Answerman

What Is Uyoku Dantai?

Manuel asks:

I've recently watched the last three episodes of Highschool of the Dead, where it introduces Saya's parents and their supporters, then I read that in the original manga they're actually a group called Uyoku Dantai, and they needed to be toned down for the anime adaptation since their views are considered politically incorrect in Japan. What exactly is this group, and is it really such a hot-button topic there?

Uyoku Dantai isn't one group, but rather the category of Japan's far-right nationalist groups, of which there are over 1,000, with membership of over 100,000. The Uyoku Dantai have been around since the Meiji restoration (they were originally out-of-work disgruntled samurai), and generally aren't super popular with most people you meet on the street. They drive around streets in black trucks equipped with megaphones, blasting propaganda at passers-by. "Why are you wearing Western clothes, you're supposed to be Japanese!!" "We should've won the war!!" They stage protest rallies outside of embassies (targeting China and Korea of course, as well as Russia).

There's a lot of differences between the different Uyoku Dantai groups. Nearly all of them hate communism and the Japanese teacher's union. Some characterize Japan as a puppet state of the USA and demand complete independence. Others strongly support the US/Japan/South Korean stances against North Korea. There's a group of neo-Nazis, and another that's obsessed with the Senkaku Islands, an uninhabited group of islands off the coast of Taiwan that has been the subject of a decades-long territorial dispute with China. Some are run by yakuza, and have been implicated in assassination attempts, arson and other violent activities.

Various Uyoku Dantai support Japan's perceived ethnic purity by spouting hatred and intolerance of foreigners -- particularly of Chinese, Korean, and half-Japanese. While those racist tendencies go back centuries, one of the most common causes for Uyoku Dantai is the justification of Japan's actions during World War II. They celebrate many of the country's convicted war criminals, and protest any official apologies or reparations for war crimes.

Their reach doesn't stay within Japan, either. The Los Angeles suburb of Glendale, California has been targeted by these groups for the past four years over its decision to erect a small, human-sized monument to Korean "comfort women" who were forced into sexual service for Japanese military members during the war in one of its parks. The matter has become a giant emotional lighting rod in both Japan and Korea, with a majority of Koreans disapproving (and some protesting) both Japan's "inadequate" official apologies and US$8.3 million in reparations, and Japan's far-right groups pushing documents that they say mitigates Japanese wrongdoing and fighting against any acknowledgement of comfort women whatsoever. Typically this is done with an internet lynch mob-like mentality, smearing the character of the old ladies and recently deceased who were comfort women as teenagers.

An international Uyoku Dantai known as The Global Alliance for Historical Truth (GAHT) supported a lawsuit against the city of Glendale, claiming the statue of a Korean girl sitting on a park bench caused “irreparable injury” from “feelings of exclusion, discomfort, and anger” to local Japanese-Americans by expressing “disapproval of Japan and the Japanese people." They lost, but even now, four years later, the group is still filing legal actions against the city (which keep getting dismissed), and its supporters target local journalists, city officials, and random mentions of Glendale on Twitter with a huge amount of vitriol.

And that's really a good microcosm of why Uyoku Dantai are not so well-liked by most people in Japan: fringe political views aside, their general means of proselytizing are so aggressive that they annoy the crap out of people, whether those people agree/care about the issue they're raising or not (usually not). They arguably do their causes more harm than good.

Every nation has their extreme nationalists making a fuss. Japan is no exception.

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Justin Sevakis has worked in the anime business for nearly 20 years. He's the founder of Anime News Network, and owner of the video production company MediaOCD. You can follow him on Twitter at @worldofcrap.