18 comments on “Ueda Hideaki, GOJ rep at UN Committee Against Torture, repeatedly tells people to “shut up” for audibly laughing at Japan’s human rights record”

• June 12, 2013 at 1:56 pm

  Welp says:

  I like how he pulled out the appeal to hypocrisy regarding whale eating with a “But you see, you all eat kangaroo…” A very typical response when you know your position is untenable but want to deflect attention.

  Reply
• June 12, 2013 at 2:22 pm

  Bitter Valley says:

  What struck me here was the 本音 (honne) revealed by/ behind the short-tempered outburst, then the doublethink switch to the prepared script less than a minute later. Perhaps if he had been genuinely proud or convinced of Japan’s record, he would have been less sensitive and defensive, and more able to say something like, “well I hear laughing, and you are entitled to express yourselves and your opinions, but why not do them more intelligently in debate.”

  Which suggests that he is self-aware enough to know that many people know about the considerable shortcomings of the Japanese legal system.

  More disturbingly for me in the honne was the arrogance and short-tempered nastiness of the whole thing. We are great, we are one of you “like an advanced Western country, but unique and special” …shut up!

  Which leads back to the point about an inability to engage and accept debate with others outside of a pre-decided formulation and artificial debate.

  Which means a carefully engineered superstructure of legalize, buraucractojargon, set-piece debating points and formulations, and pre-decided conclusions leading to a resolution…

  …to hold another expensive four star conference venue-based conflab in a desirable location via first or business class travel, limos, the lot, anything to avoid having to sit down in that shitty building in Kasumigaseki shuffling meaningless papers for several years until the next conference.

  Oh, and what about the Wa? Disrespectful wogs don’t understand it. So speak to them in a language they understand. It’s a real pity we didn’t win the war, and these people would know their place.

  Reply
• June 12, 2013 at 3:38 pm

  ununun says:

  Remix video available already.
  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tm4DUM7_Coo

  Reply
• June 12, 2013 at 3:42 pm

  Jim di Griz says:

  @ Bitter Valley #2

  Exactly!

  When it was Ishihara making the outbursts, apologists said ‘he’s not representative of Japanese people’. When Inose and Hashimoto, or the Mayor of Nagoya made outbursts, they said the same. I wonder; how many outbursts does it take for people to understand that this is representative of Japanese people?

  Reply
• June 12, 2013 at 7:29 pm

  Jim Di Griz says:

  Perhaps it was the Nepali delegation laughing? Who would have blamed them?

  Anyway, reading Japanese netizens comments on this incident are a little depressing. Just like with Inose and Hashimoto, the emphasis is on how embarrassing this outburst was (not in front of the foreigners!), rather than anyone questioning what sort of a culture is clearly in place to have produced all these morons.

  Reply
• June 12, 2013 at 8:11 pm

  John (Yokohama) says:

  On a related note…

  http://ajw.asahi.com/article/behind_news/social_affairs/AJ201306120069

  “In polite Japan, vulgarities rise as hate speech spreads

  The threats and insults came fast and furious against a woman in the fashionable Ginza district of Tokyo in late May.

  A man who was making a speech picked her out of the crowd and shouted: “Hey, you! You’re Korean, aren’t you?”

  Before she could react, the man launched into a tirade.

  “I will kill your entire family,” he yelled at her. “Die, you old bag.”

  When she smiled in her confusion, he growled, “Wipe that smirk off your face.”

  She finally told the man, “But I’m Japanese.” However, that only prompted him to approach her. He was stopped by police officers before he could reach her.

  Hate speech in Japan directed at Koreans has made headlines and drawn the scorn of Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and the United Nations. But the cold-hearted insults, threats and outright lies have spread online and in the public to target celebrities, total strangers and even a writer who was born with no arms or legs.

  Words considered unacceptable or even taboo in a country that has long revered high levels of politeness are now commonly used in such attacks.

