Japanese Right wing truck

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.

/Kyoto/rightist_truck
(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.

5 thoughts on “Japanese Right wing truck”

  1. 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.

  2. 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?

  3. I think the second character to the right of ‘self’ complements ‘self’ to make the word freedom.

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