The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, Aum, and Antisemitism in Japan
David G. Goodman (2005). Vidal Sassoon International Center for the Study of Antisemitism (SISCA).
The author examines the implications of the appearance and popularity in Japan in the 1980s and 1990s of dozens of books based on the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, several of which suggested that the ‘Jewish plot’ had already succeeded in gaining control of America. The explanations of other commentators suggesting that the phenomenon could be understood either as sublimated anti-Americanism, as the legacy of the Japanese alliance with Nazi Germany in World War Two, as indicative of Japan’s complex history of imagining foreigners, or even as inverted feelings of kinship and admiration for Jews expressed as fear and envy are all discussed. By examining the origins of the Protocols and its history in Japan, he suggests that ultimately, the consequences of its dissemination is to act as an enabling ideology for destruction.