A large advertisement in Tokyo’s leading financial newspaper, claiming that Jewish financiers were plotting to topple the imperial family and dismember Japan, has drawn a demand for “an apology to the Jewish people” by the Simon Wiesenthal Center.
The headline in the one-third-page ad in the Nihon Keizai (Nikkei) — Japan’s equivalent of the Wall Street Journal — said “the stock crash, the high yen and the political turmoil (in Japan) are no coincidence. After defeating Europe, America and Russia, Jewish capital is now after Japan.”
The July 27 ad was placed by Daichi Kikaku, a small publisher of books on economics and stocks, mainly to promote a three-volume series titled “The Last Enemy: Shoot Japan.”
To indicate how far the plot by “Jewish industrial and financial groups, centered around the Rothschilds” had advanced, the ad displayed a 5,000-yen note.
An annotation affirmed that the picture of Mount Fuji on the back of the note was actually an outline of Mount Sinai, proving that Japan’s Finance Ministry and the Bank of Japan were already under Jewish control.
In his letter to the president of Nikkei, Rabbi Abraham Cooper, associate dean of the Wiesenthal Center, wrote that “It is difficult to quantify the sense of shock, anger and indignation that so distinguished a Japanese newspaper as yours would stain its good name by prominently displaying an advertisement which gives credence and respectability to blatant and outlandish lies about the Jewish people.”
Cooper told the Los Angeles Times that an apparent resurgence of anti-Semitism in Japan was linked to rising hostility toward the United States.
NEWSPAPER DIDN’T THINK AD SLANDEROUS
Anti-Americanism “is the way (anti-Semitism) keeps its shelf life and its strange acceptability in mainstream areas,” he said. “It would be laughable if it weren’t so tragic.”
The Los Angeles Times reported that in a written response to its correspondent’s question, a top Nikkei executive said that the newspaper had a policy against accepting slanderous ads, but did not think that the ad under discussion fell into that category.
The publishing house that placed the ad declined to discuss its “Jewish plot” books but asserted that “we are satisfied that the author checked his facts.”
In a recent survey, only 1 percent of Japanese said that they knew or had ever met a Jew.
Neil Sandberg, director of the American Jewish Committee’s Pacific Rim Institute, commended the Wiesenthal Center for its protest action but suggested that Japan’s recent record had both shadows and lights.
Sandberg, who meets frequently with Japanese government and media leaders, noted that the Japanese government recently came out strongly against the Arab economic boycott of Israel, reversing decades of tacit compliance.
Two of Japan’s largest newspapers have carried op-ed articles condemning the spate of anti-Semitic books and Israel-bashing, Sandberg said. Even so, he noted, “anti-Semitism in Japan is an ongoing problem.”
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