  The man who yelled at the Japanese woman in Ginza was part of a protest organized by Zainichi Tokken wo Yurusanai Shimin no Kai (Group of citizens who do not tolerate privileges for ethnic Korean residents in Japan), known more commonly as Zaitokukai, in front of the bureau of JoongAng Ilbo, a major South Korean daily.

  The protesters were furious at a column in the paper that described the August 1945 atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki as “God’s vengeance.”

  Before setting his sights on the woman, the man was blasting South Korea in a speech, using such phrases as “Koreans must die.”

  He said, “Discrimination is only something we do against other humans, so the only thing to do with cockroaches and maggots is to exterminate them.”

  Other protesters also pulled no punches in venting their criticism, with one saying, “We will turn Pyongyang and Seoul into a sea of fire.”

  To show why he thought the woman on the street was Korean, the speech reader pulled on the sides of his eyes to form narrow slits.

  She was not the only one targeted by the protesters.

  A couple with a young child who just happened to be near the protest was yelled at, “Why aren’t you raising your voices?”

  Online attacks can be more vicious and personal, given the option of anonymity the Internet provides.

  Hirotada Ototake, 37, author of the bestseller “Gotai Fumanzoku” (No One’s Perfect), found that out after he tweeted on May 18 about feeling “humiliated” at an Italian restaurant in the Ginza district.

  Ototake, who has no arms or legs, said he was forbidden from entering the restaurant because he was in a wheelchair. His tweet included the name of the restaurant.

  According to Ototake’s tweets and other forums, he had made reservations at the restaurant, which was located on the second floor of a building. However, the elevator could not be used, and only two workers were at the restaurant when he arrived.

  Ototake said he asked for someone to carry him into the restaurant, but the owner rejected the request, saying the workers were busy and the restaurant should have been informed beforehand that a wheelchair would be used.

  Restaurant workers later denied the owner used harsh language but apologized for not telling people on their website that the restaurant should be contacted beforehand for wheelchair users.

  Many posts agreed with Ototake’s complaint. But a large number of negative comments were posted, including criticism for revealing the name of the restaurant and for not informing the restaurant beforehand about the wheelchair.

  On his blog three days later, Ototake apologized for failing to keep his composure when he revealed the restaurant’s name.

  That triggered a further exchange on Twitter and the Internet that included cruel comments directed at Ototake.

  One tweet described him as “a worthless daruma,” a doll without limbs. It said: “You were deprived of your arms and legs because of your personality, which is like a walking land mine. Don’t think you can always live by your own rules, you piece of garbage.”

  Ototake responded, “Oh, so I am garbage.”

  Columnist Minori Kitahara, 42, has been under attack for years, but she said the spread of online services has enabled her detractors to increase the frequency of their insults and their blatant lies. She said she also feels the mood nowadays attaches greater veracity to vulgar language.

  She wrote about her experiences with discrimination in a recent book titled “Sayonara hanryu” (Goodbye Korean wave).

  Her Twitter account came under a viral attack in the summer of 2011, after she criticized protests directed at Fuji Television Network Inc. for broadcasting too many South Korean dramas and programs.

  One tweet said, “We can certify with 99.9 percent accuracy that she is an ethnic Korean living in Japan.” The website for her company was also bombarded by angry posts.

  Later, a Wikipedia entry supposedly about Kitahara described her as a totally different individual. Those who took the entry as the truth spread the attack against her.

  “I thought that having animosity directed at me from others would be a dramatic event that happened only a few times in my life,” she said. “But I had to deal with one-way abuse at a pace of one post every three seconds. It also became clear that the attacks were making the senders feel good. There was a period when I was afraid to look at the Internet or Twitter.”

  It took her a year to organize her feelings and directly deny that she was an ethnic Korean.

  Kitahara also faced criticism in 2002, but back in those days, the insults arrived mainly through e-mail.

