Issue:
April 2024
Six months on from October 7, how are Japan’s media covering the Israel-Hamas war?
For months now, Japan-based protests against Israel have been attracting people from Sendai to Hiroshima. Opposition to Israel is no longer the sole province of politically active university students, peace activists or professors specializing in Palestine. Instead, evidence of growing animosity towards Israel can be found everywhere. Take the April 1 issue of Weekly Playboy, which asks, “Why aren’t we talking about economic sanctions for the Israel-Hamas war?’ Or a March 22 Hokkaido news program that reported on how primary school students in Abashiri were writing about the dire humanitarian situation in Gaza.
For months now, Japan-based protests against Israel have been attracting people from Sendai to Hiroshima. Opposition to no longer the sole province of politically active university students, peace activists or professors specializing in Palestine. Instead, evidence of growing animosity towards Israel can be found everywhere. Take the April 1 issue of Weekly Playboy, which asks, “Why aren’t we talking about economic sanctions for the Israel-Hamas war?’ Or a March 22 Hokkaido news program that reported on how primary school students in Abashiri were writing about the dire humanitarian situation in Gaza.
A cursory scan of Japanese social media for posts tagged “Israel” supports the contention in a recent cover story in the Economist, which proclaims “ISRAEL ALONE.” While this story perhaps oversells the loss of international diplomatic backing for Israel, it speaks to a very real global outcry that is causing the country to hemorrhage cultural and political capital.
This international wave of criticism against Israel has crested in Japan as well. From its inception in 2005, the Boycott, Divestments, and Sanctions (BDS) was largely an unknown and marginal phenomenon here. According to the Palestinian BDS National Committee, the movement seeks to emulate the economic strategies levied against apartheid South Africa to push Israel towards returning to pre-Six-Day War (a 1967 conflict also known as the Third Arab-Israeli War) borders, increased rights for Arab-Israeli citizens, and the tearing down of a separation wall in the West Bank.
In 2018, the movement began to gain a foothold in Osaka and Kyoto through targeted protests and the emergence of two Kansai-based groups: the Palestine Forum Japan and the Japan Information Center on Palestine.
Using letter writing and small demonstrations, BDS activists have successfully lobbied department stores to discontinue sales of Israeli products or even organisers to pull out of hosting Israel-related guests. Nonetheless, despite protests by BDS activists in 2018, the Israel Defense Exposition (ISDEF) went ahead in Kawasaki. This highlights what researchers Zelcer-Lavid and Evron explain in a 2021 article as the readiness of some companies in Japan to forestall protests by removing Israeli products or participation, on condition that doing so would not deal a significant blow to the bottom line (as cancelling the ISDEF would have been).
In the context of the ongoing conflict and the deteriorating humanitarian situation in Gaza, the BDS movement in Japan is gaining public support. As early as November, an article in the Diplomat observed: “Public opinion in Japan is tilted toward an immediate ceasefire, and there is mounting criticism over the government’s cautious balancing act between Israel and Palestine.”
This surging acrimony towards Israel in Japan’s media is occurring simultaneously with grassroots demonstrations against both Israel and Japanese companies with ties to Israel. In contrast, there has been some support on the right of the political spectrum, including former Shinzo Abe administration officials and Akari Iiyama, a Middle East Studies scholar and outspoken member of the recently formed Conservative Party of Japan.
But support for Israel from Japan’s politicians and scholars has been in the minority, driven by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs’ (MOFA) providing mixed signals about the conflict in statements, UN votes, and even social media posts. As examples of this ambivalence towards Israel, we can look to the baffling post on X (formerly known as Twitter) from a MOFA official who attended a Hanukkah event at the Israeli Embassy of Japan in December. His post was hashtagged #Gaza and #Palestine, while part of MOFA’s initial statement on October 7 read: “Japan offers its condolences to the bereaved families and expresses its heartfelt sympathies to the injured. Japan urges all the parties concerned to exercise maximum restraint in order to avoid further damage and casualties.”
The lack of specificity in the statement, and the absence of the full-throated support for Israel’s right to defend itself found in a G7 statement – which Japan (as well as Canada) did not sign – has perturbed pro-Israel voices in Japan. In a February 10 article in the Jerusalem Post, a former top aide to the Abe, Taniguchi Tomohiko, told the Israeli daily: “The Japanese government’s initial response in the aftermath of the terror attack from Hamas was actually terrible.”
While MOFA later issued a statement on October 11 endorsing Israel’s “right to defend itself and its people in accordance with international law”, this would be neither the first nor last time that Japanese has pursued an opaquer foreign policy towards Israel and the Middle East.
Despite the opacity of MOFA’s position, Israel and Japan have unquestionably grown closer in recent decades.
