SNA (Tokyo) — It’s been called the “silly season” in American politics: the last weeks before the November election, when politicians sling whatever mud comes to mind and hope something sticks. They use the media to define their opponents before they define you, and if innocents get caught in the crossfire, oh well. Too bad. That’s politics.

This season’s most insidious indictment of innocents is the false claim, by candidate Donald Trump and his running mate J. D. Vance, that illegal Haitian immigrants are eating people’s pets in Springfield, Ohio. No matter how much debunking has been done by local authorities and the credible media, they have kept repeating the lies, disrupting services, and terrorizing Springfield with far-right marches and death threats.

This bad faith is horrifying, but I’m actually rather inured to it. It’s a tactic I’ve seen in Japan for decades, and it’s been imported by America’s far-right: fearmongering about foreigners to generate a social movement.

MAGA Inspired by Japan

As I argued in my concluding chapter of Embedded Racism, Second Edition, Japan is fetishized as a template “ethnostate” by the world’s white supremacists: it keeps itself “pure,” free from immigrants “poisoning the blood of our country.” It has no official immigration policy, has revolving-door work visa policies designed to stop cheap imported labor from actually settling in Japan, and has a cultural narrative that foreign residents must settle for second-class status, with no expectation of equal treatment or even guarantees of human rights under Japan’s Constitution. If you don’t like it, “go back to wherever you came from.”

This ideology has been openly espoused even by the highest levels of Japan’s government. Far-right ideologue Steve Bannon famously called the late Prime Minister Shinzo Abe “Trump before Trump.”

But trying to adapt Japan’s xenophobia is one thing. Japan’s more impressive innovation is exporting tools to rally the far-right, as seen in the rise of the fringe in democracies including Brazil, the Netherlands, Hungary, Poland, Germany, France, Great Britain, and the United States.

The internet exploded in the early 1990s, but by the turn of the century, Japan had already perfected communication networks (such as 2-Chan) servicing the netto uyoku (internet right-wing). These anonymous bullying communities could target dissenting newspapers and businesses, make public the personal contacts of opponents, and assemble flag-wavers and bullhorns overnight to terrify whole communities—particularly foreign communities, including ethnic Korean schools, Brazilian neighborhoods, and recently Kurdish enclaves.

So what’s happening in Springfield is, if anything, a bit quaint. This playbook is a quarter-century old in Japan.

The uyoku have enjoyed great success in Japan. With the power to shift political narratives and votes, they have killed open-minded policy proposals (such as giving local suffrage to generational permanent residents) with hateful and murderous invective. Entire political platforms dismissed “individual liberties” and “human rights” as “Western concepts” antithetical to Japanese native values. Well-funded by ultraconservatives (such as Nippon Kaigi) long nursing historical grievances over losing a war and an empire, thanks to the revolutions of the Internet they have had enough volume in the media to make the fringe seem mainstream.

They not only undermined Japan’s left to the point of restoring a grandson of a war criminal (Abe) to power, making him the longest-serving prime minister in history, they also helped cause the collapse of the largest leftist political party (the Democratic Party of Japan). To this day, there is scant hope of a leftist party ever retaking power.

This success was astounding to fringes elsewhere, so they wanted in. Japan’s troll website 2-Chan became 4-Chan in English, anger-inducing algorithms in online communities steered people toward extremist echo chambers, etc. Further assisted by outside autocracies and their Internet bot-farms, the far-right rallied worldwide like never before.

The United States was particularly susceptible. Given that it has more guns than people, a strong historical distrust of government, and an extremely flawed electoral system that can be gamed to favor rural conservative voters, the US far-right surprised everyone in 2016. They put an opportunistic con man in the presidency whose only qualification was being rich and good at stoking grievance, not to mention being completely devoid of any ideology or moral values beyond winning.

Different Society, Different Outcome?

We know well where the election of Donald Trump led. A person woefully unequipped to deal with democratic processes or national crises resulted in death, destruction, and insurrection. Other democracies learned from this and disqualified their demagogues from running again. Not the United States, where centuries-old anti-majoritarian flaws embedded within its constitution still allow an insurrectionist and convicted felon to run for office. He has a decent chance of winning again if he continues to command more than 40% of a tribalized electorate.

However, we’re seeing interesting differences between how the United States and Japan are dealing with their uyoku, and that speaks to the strength of America’s civil society.

For example, compare the Springfield case with, for example, the Kurdish or Brazilian areas targeted in Japan.

In both Japan and America, politicians fearmongered for attention, and the conservative press (e.g., Fox and Newsmax in the United States, Yomiuri and Fujisankei in Japan) sensationalized the evils that “illegals” commit, bolstered by cherry-picking crime statistics from a compliant police force or a border control agency. Make “foreign crime” into a campaign issue and normalize xenophobia—that’s the uyoku playbook, and it worked in America too for a stretch.

The difference is that in the United States, the liberal voice can be as loud as the conservative. Part of it is due to the strength of the data. You can find government statistics and academic publications, cited by the trustworthy press on a regular basis, that reliably demonstrate how much the foreign workforce contributes to the economy, and how foreigners have crime rates lower than citizens. This creates a stronger narrative that immigrants are a boon, not a bane.

