The Asia-Pacific Journal | Japan Focus Volume 9 | Issue 10 | Number 2 | Article ID 3497 | Mar 07, 2011

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'Koreans, Go Home!' Internet Nationalism in ContemporaryJapan as a Digitally Mediated Subculture　　「コリアンズ　ゴーホーム」現代日本におけるデジタル方式下位文化としてのインターネット・ナショナリズム

Rumi Sakamoto

‘Koreans, Go Home!’ InternetNationalism in Contemporary Japanas a Digitally Mediated Subculture

Rumi Sakamoto

Introduction

Tsushima Island

On 18 September 2009, a person using theonline name of ‘xegnojw’ posted a four-minutevideo on YouTube entitled ‘Japanese RacistsHoot Down Korean Tourists in Tsushima’.1 Itdepicted members of a Japanese nationalist

group harassing Korean tourists on Tsushima, aJapanese island 138 km from Fukuoka and50km from Busan.2 This island has beenattracting attention from Japanese nationalistsbecause of the increasing presence of Koreantourists and Korean investment since the 2002opening of high-speed ferry service betweenBusan and Tsushima. Nationalist campaignsover the island intensified when Korea’s MasanCity adopted the ‘Tsushima Day’ bill in 2005,claiming that Tsushima should be a Koreanterritory, thereby countering Shimaneprefecture’s ‘Takeshima Day’, establishingJapanese claim to Korea’s Dokdo island.3 TheYouTube video in question captured severalflag-holding Japanese men and women yelling:‘Go home, Koreans!’ and ‘We won’t allow aKorean invasion!’ at tourists fresh off the ferryfrom Busan. Though not physically violent, theatmosphere was tense and disturbing.

This episode is just one expression of Japan’snew grassroots nationalism, which has gainedforce over the last decade against the backdropof increasingly vociferous historical revisionismand neonationalism.4 As seen in the recentconflict over the Senkaku Islands5 as well asJapan’s hard-line response to the North Koreanattack on South Korea, nationalistic sentimentsseem to be increasingly dictating Japan’sforeign policy and public opinion. Contrary towhat is sometimes assumed, contemporaryJapanese nationalism is not a monolithic entity,for it is produced by multiple participants andgroups with different ideas and modes ofcommunication. The kind of blatant jingoism

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and narrow-minded xenophobia seen above,though still largely marginalised in the officialdiscourses of the state and public media, hasfound a niche in Japan, especial ly incyberspace. New groups such as Zaitokukai(Citizens’ Group against Special Rights forKorean residents in Japan)6 and Shuken kaifukuo mezasu kai (Citizens’ Group that seeksRecovery of Sovereignty),7 however outlandishtheir stances, have successfully extendedinfluence through effective use of the Internet,incorporating YouTube and its Japaneseequivalents such as Niko-niko dōga (‘smileyvideos’) and PeeVee TV to spread theirmessages and publicise their activities.Channeru Sakura (2004-), which distributesconservative and nationalistic content viasatellite TV and Internet, also provides asignificant virtual space for neonationalistperspectives. Without the Internet, it isdoubtful that an extreme nationalist group’sforay into direct action on the peripheral islandof Tsushima would have reached an audiencebeyond the group itself. As it happened,however, the video clip was immediately takenup by Japan’s largest online forum, 2-channeru,prompting a barrage of nationalistic responsesthere. A site ‘not for the faint of heart’,8 thisunmoderated forum is known to be the mainoutlet for revisionism and xenophobic neo-nationalism of the internet generation.9

Zaitokukai on YouTube: ‘Kick out Koreansfrom Tsushima!’

This article offers an analysis of the onlinediscourse of anti-Korean nationalism sparkedby the aforementioned YouTube video on 2-c h a n n e r u . I t a i m s t o e x a m i n e t h echaracteristics of the nationalistic postings andthe online construction of Korea as Japan’sother . 1 0 The case of fers ins ight intocontemporary Japan’s so-called netto-uyo (netright-wingers . . . uyoku) phenomenon, which

has rarely been discussed in English languagescholarship.11 It is often pointed out thattoday’s Japanese youths are increasinglynationalistic and that the Internet is playing apart in this trend.12 In considering how thetechnology and culture of the Internetinfluenced the formation of nationalism incyberspace, this article engages with the ideaof a ‘cyber public sphere’. What internet-specific elements have contributed to theparticular netto-uyo shape of nationalism? Howmight we understand the paradox of theborderless technology of the Internetproducing an insular community andxenophobic nationalism?

