TOKYO, May 2 (Xinhua) -- A government website has been widely condemned for allowing public posts to be displayed carrying xenophobic remarks about Korean residents in Japan, local media said Wednesday.
The Cabinet Office website asked public opinions on political issues, and among the posts, some read: "Kick out the Koreans" and "Their forcible deportation is necessary," according to Kyodo News.
While the Cabinet Office in fiscal 2016 had stopped receiving and posting the public's comments, it had not removed or filtered any of the comments prior to that.
"I guess whoever was in charge at the time read them and decided to respect individual opinions. We will study how to deal with it after examining its contents in detail," Kyodo News quoted a spokesperson for the Cabinet Office as saying recently.
The website and its racially-hateful remarks have fanned the flames of a drawn-out fiery on the thorny issue, which, while ostensibly denouncing xenophobia, still has factions of the populace here.
Such xenophobic ideology here has, for decades, been the source of a great deal of intimidation and suffering for Korean residents in Japan, particularly owing to a notorious "citizens' group" called Zainichi Tokken wo Yurusanai Shimin no Kai, the official name of the ultra-nationalist group better known as Zaitokukai.
Zaitokukai, founded by the infamous Makoto Sakurai who has previously been arrested along with eight of his cohorts for a physical altercation with a Korean resident of Japan during a protest, often turns out in force on the streets for hours of high-decibel, intimidating, anti-Korean rabble-rousing.
The group, described by Japan's National Police Agency as a potential threat to public order due to its "extreme nationalist and xenophobic" ideology, in their public demonstrations, are typically dressed in Imperial Japanese Army-inspired uniforms and use megaphones while waving Imperial flags.
Zaitokukai, often likened to Neo-Nazis, believe that some Korean residents in Japan, known as "Zainichi Koreans", are being given special legal privileges by the government here to help integrate them into the Japanese society.
Zaitokukai also vocally oppose long-term Korean residents who have been given permanent residence status by the Ministry of Justice and, as such, are eligible to claim the same welfare benefits as Japanese citizens.
Zaitokukai's xenophobic manifesto, calls for Zainichi Koreans, as well as other non-Japanese residing here, to be stripped of their legal citizenship, kicked out of Japan, belittled in public, harassed on the streets and in their places of business, and, in the most extreme and shocking cases, assaulted, raped and murdered.
In terms of Japanese law there is a clear distinction between a "hate crime" and a "hate speech," but groups like Zaitokukai have previously exploited the law and operated in a grey area under so-called free-speech.
This had made thousands of people's lives of all ages here, including young children, utterly miserable, as hate crimes could be punishable by law, but individuals and groups who made hate speeches could do so with complete impunity.
Such was the seriousness of the problem here that an anti-hate speech law was finally brought into effect in 2016, despite Japan having been a signatory to the United Nations International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination since the mid-1990s.
Japan is home to around 600,000 ethnic Koreans, many of whom are the descendants of the nearly 800,000 Korean workers who were forcibly brought to Japan to work during Japan's brutal colonial occupation of the Korean Peninsular in WWII.
