Comments on: Japanese Right wing truck

By: Mutant Frog Travelogue » Blog Archive » Fascist wannabes in Japan fight back against Chinese protests

Wed, 20 Apr 2005 15:54:01 +0000

[...] 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 [...]

By: dan

dan — Thu, 14 Apr 2005 03:18:54 +0000

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

By: Mutantfrog

Mutantfrog — Mon, 11 Apr 2005 14:59:38 +0000

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?

By: Joe

Joe — Mon, 11 Apr 2005 14:55:29 +0000

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.

By: Matt

Matt — Mon, 11 Apr 2005 13:59:46 +0000

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.