I was talking to an Australian friend today who pointed out that Jews are insignificant in Japan.
That’s largely right. There are fewer than 2,000 Jews in the country (Jews have been in Japan since the 16th Century and the fews Jews there today are often highly successful), but to the extent that America, as the world’s sole superpower, affects Japan, and America is disproportionately influenced and shaped by Jews, than Japan is affected by Jews.
The two island cultures of Japan and England have many similarities with Jews such as high achievement and widespread influence (Japan has economic influence but little cultural influence).
I know two guys at shul who married Japanese girls after converting them to Orthodox Judaism.
The American Thinker published Jan. 6, 2013:
Japan continues to be afflicted by widespread leftist ideology among academics and the mass media. One of its unfortunate fruits is pervasive anti-Israel and anti-Semitic sentiment in Japan.
One prominent advocate of anti-Semitism in Japan is the photojournalist Ryuichi Hirokawa. I first encountered his work in the early 1990s, when I discovered that my women’s junior college students were making use of his books to write research papers in a class I was teaching there about the Arab-Israeli conflict. I had been baffled to read papers from the mild-mannered Japanese young women in my class condemning Israel and calling for the destruction of the Jewish state as the only solution to the conflict.
Here‘s a report on Japanese views of Jews:
Japan represents a special case in the research of modern antisemitism since there have been few Jews in Japan, and the Japanese are unable to distinguish Jews from other non-Japanese. This has not prevented several waves of antisemitism to arise during the last century.
The existence of recurrent negative attitudes toward Jews in Japan is a fascinating phenomenon because of the absence of most of the bases for it that characterize antisemitic attitudes in other nations. First, antisemitism in Japan has not been evolved from an encounter with Jews, for the Jewish community in Japan consists of about a thousand members, and the Japanese do not, and probably cannot, distinguish between them and other Western residents. Antisemitism does not have long roots in Japan; it started to flourish only in the twentieth century. Similarly, it does not have any religious roots: Judaism has never threatened or come into theological conflict with any of the leading religions practiced in Japan.
Furthermore, antisemitism in Japan never gained full governmental support nor did it become a national ideology. It did not develop out of any significant conflict between Israel and Japan, as is the case with Arab countries. In fact, antisemitism never penetrated the lower classes in Japan nor had it any popular support. Finally it has appeared almost solely in written form and never deteriorated to the point of material damage or physical attacks on Jews.