To answer these questions, after a brief look at2-channeru and the netto-uyo phenomenon, thisarticle offers a content analysis of nationalismin the Tsushima threads, focusing on theconstruction of ‘Korea’ as Japan’s other. It thenconsiders this case’s implication for the notionof a ‘cyber public sphere,’ and discusses someInternet-dependent factors relevant to thenetto-uyo formation of the nation as animagined community before finally consideringsome unique characteristics of Internetnationalism in contemporary Japan. But first,let us briefly look at some existing approachesto nationalisms in cyberspace to put this studyinto a context.

Nationalisms in Cyberspace

In the early days of the Internet, somepredicted that, as a global and borderlesstechnology, the Internet would become ahomogenising force that challenged andeliminated chauvinism and narrow-mindedness.Today’s optimistic observers also emphasisethe potential of cyberspace to providesomething akin to Habermas’ ‘ideal speechsituation’ and ‘autonomous public sphere,’13 inwhich citizens/individuals communicaterationally and democratically, without theconstraints of ethnic, gender, class or otherreal-life inequalities. If we follow these insights

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that the Internet provides an ‘autonomouspublic sphere’ and ‘eradicates differences,’then we may conclude that the Internetchallenges, and might even eventually end,sectarian nationalisms. Nicholas Negroponte inBeing Digital, for one, famously stated thatwith the Internet ‘there will be no more roomfor nationalism than there is for smallpox’.14

Such a prediction, however, seems, at best,decidedly premature. While the Internet hascertainly created an extensive global networkand promoted the exchange of ideas, it hashard ly created a g loba l democrat icconsciousness. Even a cursory survey revealsthat nationalistic and xenophobic commentariesthrive on the Internet. And yet, in contrast tothe abundant scholarship on nation andnationalism, Internet nationalism remains anunderstudied phenomenon. In particular, theimportant question of how the Internet as anew medium affects the nature of nationalismand national imaginary deserves furtherinvestigation.

One strand of current scholarship on Internetnationalism focuses on the diasporiccommunit ies ’ onl ine ‘ long distance’nationalism.15 Such studies look at how, forexample, the Palestinians, Kurds, or overseasChinese maintain and reinforce their nationalidentities through the Internet. As ThomasEriksen points out, the aims of ‘virtual nations’are ‘of a classic nation-building kind’.16 In otherwords, they aim to create and sustain thenation as a unified entity in the context ofgeographical dispersion of the populationbeyond national borders. Japanese netto-uyointernet nationalism, on the other hand, has noagenda for creating a transnational nationalidentity among the overseas Japanese. It ismuch more inward-looking and far lessinclusive. Netto-uyo’s ‘we the Japanese’ doesnot even include all ethnic Japanese, as thosewho do not share their values (liberals, left-wingers, feminists, supporters of non-Japaneseresidents’ rights, Korean TV drama fans etc.)

are all considered potential enemies of thenation.

Another relatively well-publicised and studiedcase of Internet nationalism is Chinese onlinenationalism that emerged around the 2005 anti-Japanese movement.17 Japanese Internetnationalism is quite different from the Chinesecounterpart. First, while Chinese onlinenationalism has been widely viewed assupporting or enabling on-street nationalism,the netto-uyo variety of Japanese Internetnationalism this article addresses has largelystayed within Cyberspace, rarely spilling outonto the street. Secondly, scholars of Chineseonline nationalism have (in somewhatHabermasean spirit) typically located it withinthe framework of civil society and citizens’activism, reading online activities as a sign ofChinese civil society as an independent spherefrom the communist state. As one scholar putit, ‘civil society and the Internet energise eachother in their co-evolutionary development inChina’.18

As we will see, however, one can hardlysuggest that Japanese internet nationalismembodies a democratic civil society. Not onlydoes it fall short of producing on-street politics,but it is also confined within niche onlinecommunities, hardly representative of civilsociety. Perhaps for these reasons, JapaneseInternet nationalism has received much lessattention than Chinese ‘civil’ nationalism hasdone in English-language scholarship. Thoughless visible than the Chinese examples anddefinitely not mainstream, Japanese Internetnationalism is a significant recent phenomenonthat indicates the formation of a shared spacewhere people engage with xenophobicnationalism and offers an opportunity forexploring the interface between the Internetand nationalism. Besides, even though muchscholarship on Chinese online nationalismfocuses on its role in offline activism, it is quiteconceivable that there also exist a largenumber of Chinese Internet users who

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participates in, for example, online anti-Japanese discussions without ever taking to thestreet. If so, this study could offer a frameworkfor comparison with such phenomenon.

