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Police gather outside the main entrance of the General Association of Korean Residents in Japan

On Feb. 27, a number of short articles were buried deep in the domestic news section of Japan’s major daily newspapers. These articles had titles like “Man behind shooting at Chongryon headquarters ‘out of patience’ with North Korea.” These articles said that when Satoshi Katsurada, 56, a right-wing activist and one of the two suspects in a handgun shooting at the headquarters on Feb. 23, was asked by police about the reason for his crime, he told them he had “run out of patience because North Korea keeps firing missiles.” Chongryon is an abbreviation for the General Association of Korean Residents in Japan, a North Korea-affiliated organization that is based in the Chiyoda Ward of Tokyo.

When the crime was committed, Katsurada was reportedly driving the vehicle, while the other suspect who accompanied him, a former yakuza, or gangster, fired a handgun at the entrance to the Chongryon headquarters. “After firing the gun, we were planning to ram the van into the building,” Katsurada also stated. They fired five shots at the headquarters. While nobody was wounded, someone easily could have been, since Chongryon officials were working in the building at the time. The logic implicit in Katsurada’s statement is that his dislike for North Korea’s repeated launch of missiles in the direction of Japan made it acceptable to shoot at Chongryon, given its affiliation with North Korea.

But Katsurada is not someone who suddenly jumped into action because of North Korea’s recent missile launches. According to the Japanese press, he has been a right-wing activist for more than 30 years and has participated in the anti-Korean rallies organized by the racist organization Zaitokukai (the Association of Citizens against the Special Privileges of the Zainichi, or ethnic Koreans in Japan) since the 2000s.

Katsurada can even now be seen in propaganda videos posted online by right-wing activists as he engages in hate speech while wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with the Japanese flag and a hat that looks like those once worn by the Japanese army. In 2013, one of Katsurada’s children – a middle school student at the time – shocked the nation by going to Tsuruhashi, Osaka’s Korea Town and shouting, “If you keep acting so cocky, we’re going to commit the Tsuruhashi Massacre, rather than the Nanjing Massacre.”

The reason that hate speech is dangerous is because it does not always end in speech. This point is epitomized by Katsurada’s shooting at Chongryon. When the Great Kanto earthquake struck Japan in 1923, groundless rumors that Koreans were poisoning the wells and setting fires spread through Japan and actually led to a massacre of Koreans. It is estimated that more than 6,000 Koreans were slaughtered by the police, the army and vigilante bands. Even a report drafted by the Japanese Cabinet Office acknowledged that Koreans had been killed in some cases.

The Japanese government has not released exact figures about this massacre, a fact that the Japanese right-wing has recently exploited to dispute this figure and claim that 6,000 people were not actually massacred. Even so, they rarely deny that some kind of massacre occurred.

What is even more troubling is Japanese society’s apathetic response to the Chongryon shooting. Many of the comments posted on articles about the incident clearly condone the shooting, saying things such as “I get how they feel.” Another common refrain was “I bet [Chongryon] staged it.”

or Chongryon

Given the pressure that the administration of Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has been putting on North Korea, there is a growing sense that the Chongryon shooting does not warrant much criticism. “Japanese society may not encourage shooting up Chongryon, but it has a tendency to forgive it,” fumed Nam Sung-u, the group’s vice chairman.

Does one’s hatred of Chongryon make it okay to shoot a gun and injure someone? Those brief articles tucked away on the domestic news page makes me afraid.

By Cho Ki-weon, Tokyo correspondent

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