Japanese Right wing truckApril 10th, 2005 by Roy Berman |
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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.
April 11th, 2005 at 8:59 am
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.
April 11th, 2005 at 9:55 am
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.
April 11th, 2005 at 9:59 am
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?
April 13th, 2005 at 10:18 pm
I think the second character to the right of ‘self’ complements ‘self’ to make the word freedom.
April 20th, 2005 at 10:54 am
[...] ort: These fascist wannabes are the same guys who hire yakuza wannabes to drive around in silly trucks and forced a manga publisher to withdraw a piece of historical fict [...]