When the Anti-Defamation League conducted its unprecedented public opinion poll in the spring of 2014, in which we surveyed 100 countries and 53,100 individuals on their attitudes toward Jews, the most surprising finding was the one that showed that 51 percent of South Koreans held anti-Semitic views.
This was the highest anti-Semitic rating by far of any non-Muslim Asian country, more than doubling the rates of China and Japan.
We did seek to understand those numbers, meeting with South Korean officials who assured us that the numbers must reflect a misunderstanding of the questions being asked (polling was, of course, conducted in Korean). But since we felt confident about our numbers elsewhere in the world, we left the South Korea numbers as they were, while continuing to wonder whether there was some cultural misunderstanding.
We still do not pretend to know all the answers to this conundrum, but recent developments stemming from a merger battle between Samsung Group’s Lee family and activist investor Paul Singer have revealed levels of anti-Semitism in the Korean business and media communities that we were told never existed.
Let’s be clear. The takeover struggle between Elliott Associates and Samsung over a merger of two Samsung companies is a business matter that is beyond the scope or interest of ADL. Clearly, strong interests were at work on both sides and powerful emotions were part of the struggle. (The merger was approved by shareholders last week.)
What was of concern to us, however, was the injection of anti-Semitism into the battle. Three Korean publications ran stories attacking Jews who they said were behind the effort to block the Samsung merger. One, the SISA Journal, published an article quoting both a former South Korean diplomat and a U.S. educated Korean lawyer about how Jews control Wall Street. Meanwhile, Samsung C and T depicted Elliot’s founder Paul Singer in cartoons as a vulture-like figure, seeking to take money away from the poor.
Here is a letter by a Jewish academic to the New York Times in 1987:
To the Editor:
I write to commend and comment on your March 12 news article on recent Japanese anti-Semitism.
First, Japanese anti-Semitism has a long history. It stretches back to the 1870’s, when Christian missionaries introduced the Japanese to an image of the Jews as a venal and despised people. This image was reinforced by Western literary works like ”The Merchant of Venice,” the first of Shakespeare’s plays to be translated into Japanese.
The notorious ”Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” which the historian Norman Cohn has called ”a warrant for genocide,” provides the basis for much Japanese anti-Semitic writing. This includes the currently popular books of Masami Uno (”If You Understand Judea, You Can Understand the World” and ”If You Understand Judea, You Can Understand Japan”), the starting point for your report. The ”Protocols” was first translated into Japanese in 1924 and continues to be reissued, most recently by the Shin-Jinbutsu Oraisha publishing company this year.
Second, anti-Semitism has greater intellectual currency and respectability in Japan than in perhaps any other industrialized society. In January 1986, an anti-Semitic novel titled ”Passover” by a Japanese woman residing in Los Angeles won the 94th Akutagawa Prize, Japan’s most prestigious literary award. It was awarded by a jury of Japan’s most respected novelists and critics, headed by the Roman Catholic novelist Shusaku Endo.
Third, it should be pointed out that the Japanese have also produced voluminous legitimate scholarship on Jewish history and culture. In 1979, the annual meeting of Japanese Germanists took up the topic of ”German-Jewish Symbiosis,” with papers on the work of Heine, Kafka, Elias Canetti and others. There was even a paper on Yiddish language and literature delivered by a Japanese Yiddishist.
The works of Elie Wiesel, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Martin Buber, Gershom Scholem and virtually every other significant Jewish author have been translated into Japanese. The work of Masanori Miyazawa should also be noted in this context. A professor of history at Doshisha Women’s University in Kyoto, Masanori Miyazawa has analyzed in books and articles the long and perverse history of Japanese anti-Semitism, and has been an outspoken critic of it.
Finally, although Shichihei Yamamoto, author of ”The Japanese and the Jews,” whom you quote, is probably correct that, taken alone, anti-Semitic books in Japan are more annoying than dangerous, their popularity is disturbing in the context of recent events. Only last September, Prime Minister Yasuhiro Nakasone alleged that blacks and Hispanics were lowering the level of intelligence in the United States, and Masayuki Fujio, Minister of Education, was sacked the same month for strident defense of pre-World War II Japanese behavior in Korea and China. Furthermore, Japan has been re-editing its high-school history textbooks to delete any suggestion of Japanese culpability for that war.
In this context, Japanese anti-Semitism reveals itself as but one manifestation of widespread racist thinking that has permeated the highest levels of Japanese Government and business bureaucracy. What emerges is a self-image of the Japanese as a pure race, superior to other mongrelized peoples, but unjustly persecuted by them. We know from bitter experience the potential consequences of this state of affairs, and everything possible should be done by all people of good will to reverse it before this annoyance has real political repercussions.
DAVID G. GOODMAN Urbana, Ill., March 13, 1987 The writer, associate professor of Japanese and comparative literature at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, has written two books in Japanese on the Jews and Israel.
