A Legacy Of Angry Men Online

[Nevilledog]

Link to tweet

https://www.garbageday.email/p/american-carnage-with-a-japanese

I was working in Tokyo the day Trump was sworn in. I’ve often compared it to a scene from a science fiction movie where an astronaut sees nukes going off from the window of a space station. To feel that far away from the chaos back home was disorienting. I felt bizarre pangs of guilt for not being there as I sat in a leopard print-themed dive bar in the Golden Gai neighborhood of Shinjuku and watched the “American carnage” speech with a Japanese dub, intercut with Japanese reporters explaining why people were burning cars in the capital. And I spent that following week having conversations with Japanese reporters about what the Trump era might be like. It was all anyone there wanted to talk about with me.

Out to lunch a few days later, one reporter offered up that the Trump presidency would probably be a lot like the early days of Shinzo Abe’s term. Abe may, at this point, be best known internationally for his cutesy Mario entrance announcing the Tokyo Olympics, but he was a virulent ultranationalist who spent his time in office calling for historical revisionism about Japan’s war-time atrocities in Korea and China. The reporter I sat with at lunch painted a picture of a soon-to-be America overrun by anonymous online trolls that abused and harassed women, leftists, activists, and journalists. He also said that Abe had figured out a way to weaponize the infamous message board 2channel (which was what 4chan was modeled off of directly). The reporter said that the New York Times would probably buckle under Trump and be pushed further and further right politically as more reporters were bullied by Trump’s administration. And he said the same thing had happened with the Asahi Shimbun, one of Japan’s largest papers. Most of the things I heard during that lunch, at least partially came true.

In fact, Jake Adelstein, author of Tokyo Vice, a fantastic book that was recently adapted into an HBO show, wrote last week in a reflection on Abe’s legacy that he was “‘Trump before Trump’—except he pulled it off.” Adelstein, in 2016, also wrote an essential piece on Abe’s links to the secret Nippon Kaigi, or the “Japan Conference,” which I highly recommend reading, as well.

“Imagine if ‘future World President’ Donald Trump belonged to a right-wing evangelical group, let’s call it ‘USA Conference,’ that advocated a return to monarchy, the expulsion of immigrants, the revoking of equal rights for women, restrictions on freedom of speech—and most of his pre-selected political appointees were from the same group,” Adelstein wrote in 2016. Yes, “imagine” that.

*snip*