguese were excluded from it. Italians and Spaniards were unaffected in practice, having already arrived in numbers and being on a declining curve. The quotas restricted Japanese, Korean and Chinese immigration, and stayed in force until the 1980s.

What the wartime bans took from Japanese Brazilians

When Brazil sided with the Allies and declared war on Japan in 1942, communication with Japan was cut, new Japanese immigration was forbidden, and a set of restrictions fell on Japanese Brazilians:

• Japanese newspapers were banned, and so was the teaching of Japanese in schools, which left Portuguese as the only option for the next generation
• travel required a safe conduct issued by the police
• schools were closed
• radio receivers were confiscated, to prevent shortwave transmissions from Japan
• the goods of Japanese companies were seized, and several of the companies were taken over by the government

The figure that gives the measure of it comes from 1939, when research by a railway company in Sao Paulo found that 87.7 per cent of Japanese Brazilians read newspapers in Japanese, a rate of literacy far above that of the general population at the time. Many of them could not understand Portuguese.

Banning the newspapers, the schools and the radios of a population that reads at that rate in one language and not in the other does not merely restrict information. It removes it. That is a more precise thing than a fear of a country, and it is what the word most reliably describes.