2-channeru and Netto-uyo

2-channeru, or 2-chan for short, is Japan’s mostpopular online community, with around tenmillion users accessing it each day.19 In thiscommunity the majority of posters post as‘anonymous’.20 2-chan does not require userregistration or email verification – a standardpractice for many English-language onlineforums. There is hardly any moderation, either.The forum consists of about 700 ‘boards’ suchas ‘cooking,’ ‘business news,’ or ‘hacking’.Each ‘board’ contains several hundred‘threads,’ with a maximum of 1,000 posts perthread. Once the number of posts reaches1,000, a new thread is created, and the oldthread is archived. Some discussions areserious; many aren’t. Depending on the board,posts can be utterly banal, discriminatory orextreme, hence 2-chan’s nickname as ‘publictoilet graffiti’. At the same time, with moreusers than any other single media site inJapan,21 2-chan is an important medium, withconsiderable social influence. It has had impacton mass media, too, as mainstream journalistssometimes use 2-chan as a news source.

Since its establishment 10 years ago, 2-chanhas developed an idiosyncratic online culture,vocabularies and styles of interaction. Racismand nationalism have been part of this 2-chanculture; participants of certain boards havedeveloped an explicitly nationalistic discourse(in particular, ‘World History,’ ‘East AsiaNews,’ ‘News Far East’ and ‘Hangul’), earningthemselves the collective name of netto-uyo, or‘net right-wingers’. While this does not meanthat the majority of the users share suchsentiments, there is a clearly noticeablesubculture within this site shared by those whogather on specific boards. Mirroring thepost-1990s historical revisionism, netto-uyo

exhibit xenophobia towards immigrants, depictKorea and China negatively, and upholdrevisionist history, justifying and glorifyingJapan’s wartime actions. They also supportpolitical leaders’ official visits to YasukuniShrine, revision of Article 9 of the constitution,and patriotic education. Although netto-uyo isnot exclusive to 2-chan, 2-chan is the mainplayground for netto-uyo, where thisphenomenon developed.22 They became visiblethrough a number of Internet-generatedcontroversies that erupted around 2002-2004such as those over the World Cup Soccerhosted by Korea and Japan, ‘Hate-Korea’ comicbooks, the so-called ‘Nanjing Massacre comicbook’23 and Dokdo/Takeshima, to name just afew.

Though it is hard to establish who they reallyare, netto-uyo are generally thought to beindividual ‘heavy’ net users who aresympathetic to right-wing/nationalist views, butfew are real-life activists or members of right-wing/nationalist organisations.24 While they areextremely vocal online and clearly identifiableas a discursive group, when it comes to real-lifepolitical actions, netto-uyo’s involvement islimited to occasional net-driven phenomenasuch as dentotsu (‘phone attack’ – organisedphone complaints on specific issues togovernment offices, left-leaning media etc.),matsuri (sudden and extreme concentration ofpostings in a specific thread for a limited time)and enjō (rush of critical or accusatorycomments and trackbacks to a specific blog orSNS site) targeting left/liberal opinions andsites. Netto-uyo essentially remain genron-uyoku [‘right-wing by speech’]25 in cyberspace;in fact, some action-oriented right-wingershave criticised netto-uyo for their lack of actionand hiding behind anonymity.26

Netto-uyo as an Expression of SocialAnxiety of Post-recession Japan

Since the emergence of netto-uyo coincidedwith the marked lowering of the average age of

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2-chan users in 2003-200427 as well as thedeepening of social problems related toJapanese youth (e.g. NEET, freeter, hikikomori[withdrawal from society]), netto-uyonationalism has often been associated withunemployed, low-income or reclusive youths.28

Linking netto-uyo and young unemployedpeop le i s common among Japanesecommentators. For example, a Japanesesociologist, Takahara Motoaki, has suggestedthat recent youth nationalism – includingInternet nationalism – is an expression of thesocial anxiety of marginalised and discontentyouths who are struggling in the recession andt h e r e s u l t a n t s o c i a lmarginalisation. 2 9 According to him,nationalistic youths displace their anxiety ontoimaginary external enemies, while identifyingwith the fantasy of strong Japan temporarilyrelieves their anxiety.30