  She said the spread of social networking services has created opportunities for people to induce overwhelming fear in their targets.

  “People who can only hurt others as a way to express the fact they are serious and angry also show a sense of desperation that their views will not be understood if they only use polite language and sensible arguments,” Kitahara said. “I was only trying to get across what I felt. It is frightening not to say anything if one thinks about the possible risks.”

  Even a seemingly harmless comment can trigger an onslaught of hate-filled comments.

  Abe said on his Facebook account that psychiatrist Rika Kayama, a known critic of the prime minister, wasn’t worth discussing when referring to her appearance on a TV program to discuss political affairs.

  The animosity directed at Kayama then exploded on an Internet bulletin board.

  Other attacks in recent months show that even ordinary people can be targets because they are considered somehow different from others.

  Personal information of those believed connected to school bullying incidents and corporal punishment against students has spread over the Internet. Even individuals who were mistakenly identified were left vulnerable to criticism and hate-filled words.

  Koichi Yasuda, 48, a journalist who has followed Zaitokukai since its establishment in 2007, said the use of such words as “die” and “kill” on the streets became standard language from about 2012.

  “They do not feel they are discriminating against or hurting someone,” Yasuda said. “They feel elation because they feel they are fighting something they consider to be incredibly powerful.”

  Yasuda said the fact that such people become convinced of outlandish conspiracy theories also shows that many people are worried about not only themselves but also the nation and the economy that supports them.

  “As the sense of language in real society evolves over the Internet, it becomes much sharper through the search for more and more stimulating words. In the end, discrimination and hate speech turn into a form of entertainment,” he said.

  The words of hatred directed at Koreans have not gone unnoticed at the top levels of the Japanese government and international society.

  At a May 7 session of the Upper House Budget Committee, Abe said about hate speech, “It is extremely regrettable that there are words and deeds that try to exclude certain nations and peoples.”

  On his Facebook account, Abe expressed his hope that hate speech would not escalate.

  On May 21, the U.N. Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights called on Japan to prevent hate speech and other actions that degrade former “comfort women” who provided sex to Imperial Japanese military personnel before and during World War II.

  Facebook officials have also said they plan to strengthen regulations against anonymous postings that could be considered hate speech.

  Yasuda said hate speech may stem from an individual’s own insecurities or feelings of inadequacy.

  “When one is not being properly evaluated at work or is experiencing problems in relationships, it is much easier to blame others or society rather than admit one’s own shortcomings. Everyone has the ability to make it through today or tomorrow using such means,” he said.

  “Whether that turns into hate speech is up to each individual, so what is probably more fearful is if society becomes accustomed to such hate speech or people’s sensitivity toward language becomes worn down,” Yasuda said.

  (While discriminatory language is contained in the descriptions of the Internet postings and demonstrations, the language was not revised for the purpose of this article.)”

  Reply
• June 13, 2013 at 5:38 am

  Jim Di Griz says:

  @ John (Yokohama) #6

  Great link, thanks.

  “Discrimination is only something we do against other humans, so the only thing to do with cockroaches and maggots is to exterminate them.”

  Koreans should be exterminated, and all other NJ discriminated against?
  This is the same Japanese right wing that believes WW2 was a ‘non-aggressive war’, waged to free asian brothers from western evil imperialism, during which the Japanese army never did any wrong, and that Japan is the victim? How do they rationalize that in their own heads? Mental.

  Reply
• June 13, 2013 at 10:34 pm

  DR says:

  Wow! Reminds me of all of my Oya-ji neighbors where I lived. They’d go into the “Urusai! Urusai!” mode when they were confronted with a concept the synapses in their fossilized grey matter couldn’t process. And now it’s public….on a grand scale. Lift rug, sweep dirt under, and deny, deny, deny! Pesky foreigners, they MADE him do it! Hope someone fast-tracks this to the IOC….

