Prime Minister Fumio Kishida said Friday he is considering expressing his solidarity with Korean residents in the Utoro district in Kyoto Prefecture, western Japan, which became a target of hate crime in 2021.
“I want to look into when would be the appropriate time to express my solidarity with people in the Utoro district and other related communities,” Kishida told a Diet committee in response to a question by a member of the Komeito party, the junior partner in Kishida’s coalition government.
Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida speaks at a House of Councillors Budget Committee session in Tokyo on March 3, 2023. (Kyodo) ==Kyodo
Kishida declined to say whether he would visit the Utoro Peace Memorial Museum in Uji, which opened in April 2022. The facility chronicles the history of the district, formed by descendants of wartime Korean laborers who were left abandoned after the construction of an airfield was halted in 1945 following Japan’s defeat in World War II.
Regarding hate speech and hate crime, Kishida said, “Unjust and discriminatory statements which exclude people of a specific ethnicity or nationality, as well as acts of crime or violence conducted under such motivations, are unacceptable in any society.”
Kishida added the government will make efforts toward resolving discrimination in Japan by raising awareness.
Photo taken April 30, 2022, shows the Utoro Peace Memorial Museum in Uji in Kyoto Prefecture, exhibiting the history of descendants of wartime Korean laborers in the Utoro community in the western Japan city. (Kyodo) ==Kyodo
The district suffered an arson attack in 2021 by Shogo Arimoto from Nara Prefecture, neighboring Kyoto. He was sentenced to four years in prison by the Kyoto District Court in 2022 for setting fire to empty houses.
No one was injured in the incident, although the fire burned down about 40 signs that were due to be put on display at the museum.
Arimoto told the court during the trial he had wanted to hamper the museum’s opening by destroying its exhibition items. He said he had grown to hate people with Korean roots after watching news reports regarding disputes over historical events related to Japan’s colonial rule of the Korean Peninsula from 1910 to 1945.
Source: kyodo news
