My previous post contains this quote from ESWN:
the majority in Japan is either embarrassed, intimidated (as in: if you speak up, an ultra-rightist sound truck going to show up outside your home and/or workplace to harrass you 24 hours a day with diatribes of hatred)
This raises the question, and it was raised to me by a friend, how intimidating are these famous right wing trucks that drive around and congregate to celebrate certain days or intimidate certain foes? Judge for yourself. Here’s a photograph of one that I took in downtown Kyoto.
(Click the thumbnail for the full size picture)
A publicity truck for one of the various ultra right wing groups in Japan. Notice the loudspeakers on top, standard for trucks representing a political group of any stripe.
The upper line of text translates to “Establish an independence constitution”
The large text below the flag reads “All-Nippon Freedom Brotherhood”
The emblem to the left of the door is the Imperial Crysanthemum, with the kanji for ‘self’(short for freedom) in the middle.
Maybe I’m too much of an American to get why this is intimidating. I know that if you bring this menace down on your neighborhood, some people will resent you, and that’s discouraging. But whenever I picture a truck stationed outside a house for 24 hours blaring propoganda out through a loudspeaker, I also picture at least one person in the neighborhood pelting their truck with bricks.
Here’s a more modern urban assault model I found one day, also in Kyoto:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/redjoe/7634040/
I’ve heard that sometimes the right-wingers will send yakuza after you if you photograph their truck.
If you look close, that SUV version looks to be from the same organization as the truck I photographed.
I’ve actually heard, from a journalist I knew in Kyoto who said she had interviewed them herself, that the trucks are often driven by low ranking yakuza associates. Not real yakuza of course-that would be like Tony Soprano driving his own ‘waste management’ truck.
Why didn’t they attack me? Are even yakuza thugs in Japan unsure how to confront a foreigner in public?
I think the second character to the right of ‘self’ complements ‘self’ to make the word freedom.
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