I also didn’t know about this either.
“Early rising creates Japanese nationalism”,says a Cambridge Japan scholar.

http://www.upi.com/Science_News/2008/08/19/Early_rising_creates_Japanese_nationalism/UPI-21211219187100/

(HT to Ampontan)

I think that we have all made our points, but I just looked at these comments on Mutantfrog and just had to share them as part of this thread. Some of them should go into some kind of anthology of internet crazy.

So much hate (check out that one about being corrupted by Japan)!!

Does anyone realized when you search for groups with the word “Japan” in Facebook,the top on the list is “Fuck Off Japan,Leave the whales alone” with membership of 230.717 people?(Out of curiosity,I also searched for groups with the word “Norway”.The top of the list was “Fuck you I’m from Norway” and the founder was bitching about Sweden….)

You make a very good point. What I want to say, however, is that we don`t really know either way. I have generally looked at two types of things on 2ch – anime and manga reviews (never seen a racist comment there) and war memory stuff. I did a survey of a 1000 post Nanking massacre thread that popped up around the 70th anniversary. It was a big argument. I counted 600 posts from affirmers and 400 or so from deniers. They seem to have come to a conclusion that more or less reflects the academic consensus – massacre did take place, but it was mostly POWs. The right stop arguing that there was no violence but argue that the killings of POWs under the circumstances in Nanking were allowable under international law (this is a correct but morally reprehensible argument). The left makes the same point that the vast majority of academics do – a lot of killings is a lot of killings. People do go on 2ch and strike back at the right, but my single example does not prove anything – we just don`t know how common any of this is.

My concern is that if the current positioning of 2ch in the scholarship (etc.) is maintained, it will stand for decades as a representation of what “Japanese youth” were thinking in the 2000s without anyone ever having quantified it (and no academic has even done a qualitative look that is as good as what you and other bloggers have done from time to time).

I`m also not comfortable with the idea that 2ch is a unique Japanese racist space while the English net is more or less clean of that stuff. Youtube comments are an absolute sewer. There are threads that literally have 20,000 anti-Japanese posts (calling for the Japanese to be killed to the last, etc.). Now, we assume most of these are coming from Chinese or Koreans (once more, with no evidence) but there is no way that anyone who posts on Neojaponisme, for example, is going to go over there and stick up for Japan or call people on every racist thing that they say. Nobody has that kind of time so we just end up leaving that particular sewer to fester. Are we giving tacit agreement or just giving up? When one looks at the number of comments, it seems like that is the major site of discussion of Japan on the English-web, not the blogs, and it is damn racist. I even see anime videos and Japanese movie trailers where people, unchallenged, decide that it is as good a place as any to throw in a quick “#&$% Japan” (and that would be a tame example).

Somebody needs to put some serious manpower together and do a huge survey of just what is being said on 2ch and in which discussoins.

No way. And my post has been read and linked by so many women bloggers(both adult and young) and they participate in Anti-Mainichi by using their real human relations. すんごい怒ってる

>Aceface
Well, I award again la medaille d’or de l’hypocrisie to our venerable FCCJ.

The difference is Waiwai was on the website of the nation’s third largest paper for about five years and the contents comes from Tabloid crap like Jitsuwa Knuckles and added creative translations.

Gaijin Hanzai File was sold right next to Jitsuwa Knuckles in convenience stores near you for about a week,and the contents were picked up from the mainstream papers crime section and added the tabloind sensationalism.

The disapearance of former achieved the elevated status of issue regarding press freedom within FCCJ.
http://www.e-fccj.com/

And the disappearance of the latter was seen as the victory against the Japanese xenophobism among the expat community.
http://www.debito.org/?cat=27

The similarity is few outside of internet knew it’s existence before the internet campaign and their effects on Japanese public opinion were close to zero.