Rising anti-Korean xenophobia in Japan

Rising anti-Korean xenophobia in Japan is a social climate that turns Kido’s previously distant awareness of his ancestry into a source of personal unease. The Great East Japan Earthquake brings the 1923 massacre of Koreans back into public discussion; later demonstrations, online racial abuse, and popular books hostile to Korea make prejudice harder for him to dismiss as someone else’s problem. The novel traces how history and media can recast a person as a suspect category, while asking what legal status, private decency, and family love can protect when public speech licenses suspicion.

Historical Memory and Personal Recognition

For much of his life, Kido had given little thought to the connection between his ancestry and his in-laws. His father-in-law had welcomed him into the family with a remark about being fully Japanese after three generations, and Kido had understood the words as uncomplicated acceptance. Only after the Great East Japan Earthquake, when media coverage repeatedly recalled the massacre of Koreans in the aftermath of the 1923 Great Kanto Earthquake, did he reconsider what that welcome might have meant. He learned that Yokohama had been a major source of the false rumors about a Korean riot that helped fuel violence. The history was no longer distant: it had taken shape in the city where his wife’s family had lived for generations.

The family’s silence about that history sharpens the unease. Kaori’s grandfather would have been a young child during the 1923 earthquake; her great-grandfather would have been an adult. Kido wonders what they experienced in the violence that followed, but has not asked his in-laws or even Kaori. He and Kaori have discussed the prospect of another major earthquake in the Tokyo region without comparing it with the earlier disaster. The contrast makes public memory feel both present and withheld: the past is available in news reports, yet remains unspoken within the family whose history intersects with it.

The anniversary also gives the danger a disturbing horizon. The massacre’s ninetieth anniversary prompts Kido to think ahead to its centenary, even as future earthquakes in the Nankai Trough and the Tokyo region are treated as near certainties. In his thoughts, disaster and xenophobic violence converge in a fear that a future crisis could again turn Koreans into targets. His anxiety is not simply a response to history repeating itself; it comes from recognizing how readily catastrophe and rumor might make old accusations seem plausible to frightened people.

From Public Hostility to Private Vulnerability

The rise in nationalism and xenophobic far-right demonstrations following the previous summer’s dispute over Takeshima forces Kido to acknowledge that there are people he does not wish to meet and places he does not wish to visit. This recognition marks a change in his self-understanding. He had grown up largely as a Japanese person, even before naturalization, and had not regarded himself as a direct victim of discrimination. In Tokyo, accounts from other third-generation Zainichi had even made him feel embarrassed by how little bigotry he could recall. Now he is uneasy about being perceived as belonging to what public hostility calls the Korean race.

That unease becomes immediate when an old university friend contacts him to report that a childhood yearbook photograph has appeared online under the caption “Zainichi Minted as Lawyer!” The post dredges up an old assault-and-robbery case Kido had handled before marriage. Because the person he defended was Zainichi, the poster merges the case with racial insinuation and abuse. Kido is less wounded at first than dumbfounded by the language, some of it so archaic that he has never encountered it, but the page’s use of his boyhood image alongside accusations such as “spy” and “North Korean agent” makes the attack personal.

The post also identifies Kido as married and a father. The exposure of his family, rather than the insults alone, leaves him furious and unsettled. He experiences the attack as a disturbance to his sense of continuity, as if his ability to persist through time were draining away and a dissonance had taken its place. He has not told Kaori about the episode. Although she and her mother are concerned by reports of hate speech, Kido has grown tired of monitoring his own sensitivity to prejudice and misses his former ability to dismiss intolerance as a mistake.

Media, Rumor, and the Making of Categories

The novel places online abuse beside a broader media environment. On a train, Kido imagines how little his careful legal reasoning would mean to people shouting anti-Korean slogans if an extraordinary crisis overrode the ordinary order of rights. But the threat does not require an apocalypse: in his account, fake news could inflame people within everyday life and make them feel entitled to violence. The fear rests on a political distinction between the protections institutions promise and the ease with which public language can make a neighbor appear dangerous.

Kido later corrects his own tendency to explain his anxiety solely through his Zainichi identity. His colleagues at the law firm are also distressed by the post-earthquake rise in nationalism, and even publishers they had respected are filling bookstores with titles hostile to China and Korea. The significance lies in the spread of the rhetoric beyond the far right. When hostility is packaged and circulated by mainstream cultural institutions, it is harder to treat it as marginal noise; pessimism becomes a response not only to identity-based vulnerability but to the society in which that vulnerability is normalized.

A parallel media episode exposes another form of category-making. A feature about Makoto Hara, the son of a convicted murderer, recounts his boxing achievement, his withdrawal from a major championship match, his years working as a day laborer, and his later shoplifting convictions. Though the article claims to protect his identity, an online crime-enthusiast site has already exposed his mother’s surname and circulates sordid hearsay. The article sympathizes with Hara’s hardship yet speculates that criminal tendencies might be inherited. Its framing turns a complicated individual history into an argument about criminal offspring, echoing the racial post’s conversion of a person into a presumed type. The novel’s concern is not that these cases are identical, but that sensational narratives can make insinuation look like explanation.

Belonging, Law, and Family Memory

Kido’s professional life depends on the legal order he works to preserve: it protects his family’s human rights and their standing as citizens. The xenophobic slogan he fears exposes the limit of that assurance. If a crowd decides that ancestry outweighs a person’s actual life, his work as a lawyer, his role as a father, and his ordinary character may count for nothing. The novel thus connects prejudice to the precariousness of civic belonging: formal protections matter, but they cannot by themselves prevent rumors from shaping how people see one another.

The family’s own negotiations over names and remembrance provide a quieter counterpoint. After Rié tells Yuto she intends to return to her maiden name, he asks to remain Taniguchi. He explains that his surname has changed as his household has changed and that, at school, everyone knows him by the name he now has. More than a practical preference, keeping Taniguchi is his way of resisting the possibility that his father will be forgotten after that father’s family turned away from him. His plea shows how a name can hold a personal history that differs from the legal or adult account of identity.

Rié’s later understanding of Yuto also turns on forms of memory that cannot be reduced to a label. Reading Akutagawa’s “Asakusa Park,” she is moved by the boy who loses his father and recognizes, through Yuto’s response to the story, his unspoken loneliness. She wonders whether he had sensed something about his own father before she revealed the truth, but cannot know. In a poem, Yuto imagines the voice of a cicada that has left its shell and the shell as a resonating instrument; Rié associates the cherry tree in his account with the tree his father had chosen. Literature and family ritual give the boy ways to carry grief that no public category can explain.

Narrative Significance

The novel’s account of anti-Korean xenophobia moves between public history, media circulation, private shame, and intimate acts of remembrance. The 1923 massacre is not simply background to Kido’s present: its return to public attention changes what he can imagine about his place in Japan and about the safety of his family. The online post makes that vulnerability concrete, while the bookstore titles and crime feature show how hostility can travel through forms that present themselves as commentary or information.

Against this flattening, the narrative keeps returning to people whose identities exceed the stories told about them. Kido is a lawyer, husband, father, and naturalized citizen as well as a person of Korean ancestry; Hara’s life cannot be explained by a theory of inherited criminality; Yuto’s chosen surname and literary imagination preserve relationships in ways official labels cannot. These contrasts do not resolve the danger Kido perceives. They clarify what is at stake: the capacity to recognize another person as a particular life, rather than as a racial, familial, or criminal category made ready for suspicion.