Japanese anti-semitism

Press, 24 April 1987, Page 16

Japanese anti-semitism

A paperback entitled “If You Understand the Jews You Can Understand the World: 1990 Scenario for the 'Final Economic War’ ” is a runaway bestseller in Japan at nearly a million copies sold, according to weekly “Bunshun” magazine. The author, Masami Uno, asserts in it that the United States is a “Jewish nation" and that Jewish interests are behind “a targeted bashing of Japan” by engineering the surge in the yen’s value, causing record unemployment and the “hollowing out” of Japanese industry. Professor Herbert Passin, a noted scholar of Japanese educa-

tion who has chronicled the recent explosion in anti-semitic literature, says there are “over 100 books” dealing specifically with Jews at present circulating in Japan. While some are “very friendly, making the Jews seem enviable,” Mr Passin is concerned at the convergence of “remarkably detailed paranoia” in overtly anti-semitic works and their explosive popularity.

Professor Passin cites “Bunshun’s” survey of Tokyo bookshops that found most of the buyers were young white-collar workers, attracted by cover jackets advertising instant explanations of troubling pheno-

mena such as the high yen. The reaction of many members of Japan’s 1000-strong Jewish community is bewilderment. “Japan never succumbed to Nazi pressure to enforce the ‘final solution’ on Jews living in China, and even helped Jews escape persecution,” a business consultant, Mr Stewart Scheuer, insists. Professor Passin notes Japanese have had hardly any historical contact with Jewry and that anti-semitism has only ever had limited currency among Japan’s conspiracy-inclined ruling elite, Copyright — London Observer Service