The late former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe was instrumental in brokering a rapprochement of Israel-Japan ties, identifying Israel’s focus on technology as both an opportunity for commerce and a partnership to foster an increasingly pro-active Japanese security posture. In 2014, Israel became Japan’s first industrial research and development agreement partner, and bilateral trade reached $3.5 billion USD in 2018. Reflecting the strategic nature of Japan’s closer ties with Israel, the countries signed a cyber-defense agreement in 2017.
Continued activim targeting Israeli economic interests in Japan could have a significant effect if Japanese companies perceive their investments in Israel as coming at too high a domestic and international cost. A Jerusalem Post article on February 10 reported that an estimated 12.8% of investment in Israel’s high-tech industry comes from Japan. In further evidence of growing grassroots antagonism towards Israel, local assemblies across Japan – including Yokohama and other major cities – have unanimously passed resolutions calling for an immediate ceasefire. The resolutions speak to a widening gap between the position taken by the Kishida administration and MOFA, and the general population.
Many of the world’s most economic and militarily powerful liberal democracies have attempted to convey a unified message of support for Israel’s right to defend itself against Hamas. Yet cracks have appeared in their support, even in the U.S., where State Department staffers criticized the Biden administration’s support for Israel in a blistering letter written in November 2023.
In Japan, the Kishida administration and MOFA have also sought to emphasise their consistent and unwavering support for Israel, but at varying junctures have drawn criticism from both pro-Israel and pro-Palestine voices. The latter were angered by Japan’s decision in January to pause funding to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) following allegations by the Israeli government that UNRWA employees had been involved in the October 7 attack. However, Japan is considering resuming funding, according to multiple press reports, angering many pro-Israel online commenters.
MOFA’s ambivalent support for Israel is not actually at odds with its policy to date. Japan’s approach toward the Middle East has long been pragmatic. As scholar Raquel Shaoul wrote in a 2004 essay titled Japan and Israel, Japan has long prioritized access to oil, with alignment with American interests in the region a secondary concern. Japan’s overall approach to the Middle East has been risk averse – one reason why analysts speculated that the Abe administration had tried to build stronger ties with Israel.
The general outcry against Israel and the measured support offered by the Kishida administration and MOFA underline how individual and institutional reactions in Japan to the conflict between Hamas and Israel have much deeper roots than reflected by current events. Worryingly, commentary on the conflict in the mainstream Japanese media risks legitimizing perilous tropes about Jews.
Of particular concern are the (mis)use of the Holocaust and the disparagement of Jews as a group when it comes to criticism of Israel. A good example is a November 10 editorial on the front page of the Asahi Shimbun, which reflected on the anniversary of Nazi Germany’s 1938 pogrom Kristallnacht (The Night of Broken Glass), proclaiming that “even victims can turn into aggressors”. The editorial asks of the IDF’s continuing “Swords of Iron” campaign in Gaza: “Do the Jewish people intend to repeat their negative history, even though they have experienced indescribable suffering?”
When, on 11 January, the Asahi published a piece headlined “Disinformation a hallmark of coverage of Gaza Strip conflict”, it made no mention of disinformation in the Japanese-language media.
Perhaps even more striking was a graphic shown during TBS’s Sunday Morning news magazine on January 7 this year. Discussing the deteriorating humanitarian conditions in Gaza, the TBS announcer stood in front of a CG-animated Gaza border wall, telling viewers that Gaza “has been called an open-air prison”. She continued: “But Israel, which created this wall, was once in the opposite position,” before the CG-border wall morphs into a section of a wall at Auschwitz.
Implying that Jews are collectively responsible for the actions of the Israeli government and the IDF is not only antisemitic – it has no grounding in reality: many Jews in Israel and those who belong to the Jewish diaspora are clearly upset with the Israeli government. Indeed, the Mainichi Shimbun and NHKprofiled a Jewish graduate student and the Hiroshima-Palestine Vigil Community in Hiroshima who are leading calls for the Hiroshima Municipal Assembly to look at its own history to understand the importance of publicly calling for a ceasefire. The spread of disinformation about the conflict, and about Jews as a group, risks a revival of the troubling wave of yudaya bukku - lowbrow books espousing anti-Jewish conspiracies that perpetuated racist stereotypes of Jews in the 1980s and 1990s.
Whether it is rising disinformation or the continuing protests against Israeli-connected Japanese businesses, the rancor against Israel in print and online – as well as on the streets - shows no signs of abating. What is clear is that the longer these denunciations of Israel continue, the greater the likelihood that support for Israel from sections of Japanese business and politics will be in jeopardy.
Dylan O’Brien is a PhD Candidate in Cultural Anthropology at the University of California, San Diego. His research examines how representations of Jews and Judaism in Japan interact with Jews living in Japan.
