Mei Ling participates in anti-hate speech protest

Misuzu Goto’s participation in a counterdemonstration against anti-Korean hate speech fulfills a promise she made to Akira Kido after he explained why he believed a third party should intervene when people suffer. The act is significant not only as a public response to xenophobia but as a private gesture between two people: Misuzu goes because she wants to, while Kido discovers that her intervention leaves him grateful, proud, and uneasy at once.

The promise

Kido and Misuzu discuss the difficulty of deciding who is a victim and who is responsible for another person’s suffering. Kido argues that the uncertainty is precisely why a third party should step in, and links that intervention to the purpose of the legal profession. Misuzu listens, then tells him that she will go in his place. Kido is caught off guard: he has not meant to ask her to represent him and worries that attending might cause her distress. He thanks her, but she explains that she wants to go for her own reasons. Her decision is therefore neither a simple assignment from Kido nor an act undertaken solely to please him. It is a choice she claims as her own.

The demonstration on television

Some time later, Kido is at home with his family when he turns on the television and sees a news report showing a hostile crowd marching in daylight with Rising Sun flags and shouting anti-Korean abuse. He intends to turn the broadcast off. Then its caption shifts to “Counterprotesters on the Scene,” and a woman holding a placard appears briefly. The sign reads, “Can’t we just get along? Chinhage jinaeyo!” Kido is almost certain the woman is Misuzu.

The sight surprises him because he had not expected her to act on what she said. When the broadcast is interrupted, he tries to recover the image and remember whether he truly recognized her. His memory is already hazy, but the moment prompts him to recall her earlier promise. They have not been in contact lately, and he had nearly forgotten their conversation; now he realizes that she went without telling him, and that she has carried out her intention in his absence.

Kido’s divided response

Kido is glad that he matters enough to Misuzu for her to make the effort. He understands that attending could not have been easy, and the recognition brings him a smile. Yet he cannot approve her participation without reservation. His feelings settle somewhere between joy and dismay, and he sighs at his own tendency to scrutinize her choice even while feeling touched by it.

That hesitation is tied to Kido’s understanding of his own Zainichi identity. He reflects on how he has regarded Zainichi people as neither simply separate from him nor a group he can judge from the outside: his interests are bound up with theirs, and he considers himself part of that community. Against this background, Misuzu’s appearance is more than a reassuring personal gesture. She has acted publicly in a matter that Kido experiences as connected to his own position, but he remains unsure how to receive someone else’s intervention on his behalf.

Personal care and public action

The counterdemonstration joins a private exchange to a visible political response. Misuzu’s promise began in conversation, where Kido described intervention as a responsibility arising when suffering cannot be neatly assigned. At the demonstration, she becomes the person who intervenes, carrying a conciliatory message in the presence of anti-Korean hostility. Her sign does not erase the conflict around her; its call for people to get along stands against the abuse shown in the same report.

For Kido, the event also makes the limits of his own response visible. He is moved that Misuzu has followed through, yet wary of the difficulty and implications of her choice. The news image offers only a brief glimpse, and his recollection is uncertain, but its effect is lasting: he understands that Misuzu acted independently on a promise he had almost forgotten. Her attendance thus gives practical form to the question they had discussed—when another person’s suffering calls for intervention—and leaves Kido confronting the complicated intimacy of being cared for in public.