Today's Liberation Day, one of the few holidays celebrated in both North and South Korea, so it's a good day to start boycotting Japan.
If the annual Yasukuni visit doesn't motivate you enough, think of all the Treasury securities Tokyo buys:
MAJOR FOREIGN HOLDERS OF TREASURY SECURITIES (in billions of dollars) HOLDINGS 1/ AT END OF PERIOD
Country May 2006 Japan 637.9
<http://www.treasury.gov/tic/mfh.txt>
For those of you who are not satisfied with going after imperialists without also going after anti-imperialist Islamists, have I mentioned that Toyota Land Cruisers appear to be the vehicle of choice for the Taliban as well as the multinational empire's aid agencies, having received Osama bin Laden's product endorsement?
<blockquote>Mr. bin Laden, like many of the sheiks and princes of Saudi Arabia among whom he grew up, likes Toyota Land Cruisers, as did his military commander, Muhammad Atef, a former Egyptian policeman who is believed to have been killed by American bombing last week.
There is a hierarchy of vehicles among the more important lieutenants of the Taliban and Al Qaeda, Mr. bin Laden's terrorist organization. Not for them anything discreet and durable, to go with the austerity of their faith: nothing but a Land Cruiser will serve. For ordinary fighters, men with long beards and longer barrels on their ubiquitous Kalashnikovs, the vehicle of choice is the Toyota Hilux, a compact pickup truck popular throughout the developing world. (John F, Burns, "Trucks of the Taliban: Durable, Not Discreet," New York Times, 23 November 2001, <http://select.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=F30A13F73F5E0C708EDDA80994D9404482&n=Top%2fReference%2fTimes%20Topics%2fPeople%2fO%2fOmar%2c%20Muhammad>)</blockquote>
If that is still not enough, how about this?
"Japan consumes 22 percent of Iranian oil exports and is slated to begin development this year of the largest and most modern onshore petroleum fields built in Iran since the 1979 Islamic revolution [Azadegan*]" (Anthony Faiola and Dafna Linzer, "Japan Wary Of Plan for Sanctions Against Iran: U.S. Ally Feels Tug of Financial, Energy Ties," Washington Post 13 June 2006: A14, <http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/06/12/AR2006061201504.html>).
Does Tokyo not have any regard for human rights violations, its own, Washington's, and Tehran's? Do people who buy Japanese goods and governments who court Japanese investors not care about human rights violations at all?
There's more to not-so-secret affinity between Japan and Iran than trade and investment: Iran's "new conservatives" want to make their country "Islamic Japan":
<blockquote>After Speaker of the Majles Ali Akbar Nateq-Nouri lost the 1997 presidential race to Khatami and the conservatives went on to lose their parliamentary majority in 2000, a subgroup of middle-aged conservatives began to argue for revising the conservatives' political message. Many on the old right clung to revolutionary tenets denouncing the West and preaching selflessness, with a particular stress on "martyrdom" as the sacrifice of one's life—literal and figurative—for the sake of Islam. These slogans clashed with the reformists' focus on opening Iran to the outside world and leaving behind the heroism of revolutionary martyrs in favor of a society in which Islam would not impose self-abnegation and self-denial. The new conservatives saw that the rhetoric of self-sacrifice had become meaningless to the generation born after the revolution—over half of Iran's total population. In their newspapers, they began to question the old guard's puritanism and obsession with lamentation and, instead, to borrow themes from the reformists to better compete in the electoral arena.[3] Progressively, expressions of the conservatives' message sounded less and less like the dolorous exhortations of the old guard. Their widely publicized slogan in the 2004 parliamentary campaign—"a free, developed and joyful Iran" (Iran-e azad, abad va shad)—had no specifically Islamic component. Instead, the conservatives spoke of economic wellbeing (refah-e eqtesadi) and the transformation of Iran into a kind of "Islamic Japan." While the traditional conservatives had mentioned economic justice, they had normally rejected rhetoric of economic development and material progress in deference to Khomeini's saying that "economics are for the beasts."
(Farhad Khosrokhavar, "The New Conservatives Take a Turn," Middle East Report 233, Winter 2004, <http://www.merip.org/mer/mer233/khosrokhavar.html>)</blockquote>
Whether you hate America or Iran and Islamists or both, if you follow their money, as well as the genealogy of their new management philosophy, you eventually get to Japan. :->
Lastly, if you are worried about anti-Semitism, anti-anti-Semitism, anti-anti-anti-Semitism, and so on, a "Boycott Japan" campaign is an ideal tool to counter it, too. Your slogan can be, "It Ain't 'the Jews' -- It's the Bank of Japan!"
* Reuters, "Japan's Inpex Says No Date Set for Iran Deal," 10 August 2006, <http://archive.gulfnews.com/articles/06/08/10/10058780.html>. -- Yoshie <http://montages.blogspot.com/> <http://mrzine.org> <http://monthlyreview.org/>