During the 1970s and 1980s, when theJapanese economy was strong and life-timeemployment and seniority systems werewidespread, ‘company’ identity served as areservoir for Japanese men’s national identity,as loyalty to the company was conflated withloyalty to the state as the protector of theprosperity of the companies they workedfor.31 The majority of today’s youths, however,are denied secure ‘company’ membershipbecause of the new norms brought by therecession. Downsizing, restructuring,outsourcing, flexible employment systems –these strategies that companies haveintroduced in response to the recession thatfollowed the bursting of the bubble have meantthat many young people fail to obtain stablejobs on completion of their education. Theyhave come to constitute a large ‘new lowerclass’ sector notable for casual service labour,which is unstable and badly paid.32 Under suchcircumstances, constructing and attacking theexternal enemy figure in cyberspace seems tooffer one way of dealing with social frustrationand anxiety. I would, however, add that the‘nationalistic’ identity of netto-uyo is not a

direct or necessary consequence of the forumparticipants’ economic circumstances or theirpre-const i tuted ident i ty as the ‘newunderclass’. Rather, I believe that their netto-uyo identity is constructed discursively, byengaging in the types of practice I will describein the following.

The Tsushima Threads

Consider the nationalistic postings on thethreads that started with the YouTube videomentioned earlier. These threads appeared inSeptember 2009 on the ‘East Asia News+’board, one of several netto-uyo boards. At thetime of the research, most of the threads onthese boards were on Korea-related topics. TheTsushima thread in question started with aposting on a Korean-language site Kukinewsreport on a Youtube clip of the aforementionedincident as the increasing number of Koreantourists agitated right-wingers. Normallyinsignificant in Japanese minds, this smallisland came to attract the attention of somepopular media and the netto-uyo especiallyfollowing a report on the Korean territorialclaim on the island in reaction to Shimaneprefecture’s ‘Takeshima Day’ and continuingconflict over Dokdo/Takeshima issues.33

The thread I examined attracted 7,000 postingsextended over seven threads in 4 days. Theusual limit for postings per thread is 1,000 andthe majority of topics stays well within thislimit; so 7,000 reflects a significant level ofinterest. In many ways, these postings weretypical netto-uyo chatters. First, the threadstarted with a report of minor news thatinvolved Korea, rather than any majorinternational news widely reported on nationalmass media such as TV and newspaper. 2-chan‘news’ boards often have a different pattern offraming and agenda setting from those of TVand newspaper news, partly because of its self-awareness as an ‘alternative media’ thatchallenges mainstream media and their‘hypocrisy’. Typically, a small ‘news item’ like

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this one is found in a Korean, Chinese orsometimes an English language source,34 and istranslated into Japanese and posted. Thepreferred source is popular global media, inthis case the YouTube video clip. Thisparticular cl ip was uploaded with anintroduction in three languages: Japanese,English, and Korean. Secondly, the discussionquickly turned into a repetition of well-rehearsed netto-uyo stances, issues andconcerns, not necessarily related to the originalposting. This is exactly what happened with theTsushima thread, as we will see. Certainvocabularies, enunciation patterns anddiscursive structures define netto-uyo chatters,and we can find them regardless of the thread.The presence of visual content that points toemotionally potent issues (in this casetheYoutube clip of a xenophobic protest), isalso very common.

‘Us’ and ‘Them’

Netto-uyo postings on this thread were intense,many exhibiting unrestrained hostility towardsKorea and Koreans. Given 2-chan’s lack ofregulation and total anonymity, the tone isoften extreme. Taboo derogatory terms areroutinely used. Koreans are associated withexcrement, rubbish, public urination, stealing,prostitution, violence, illegal activity andobscenity. Vulgar and callous statements thatwould not be found in the mass media andother public spaces abound. Typical postingsread: ‘Koreans are cancer of Japan and shouldleave Japan’; ‘Koreans are the world’s shame;‘parasite rubbish race Koreans should die’, andeven ‘let’s massacre the stupid Koreans now’.Such virulent statements were abundantthroughout the 4 days I observed thisparticular thread, and are commonplace innetto-uyo chatter in general.

Collectively, the 7,000 postings produced andreinforced the negative image of Korea andKoreans far beyond the Tsushima issue. Forumparticipants brought up a multitude of Korea-

related issues which had nothing to do withKorean tourists on Tsushima: the ‘special taxand welfare privileges’ that zainichi Koreansallegedly enjoy, the ‘illegal occupation’ ofTakeshima Island’, kimchi with parasite eggs,or crimes by Koreans in Japan and overseas.Links were made to a TV news item about aJapanese boy who was attacked in Korea,snapshots of anti-Japanese artwork by Koreanschool children, a Youtube clip on a rape by azainichi Korean, 2-chan threads on zainichipension entitlement and welfare benefits,s h o c k i n g i m a g e s o f a n t i - J a p a n e s edemonstrators slaughtering pheasants (Japan’snational bird) in front of the Japanese Embassy,and many more. These and other unrelatedevents and images are linked together underthe unifying but empty sign of the ‘Koreans’.

