Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi solutions a query on the Upper House’s plenary session within the National Diet, Japan’s legislature, in Tokyo, Japan, June 19, 2026. /CFP
Editor’s word: Zhou Yaxin is a global affairs observer. The article displays the writer’s opinions and never essentially the views of CGTN.
Japan is taking a pointy rightward flip. Its social local weather is alarmingly paying homage to the one which produced the 1923 Kanto Massacre – a bloody episode of anti-Chinese violence in trendy Japan that served as a costume rehearsal for the following full-scale struggle of aggression in opposition to China. How can we keep away from repeating the tragic errors of a century in the past shouldn’t be solely a crucial alternative that Japan should get proper, but in addition an pressing problem that we should confront.
What precipitated the Kanto Massacre?
After the Meiji Restoration, a socio-political motion that restored imperial rule below Emperor Meiji, a lot of Chinese laborers went to Japan in quest of work attributable to Japan’s fast financial growth. By the early Twenties, the Chinese inhabitants in Japan had surged to round 16,000. Subsequently, calls to limit the immigration of Chinese laborers grew more and more vocal and the Japanese authorities issued a sequence of discriminatory ordinances and payments, together with the Items on the Prohibition of Chinese Workers.
These directed the native authorities to tighten border entry inspections for Chinese laborers, intensify repatriation, and impose strict restrictions on their residence, every day actions, and employment. As a consequence, the dwelling circumstances of Chinese laborers in Japan turned more and more harsh.
In September 1923, a devastating earthquake struck Japan’s Kanto area, leaving greater than 100,000 individuals useless or lacking. In the aftermath, rumors unfold wildly that Koreans and Chinese had been profiting from the chaos to commit arson, effectively poisoning, riots, and looting.
Seizing this pretext, the Japanese army and police, in collusion with extremists, launched large-scale raids focusing on Chinese laborers in Tokyo, Yokohama, and different areas. More than 700 Chinese laborers had been brutally killed, in addition to a number of Chinese group leaders and college students.
Subsequently, below the guise of “protection and resettlement,” the Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department carried out mass detention of the surviving Chinese laborers, the place they had been subjected to hunger, dehydration and bodily abuse. Approximately 3,000 Chinese employees had been forcibly held or repatriated.
After the atrocities, the Chinese authorities lodged representations with Japan and demanded compensation, however the Japanese authorities persistently denied the bloodbath ever passed off. It grudgingly promised 200,000 yen (about $97,000 at the moment) in compensation, a sum that by no means materialized.
What drives the anti-Chinese sentiment in Japan?
As summarized by historians, the Kanto Massacre stemmed from three foremost components: the deflection of Japan’s home issues, media incitement, and the rise of extremism. Disturbingly, all of the three components appear to be resurfacing in Japan as we speak.
When home points can’t be resolved correctly, an “external enemy” is created. After World War I, as European international locations returned to the world market, Japan’s growth dividends pale, and points like overproduction, enterprise closures, and hovering unemployment converged.
For Japan’s ruling class, fixing these structural issues was not simple. Instead, deflecting public discontent onto “external targets” turned essentially the most expedient political device. Politicians slandered Chinese laborers for stealing jobs and disrupting public order, portraying the Chinese because the “source of problems.” Gradually, the complicated social points had been lowered to a single, harmful narrative: The Chinese had been accountable for Japan’s troubles.
Today, Japan’s economic system stays mired in stagnation. Energy shortages and a depreciating yen have additional intensified social and livelihood anxieties. Right-wing forces led by Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi are following the identical previous playbook, speaking up exterior threats, aggressively pushing the “China threat” narrative, and stirring up xenophobia. Their motive is obvious: masking their very own governance failures with a tricky posture in opposition to “foreigners.”
A busy avenue in Tokyo’s Shinjuku District, Japan, June 19, 2026. /CFP
Prolonged media incitement turns hostility into “common sense.” Looking again on the Japanese public discourse across the time of the Kanto Massacre, one characteristic stands out: the Japanese media’s sustained marketing campaign to inflame anti-Chinese hostility.
At the time, many newspapers and periodicals, pushed by business achieve or political pursuit, churned out tales with virulent anti-Chinese overtones, entrenching stereotypes by means of provocative language. Over time, they managed to scapegoat the Chinese for Japan’s social issues, cementing the collective mindset that “hostility toward Chinese is justified.”
Today, Japanese media protection of China continues to be rife with prejudice and hostility. Some TV applications routinely talk about China-related points in an exaggerated, fear-mongering tone. Negative content material about China spreads quickly throughout social media, whereas rational voices are simply drowned out by hysteria.
Once an excessive ideology takes maintain, society’s psychological threshold for violence drops. The Kanto Massacre was a direct outgrowth of the rampant unfold of the Japanese militarist ideology earlier than World War II. Its function was to tighten inside management, gasoline exterior growth, and forge social consensus rooted in excessive nationalism, thereby laying the groundwork for the wars of aggression that adopted.
Although Japan is at the moment constrained by its pacifist structure and the post-war worldwide order, the toxins of militarism haven’t been absolutely purged. In latest years, historic revisionism has run rampant, and the youthful technology has been systematically fed a distorted model of historical past.
Narratives as soon as confined to the far-right fringe are actually bleeding into the mainstream. Expressions of xenophobia as soon as dismissed as excessive are garnering extra public assist. Vicious rhetoric and acts focusing on Chinese vacationers and abroad Chinese are more and more being repackaged as “legitimate concerns.” Some extremist parts not view their actions as violence – they earnestly consider they’re “defending the nation’s honor.”
The latest case of Kodai Murata, a Japanese Self-Defense Forces officer who broke into the Chinese Embassy in Tokyo with a knife, is a stark manifestation of this pattern.
Where is the extremist sentiment headed?
When a rustic sustains home cohesion by consistently manufacturing exterior enemies, the hostility will inevitably seep into the material of society, and on this case, finally land on Chinese vacationers on the road, Chinese college students within the classroom, and Chinese-owned retailers in business districts.
Revisiting the Kanto Massacre as we speak shouldn’t be about perpetuating cycles of hatred. It is about studying a painful lesson from historical past, and staying vigilant within the face of the anti-Chinese sentiment that continues to poison Japanese society as we speak.
For Japan, a query calls for sincere reflection: Why is a society that has lengthy prided itself on being a “peaceful nation” quietly condoning the unfold of such a virulent sentiment? If Japan actually values the peaceable order and worldwide standing it has spent the previous 80 years constructing, it will possibly not afford to show a blind eye to this pattern.
Otherwise, when the extremist sentiment lastly breaches the ethical barrier, the blowback will land squarely on Japan itself.
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Source: CGTN