Calls in the Diet for legislation to curb hate speech targeting foreign residents of Japan are being made even as the issue barely registers on the campaign trail for the July 21 Upper House poll.
Over the past six months, demonstrations and parades against foreign residents, especially Koreans, have grown in intensity. In Osaka's Tsuruhashi district, home to large numbers of "zainichi" resident Koreans, a 14-year-old girl in February using a microphone loudly maligned Korean residents, saying she despised them and warned them to relocate to the Korean Peninsula or be massacred.
Her comments were reported worldwide and were followed in the months afterward by anti-Korean demonstrations in Tokyo and Osaka that grew, with protestors holding signs saying "Good or Bad Koreans: Kill them All."