Prisca Molotsi thought she had moved well beyond her past life of being taunted by police, seeing her family’s property confiscated and hearing about people, including a relative, being killed for opposing a racist policy.
But those unpleasant memories were rekindled after she heard about novelist Ayako Sono’s column calling for racial segregation in Japan.
“Do the Japanese think they are better than other Asians?” asked Molotsi, a singer who was born in South Africa and now serves as a lecturer at Nanzan University in Nagoya. “There is no difference among humans.”
Anger and bewilderment continue over Sono’s weekly column that appeared in the Feb. 11 edition of The Sankei Shimbun. The 83-year-old author, pointing to what she learned about post-apartheid South Africa, wrote that although Japan needs foreign workers to make up shortages in the labor force, they should live in separate residential areas for different races.
Amid the ensuing uproar, Sono said she still likes the idea of separate communities based on race but insisted she never praised apartheid. She also accused the media of passing on misinformation.
But some say the damage to Japan’s image has already been done.
“Separating residential areas is nothing other than apartheid,” said Ryuichiro Saito, secretary-general of the Africa Japan Forum, a nonprofit organization that submitted a letter of protest to Sankei and Sono regarding the column. “We cannot ignore her comment.”
After her column was published, Reuters transmitted an article that said in part that a former adviser to Prime Minister Shinzo Abe had praised apartheid. Internet postings lambasted Sono.
In response to a request from The Asahi Shimbun, Sono, who served as a member of a government panel on education under the Abe administration, submitted a written statement.
“I have lived in a world unrelated to blogs and Twitter, but I have learned that there are people who have become agitated based on mistaken information,” she wrote.
“I have never been an adviser to Prime Minister Abe. Any newspaper that transmits such an article, whether it be Japanese or foreign, has the responsibility to clarify the basis for the article. If they cannot present that evidence, the conscience of a media organization behooves it to revise the original article.
“I have never commended apartheid, but I do think that the existence of a ‘Chinatown’ or ‘Little Tokyo’ is a good thing.”
A South Korean man in his 40s who has lived in Tokyo’s Okubo district for 15 years described Sono’s column as “totally incomprehensible in the international community.”
The man recalls first arriving in Japan and having difficulty renting a room because real estate agents refused foreigners. Now, however, it is common to see people from China and the Middle East leading normal lives in Japan, he said.
However, hate speech rallies directed at Koreans have led to a sharp decrease in customers to the many stores operated by ethnic Koreans in Okubo, home to Tokyo’s Koreatown.
“Both the argument to separate residential areas and hate speech have a common point of unilaterally rejecting anyone who is different,” the man said.
Naoto Higuchi, an associate professor of sociology at Tokushima University, said Sono’s original comment could escalate into an international issue.
“While she says she is not proposing a return to apartheid, the gist of her column is a call for allowing foreign workers under a system of racial separation,” he said. “For foreigners living in Japan, a column that suggests social ostracism written by an influential individual and published in a national daily newspaper could lead them to hold a sense of fear that the contents of that column could spread throughout society.”
South African Ambassador Mohau Pheko wrote a protest letter to Sankei, which led to the publication in the newspaper’s Feb. 15 edition of a statement under the name of Takeshi Kobayashi, managing editor of Sankei’s Tokyo Office.
The statement said Sono was expressing personal opinions in her regular column.
It added, “We have consistently maintained a stance that all forms of discrimination should not be tolerated.”
(Azusa Ushio and Daisuke Shimizu contributed to this article.)
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