  Reply
• June 15, 2013 at 6:06 pm

  Peter McArthur says:

  Astonishing! He doesn’t know why they’re laughing at him. He used to be ambassador to Australia, but he doesn’t know that some cultures laugh at people when they talk crap.

  No wonder Japan punches below its weight in international diplomacy.

  Reply
• June 15, 2013 at 8:33 pm

  Adam1 says:

  Abe’s education reform to push more english lessons might bring more morons like this.
  Anyway, here is something I would say Japan try to indirectly mention Turkey’s current situation without saying anything. Olympic 2020 only in Tokyo gurranty your safety

  http://newsonjapan.com/html/newsdesk/article/103122.php

  I hope IOC don’t have blind eyes.

  Reply
• June 16, 2013 at 3:03 am

  Mainichi_struggle says:

  It’s interesting to see two recent threads on seemingly disparate subject matter come together so nicely:
  Thread 1: English ability/experience with other cultures often deemed unnecessary or undesirable for new hires in many Japanese companies and institutions.
  Thread 2: Japanese diplomats constantly getting into trouble by not understanding correct English usage or how to behave in a multi-cultural environment.
  Regarding ambassador Hideaki Ueda’s recent gaffe, as a poster on another site has observed, there was a substantial awkward pause and unusual inflection during his statement: “Certainly Japan is not in the middle age, WE ARE. ..one of the most advanced country in this field.”Whether laughing ensued based on the way his manner of speaking made the statement sound contradictory or the panel’s incredulousness upon hearing such an incredible statement the end result is the same: He cannot communicate effectively (as one should expect an international diplomat to do).

  It has become overwhelmingly obvious to me (as I’m sure it has others who read and post here) that Japan (in general) often wants two completely contradictory things simultaneously: International accolade and respect / wholesale acceptance of obviously fictitious propaganda dispersed through the ministries for overseas consumption.

  Sorry, but you can’t have it both ways. Allowing business owners to have total freedom to disallow entry to anybody they see fit (as long as they are foreign), then complaining that foreigners are ‘attacking’ Japan for being a xenophobic country is another example. Advocating video evidence for felony and misdemeanor convictions but pushing to keep cameras out of criminal interrogations would be another. Lying about Japan’s human rights record then becoming incredulous and infuriated when other countries’ representatives don’t swallow your propaganda wholesale is yet another.

  As the only visibly non-Japanese member of my workplace I am particularly sensitive to attitudes among Japanese regarding my presence. When the international press is singing Japan’s praises I am welcome (“Oh, your company is so international”). When Japan is in hot water I am met with suspicion and scorn (“Oh, you have a gaijin. What is he doing here”). I entreat you all to please only say positive things about Japan in the future. It will help bring my little ‘dreamy day’ aspirations closer to reality [insert smiley-face, winking emoticon here].

  @ John (Yokohama) #6
  Don’t you find it interesting that when confronted by threats of “I will kill your entire family”from the Zaitokukai the woman’s response was “But I’m Japanese”. Isn’t that telling? Instead of “Leave me alone you racist creep” she basically responds with a “But I’m one of you.” entreaty. Nazi parallels, anybody? The response to the threat might be even more telling than the actual threat…

  Reply
• June 16, 2013 at 12:15 pm

  Loverilakkuma says:

  In the footage, I wasn’t sure where he was until I checked out his profile with a picture. He was sitting in the middle, but hard to see because his face was clouded by listeners sitting in the front rows. I think the footage well illustrates Japan’s political satire by portraying Ueda as the representative of J elitists who behave like the pre-programmed i-robot without face. Definitely he’s NOT a role model of “JAPANESE WTIH ENGLISH ABILITIES.” That explains why Japan has MOFA, which is referred to “MINISTRY OF FEIGNED ATTITUDE.”

  Reply
• June 16, 2013 at 1:22 pm

  JJ says:

  It’s honestly just typical, sad to say. It is indicative of the majority of “globalized” Japanese who are not picked for a position based on any social skills whatsoever.