In Japan, however, data of this ilk has been consistently muffled. The press pretty much parrots the police narrative. Most of the statistics you find on foreigners in Japan are couched in crime statistics, because the government (i.e., Ministry of Justice, not a ministry dedicated to immigration) is more interested in tracking and policing them, not supporting them as they assimilate. In the Japanese media, try to find any publication that calls imported laborers “immigrants.” There isn’t even a word for it yet. Which means the default assumption is that foreigners are temporary workers, here to make money off the economy instead of contributing to it.

There’s also the fact that minority voices in the United States are much stronger. Reporters and news networks actually go on-site to targeted areas such as Springfield and channel the voices of the discriminated directly into the national conversation. They also megaphone liberal politicians, interest groups, and civil rights experts. Even late-night comedians (the overwhelming majority of whom are liberal, many even immigrants themselves) keep a steady drumbeat exposing how the arguments against immigrants are ludicrous.

In Japan, however, you might get some media reportage on the plight of foreign workers, but most of it is muted through the voices of Japanese spokespeople who aren’t affected by the discrimination themselves. Rarely do you hear the voice of the Non-Japanese person because people reflexively assume a language barrier. At best, you might get the occasional feel-good feature on one brave foreigner with translated platitudes about common humanity, but again, nobody calling him an “immigrant” who now belongs in Japan.

You don’t even have good late-night political comedy in Japan (because sarcasm isn’t really a source of humor in Japanese). Plus I lost my “Just Be Cause” column in the Japan Times (which got more than a million page views during its decades-long run) because of a pro-Abe switch in ownership. Again, these voices get muted. It matters.

Hope on the Horizon?

For a case in point, contrast Japan’s media narratives with a column in The Daily Beast dated September 25 entitled, “Why I Hope Trump’s Racist Pet-Eating Lie Will Cook His Goose.”

Its subtitle is “Donald Trump is not a real American,” because, “real Americans stand up against bigotry. Real Americans care about the least among us, not only because we are empathetic humans, but because a generation or two back, most of our families were in exactly the same position.”

The main arguments are about “how profoundly anti-American the Trump/Vance ticket has now become.”

“Anti-American?!” That’s stunning. Can you imagine any mainstream Japanese press opining that somebody discriminating against foreign residents of Japan is “anti-Japanese?”

Quite the opposite. The corresponding term, han-Nichi, is usually reserved for critics who oppose the uyoku, and it doesn’t get all that much pushback. Thus, elements of their bigoted views are often so normalized in Japanese society they are visibly part of the legal structure and national narrative. Read my book Embedded Racism for more substantiation.

Can Things Really Change?

One can make a solid case that these differences between the United States and Japan are a matter of culture, i.e., one society grounded in a narrative of a “nation of immigrants,” and another that sees itself as (despite all evidence to the contrary) a “monocultural, monoethnic, isolated island nation” (tanitsu minzoku, shimaguni). After all, Japan only opened up to the world, er, um, nearly two centuries ago.

The problem is that putting things down to culture makes societies look static. That’s untrue. To me, the difference is more legal than cultural. And fortunately, you can reconstruct the cultural through the legal.

For example, the world reconstructed itself to abolish an evil as dire as slavery, once a commonplace feature of prospering societies.

Japan too has reconstructed itself to shed feudalism, imperialism, and suicidal militarism.

How? Because people eventually realized, usually the hard way, that giving legal license to systemic bigotry and hate-based privilege only leads to awful consequences, including genocides, civil wars, and revolutions.

So the racisms of the world, including targeting foreigners for political sport and advantage, must be legislated away. You don’t just wait for the bigots to naturally “come around.” That’s why we have a United Nations treaty against racial discrimination and related intolerance (which Japan too has signed).

However, for nearly three decades now, Japan has violated not only that treaty but also its own Constitution (Article 14), refusing to pass a law against racial discrimination. And it has long gotten a free pass for it thanks to geopolitics. The Western powers need Japan plugged into the world economy, anti-communist, and now anti-China. If some foreigners suffer, oh well. That’s politics.

Well, as they say, karma’s a bitch. As seen above, this free pass has allowed Japan to become a fast-breeder reactor of far-rightism, with uyoku-styled networks undermining democracies worldwide.

How Japan treats its non-citizen residents and diverse communities is a bellwether for how future neofascist demagogues in other countries will treat their minority voices and views. Because, again, Japan is their template.

Will the United States, despite its own enormously flawed record (e.g., the legacies of slavery, indigenous genocides, and geopolitical war crimes), detoxify itself from its own demagoguery in its November elections?

There’s a decent chance. It’s happened numerous times in American democracy and civil society.

And if it does, it’s time for the democracies of the world, including Japan, to face the fact that their societies are not static. Majorities change over time, as do their priorities.

The nature of majority rule means that societies in flux (in America’s case, becoming demographically browner) must have governments that respond to this change, not preserve bigotry and White Supremacism just because it’s historical and loud.

It’s the “silly season,” yes, but what’s at stake this election is anything but silly.

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