
AN: Tokyo newshounds lose Ishihara's scent
The Japan Times
Tuesday, January 4, 2005
By Mark Schreiber
The right arm extends outward, fingers stiff, palm down in the classic fascist salute. But instead of a swastika, the symbol on his armband is the Hinomaru, the Japanese flag. And the embellishment of a short brush mustache notwithstanding, the scowling face in the sketch in Saizo does not belong to the Austrian politician who took power in Germany in the 1930s, but to Tokyo Gov. Shintaro Ishihara.
Tokyo Confidential surveys popular vernacular magazines -- often "salacious, libelous and utterly unreliable" -- to discover what the Japanese are "really thinking."
Ishihara, while an avowed nationalist, neither advocates burning books nor herding minorities into concentration camps. But Saizo, an in-your-face monthly that revels in taking pokes at the establishment, finds a Hitlerian analogy expedient for casting its spotlight on the governor's increasingly confrontational attitude toward the media.
On the TBS "Sunday Morning" program Oct. 28, Ishihara was shown at a rally in support of Japanese who had been abducted to North Korea, during which he remarked on camera, "It is not my intention to justify the history of Japan's annexation of Korea 100 percent."
But a technician erroneously superimposed a subtitle that read, "It is my intention..."