  I’m sure there are more than a few posters here that have had a heated argument with a Japanese person who turns lethal when Japanese society is criticized in any way: while I again, hate to say it, it is mostly men.

  Can’t say you can blame this idiot: Japanese with true pride in their country accept the faults, and pragmatically move ahead: the revolutionary thinkers of Japan always made note of this (e.g. Fukuzawa; Nitobe; Sakamoto). This man is one of the privileged who like many during “Bubble education,” was not taught to handle criticism.

  Reply
• June 16, 2013 at 9:14 pm

  Bill says:

  Here is a Youtube video (30:03) of this incident being discussed in Japan’s lower house on June 11, 2013. Discussion led by DPJ lawmaker Takeshi Shina. Parliamentary Vice-Minister for Foreign Affairs Toshiko Abe gives the perspective of MOFA on the incident.

  http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=615NgvTbV4A#!

  Reply
• June 17, 2013 at 6:03 pm

  Welp says:

  @11 It’s just another case of “when we want it, how we want it.” When we want it, you’re dead fluent and can read anything we thrust in front of you at a moment’s notice, and when we don’t want it, you will be complimented for not stumbling over the pronunciation of “konnichi wa” and belittled appropriately. When we want it, you are one of the workers in the office same as us, taking the same punishments as us when we mess up, but when we don’t want it, you’re the foreigner and you’re out on your own so as not to cast a bad light on the rest of us.
  Preferential selection and abuse of the uchi/soto dichotomy that occurs so often here, especially with a disadvantaged group of people who they can wield power over based upon bloodline and citizenship.

  Reply
• June 17, 2013 at 9:09 pm

  Jim di Griz says:

  @Mainichi_struggle #11

  You are onto something with your analysis of the two threads coming together. That’s not a failing of Debito.org (not to imply that you claimed it was), but rather these two issues are linked, if not sharing a causal relationship. That deserves deeper analysis,

  Reply
• June 21, 2013 at 3:49 pm

  Baudrillard says:

  @ JJ #13 “I’m sure there are more than a few posters here that have had a heated argument with a Japanese person who turns lethal when Japanese society is criticized in any way: while I again, hate to say it, it is mostly men. ”

  I have the opposite experience, sadly. Only yesterday my Japanese teacher-whom I regard as an open minded cool person and she is married to a Chinese, etc etc. sadly still thinks in paradigms such as
  1. “Japan needs gaijin who think like you, who understands us and can give us new ideas (which I doubt in practice) and then after a drink or two
  2. “Rules and laws in Japan are the same thing” (when I said Oyaji sometimes try to “explain the rules” to me, i.e. force me to do what they want) she jumps to
  3. “You white people (“guys”) have it easy in Japan”, I was called “yellow” at the Opera house by some middle aged woman who wanted my seat. Japan is a piece of cake compared to that, you only come here for money anyway.”
  4. “White people cannot be the victims of racism” (Asians-subtext Japanese-have it worse (subtext, when not admitted into the white man’s club they are so eager to join).

  I wouldn’t call having your child refused entry to an onsen on the basis of her appearance “a piece of cake” for “You white people”.

  Disappointing. I think I shall do the Japanese thing and ignore her. I dislike confrontation, and I couldnt get a word in edgeways, except to counter that I do not regard myself as a member of a particular tribe but a free citizen of the world, a paradigm I wish she would adopt.

  Reply
• June 29, 2013 at 4:33 am

  Jim Di Griz says:

  Ah, now I’ve heard it all. English language skills deficiency is actually ‘protecting’ Japan from global disasters- official!

  http://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2013/06/29/business/poor-english-skills-saved-japans-bankers-from-subprime-loan-fiasco-aso/#.Uc7vHBwSGkM

  From Aso; the man with deficient Japanese language skills (kanji test, anyone?).

  Reply