"Hate speech kills people" reads the headline in the September 27 issue of Nikkan Gendai, where the tabloid has devoted a full page to an interview with journalist Koichi Yasuda. 

Last June, Yasuda published a 600-page book titled Jishin to Gyakusatsu (Earthquake and Massacre), which touched upon the thousands of Koreans who were slaughtered by police and lynch mobs in the civil unrest that occurred in the wake of the Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923.

Yasuda's concern this time however is about Kurdish people, who from the 1990s began converging on the bed towns of Kawaguchi and Warabi in southern Saitama Prefecture. 

"Over the past year," Yasuda tells Nikkan Gendai, "discrimination and bias against Kurdish people began to surge. With debate in the Diet over reforms in the law concerning immigration and refugees, the Kurds became the focus of attention, partly because the media has covered the efforts by many of them to obtain refugee status. This in turn may have stirred latent xenophobia in people's minds, and it led to a rapid rise in hate speech." 

Yasuda believes the same types of people who had previously directed their hatred toward Koreans in Japan found it easy to shift their animosity toward Kurds. 

And naturally social media is at least partially responsible. 

"Unfounded accusations spread with astonishing speed," said Yasuda. "When something negative happens -- no matter how weird or outlandish -- the Kurds get blamed for it.

"Actually over the past decade, while the foreign population of Kawaguchi City has doubled, the number of criminal cases attributed to them has dropped to half. And interactions between Kurds and the local residents are fine, although this tends to be disregarded," he added. 

Yasuda was asked if the recent surge in hate speech has had any impact on the lives of Kurds in Kawaguchi.

"One local Turkish-style restaurant reported receiving numerous threatening phone calls, with the callers screaming 'Drop dead!' and 'Get out of Japan!'

"There have also been malicious posters on YouTube photographing Kurds or even showing them playing in a park with their children. Some have been claiming the Kurds have set up their own armed self-defense group. Many agitators have come from outside Saitama prefecture, and are responsible for aggravating the situation," Yasuda added.  

One thing that has Yasuda particularly concerned is that government officials in Japan who speak out publicly against hate are few and far between. 

Contrast this, says Yasuda, with what occurred in Charlottesville, Virginia in 2017, when white supremacists held their infamous "Unite the Right" tiki-torch parade. Afterwards one woman was killed and 19 people injured when a man rammed his car into a group of counter demonstrators. 

Without hesitation, Virginia Governor Terry McAuliffe went before the TV cameras and unambiguously asserted, "Our message is plain and simple: Go home. You are not wanted in this great commonwealth."

"Unfortunately, it is rare to see individuals in Japan taking that kind of  firm stand," said Yasuda. "This is probably because Japan still has a weak sense of resistance to directing discriminatory behavior toward others. Behind this lies the fact that, despite the existence of many related cases, they have not been discussed in public forums or statutes put in place to crack down on them. This can be said to be a characteristic of Japanese society." 

Granted, in 2016 Japan's Diet enacted the Anti-Discriminatory Speech Act, which Yasuda said was a move in the right direction, although the law does not stipulate penalties for violators. In 2020 Kawasaki, a city with a large ethnic Korean population, passed the nation's first ordinance treating hate speech as a punishable offense. 

"As Japan becomes increasingly dependent on foreign labor, determined efforts will be needed to deal with discriminatory activities," Yasuda notes. "The foreign population will keep growing. Failure to implement anti-discriminatory measures will create stumbling blocks to our social development, and raise questions over the country's political stance."