Historical Divergence and Political Convergence: Post-October 7 Japanese Media and its Impact on Jewish Organizations in Japan

• In Event: Jews respond to crisis

Abstract

Since October 7, 2023, the impacts of the ongoing war between Hamas and Israel on minority Jewish populations outside of Israel has become a globally urgent issue. In Japan, the past three decades of warming bilateral ties between Israel and Japan have coincided with a precipitous decline in the previously prominent genre of YUDAYA BUKKU (Jewish books), or books espousing antisemitic conspiracies about Jewish history and contemporary geopolitics.

However, a recent spate of books with dustcovers bearing “KINKYŪ SHUPPAN (emergency publication)” in bold text discuss everything from proposals of a link between the Holocaust to the “Palestinian problem (PARESUCHINA MONDAI),” to Japanese academics’ arguments that Jewish nationhood is a colonialist myth. Amidst the continued publication of such books, in November 2023, a far-right wing activist rammed his car into the police barricade outside the Israeli embassy in Tokyo, and in early 2024, a blood libel about Tokyo’s oldest synagogue was circulated on Japanese social media. While prior scholarship argues that the YUDAYA BUKKU boom was divorced from actual Jews, this seems untenable in the present moment. My paper asks: what are the impacts of rising anti-Israel discourse on Jews in Japan?

I read this surging anti-Israel – and sometimes, outright anti-Jewish – media through my ethnographic fieldwork with Jewish organizations in Tokyo, and interviews with diplomats, pro-Israel evangelical Japanese Christians, and publishers. Since October 7, usually unaligned political groups, from leftist peace activists to far-right isolationist anti-globalists, are consistently using similar images and rhetoric to articulate distinct perspectives about Japan’s relation to Israel. I argue that this metastasizing of tropes about Jews in political discourse about Israel threatens to reframe Jewish experience and community in Japan as inherently political. Turning to how events about October 7 hostages, Holocaust commemoration, and even book launch events about Israeli tech startups have received in Japan, I forward that the widespread politicization of Jewishness is marginalizing the perspectives of Jews and their participation in Japanese society. Given the historical diffusion of conspiracies and misinformation about Jews from Japan to other East Asian contexts, this new paradigm is both urgent and concerning.

Author

• Dylan Hallingstad O'Brien, University of California, San Diego