ネット極右 (Net Far Right) Japanese Racist Fanatics
 

The NY Times recently ran an article on the ultra-nationalist group calling themselves the ネット極右 (Net Kyoku/Net Far Right) whose members have been harassing various foreigners and spreading their racist messages of intolerance and hate.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/29/wo...a/29japan.html

Definitely a very scary group of Right-Wingers who seem to be exploiting the internet to coordinate their rallies and target individuals. You'd think these guys would have something better to do than scapegoating foreigners for all the social/economic problems facing Japan.

Scary group of right wingers?

They dont sound all that scary to me.

Also... I kinda agree with them on the Korean school issue though maybe not for the same reasons.

In Japan there are many so called Korean schools. However most arent schools like we have in the west where it is simply a place where the language of the country can be used, these schools teach North Korean facist ideology to the students. They have pictures of Kim Jong Il and Kim Il Sung on their classroom walls etc.

I have never heard that before. Do you have any links giving more detail.

I agreee they don't sound like anything new. Right-wing, anti-foreigner groups have been around for decades...all bark, little bite.

Here you go MMM

YouTube - North Korea's Lifeline - Japan

Chongryon - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Here you go.

ETA; Ronin got the links to you first. :)
He was right on about the description - they are well known to teach North Korean ideals and Japan hate... Which puts a lot of the students in a very painful place as they live in Japan and are surrounded by Japanese people.
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To add - they are talking about 2ch. They bring up the Halloween thing as if it was just people dressed up and being harassed - it was the "block the train from normal people and have a huge drunken party on it" thing that was protested. Even *I* would have gone to protest it.

Thanks for the links, guys. This is a new one for me.

I know on the Tokyo and Osaka loop lines there were Halloween parties by foreigners who would ride the loops and get off at certain exits at certain times...reassemble and ride the trains. I know a guy who participated in the Osaka ride for at least 10 years, but it sounds like it is now over as of last year or so. to be honest it isn't anything i would ever participate in, but as I understand it, it was never about blocking anyone from riding a train. It was supposed to be a good natured fun. If it wasn't, then maybe the protesters have a point. (I do know as many japanese participated in the Osaka ride as foreigners.)

I don`t know anything about the Osaka one, but there were a LOT of issues with the Tokyo one. Was it started as and intended to block people from riding on the trains? No - but that is what it ended up doing. Eikaiwa teachers who wanted to get dead drunk and party apparently ruined the whole thing.
I wish I could find the Japanese thread that I read elsewhere about it back right after it happened, but there were quite a few stories of people being flat out accosted and shoved out of the cars. That big drunk guys would let the cute girls on, and shove the businessmen away from the doors, etc. There were also a lot of talk about groping getting way out of hand, and just general misbehaving and tearing up of the trains by people who thought it was hilarious that they had "gaijin power" and that the train operators couldn`t really do much to them.

The following year there were protests. This did not surprise me.

I think there were issues with the Osaka one, but it was more about overcrowding than anything malicious. And they were riding the loop for hours for only a couple hundred yen. Again, I am not endorsing it, I just felt (from what I had seen and read) that it was intended to be in good fun and to create some sort of Halloween tradition for foreigners living in Osaka.

It is a holiday I missed when I lived in Japan, so I can respect that level of having fun and following the "friskiness" of the holiday.

If things got over-the-top in Tokyo (or Osaka) it does not surprise me. What you describe, Nyororin, is deplorable, and people that would shove people off train cars should be arrested and detained.

I wasn`t actually there, but I tend to believe the videos taken from the Japanese side and the talk of it in places that aren`t typically the type of place you`d expect. A lot of the complaints I read were on the Benesse mothers board - mothers would talk about how they or their husbands got home late or super stressed because they had to wait for another train or were shoved around. From what I understood, maybe the official party "ended" after an hour or so, but they would stay - often filling multiple cars - until the last train.

It is really something that shouldn`t have been started in the first place, in my opinion. If you want to do a party, do it in a park or something - not on public transportation to annoy tons of people who just want to get from point A to point B.

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In an attempt to find the thread from 2008 - I found a post by a young woman who had to go to rescue her grandmother because she was forcibly picked up and dropped outside the train and told "くそばば帰れ!" by a group of white guys in pirate hats, one of them without pants on. The woman`s bag was dropped in the train, so she had no money and was too scared to get back on the train. (A follow-up said they did get her bag back - it was tossed out at the next station and was turned in by someone.) She was wanting support and to know whether it was a good idea to try to contact embassies about it.

Deplorable is a nice way to describe it. The 2008 party was apparently true and total chaos.

I am in complete agreement with you Nyororin. Some of this comes from ALTs just out of college who are not yet ready to go from "playground" to the real world. College is a playground, and ALTs (yours truly included) went straight from college to Japan. I'd like to think that I was more mature and respectful than the people that participated in these activities, but I am not going to get on too high a high-horse.