The result is to depict Koreans as violent,unethical, overly emotional and irrationalpeople, who are a ‘threat’ to Japan. Incomparison, ‘we Japanese’ are portrayed as amoral, rational, polite and too tolerant peoplewho are being taken advantage of—andvictimised by—the Other’s aggression, slynessand lack of morality. There is a certain ironyhere, of course, that while accusing the Otherof lacking morality, such posts are rife withcrude xenophobic verbal abuse of the KoreanOther that is hardly moral. ‘Koreans’ in thisforum are a symbol of negativity and arepository for its participants’ hostility, ratherthan real ‘Koreans’ in the sense of the citizensof South Korea. Its function is to constructantagonisms between ‘us’ and ‘them’. The‘Korea’ or ‘Koreans’ simply operate as a signthat carries negative values such as ‘inferior’,‘dirty’, ‘shameless’, ‘primitive’, ‘violent’, and‘irrational’. The posts served as triggers forinvoking and repeating a clear and antagonisticus/them relationship.

In reality, this ‘us’ and ‘them’ boundary is aproduct of rewriting history, for Japan andKorea have a deeply intertwined history datingback to ancient times; Tsushima Island itself is

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a repository of numerous traces of extensiveKorea-Japan relations.35

A stone monument for Korean embassiesto Japan during the Edo period in

Tsushima. The bilingual explanationboard says that the Korean visits broughtJapan sophisticated knowledge, art and

culture, and talks of deep respecttowards the Koreans. (Author’s

photographs)

As Oguma Eiji has emphasized, Korea was partof the Japanese Empire until 1945.36 But thenetto-uyo posts conveniently forget the colonialhistory, favouring ahistorical and essentialisedrepresentations of homogeneous ‘Koreans’ asJapan’s inferior Other. This is consistent withthe postwar myth of homogeneity and generalhostility towards Koreans and zainichi Koreans.It is also consistent with recent revisionist-neo-nationalist promotion of anti -Koreanxenophobia.

The participants typically blurred distinctionsbetween South Koreans, North Koreans andzainichi Koreans (Korean residents in Japan,mostly second, third, and even fourthgeneration). Just eight minutes after theoriginal posting about the YouTube video,someone wrote: ‘Zainichi Koreans should getout of Tsushima Island’. This is an odd thing tosay because the Korean tourists captured in theYoutube video stepping off the ferry are mostlikely South Koreans, not zainichi Koreans. Theright-wing activists on the video themselvescertainly seem to think so, judging from whatthey are screaming. But no one points this out.Far from it, people join in accusing zainichi ofheinous crimes. As the days pass andcomments accumulate, more and more postingsassert zainichi should leave Japan and go backto their ‘homeland’.

Over the course of the four days, the forum’sparticipants extended the target of xenophobiccommentaries from Koreans to foreigners ingeneral. Some postings criticised NorthKoreans. Even ‘Chinese’ were attacked a fewtimes. They repeated crude messages like‘Japan belongs to the Japanese. Korea belongsto the Koreans. Koreans, go home’ and‘foreigners should stay out of Japan’. Somepointed out how European nations that had

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accepted immigrants are now suffering theconsequences. Others argued against grantingsuffrage to non-Japanese residents.37

Of course, the threads were not entirelyhomogeneous. Some marginal minorities didattempt to insert different views. For example,one participant says of the rightist activity:‘Japan’s shame; I cannot accept such a stupidaction that will lower Japan’s internationalstanding’. But this kind of statement is curtlydismissed, ignored, or identified as intrusion bya ‘Korean spy’. The conversation then goes onas i f they d id no t ex i s t . There i s noengagement, no argument, and no discussion.This partly has to do with 2-chan’s culture ofcynicism, where taking other posters’ opposingviews seriously and engaging them isconsidered uncool. Engaging or taking thingsseriously is a common ‘mistake’ noviceparticipants are often caught making. In thisforum participants are expected to ‘read theair’ and carry on by adding to the existingconversation with slight variation of themes. Touse a 2-chan net slang, the quality ofmattari—or being laid back, slow, and notcausing trouble—is valued.

‘Race’

Interestingly, although racism and xenophobiacharacterise 2-chan’s netto-uyo discourse, itsconstruction of ‘us’ and ‘them’ contains veryfew comments on racial traits of Korans orJapanese. Race is assumed but not argued for.This is noteworthy in light of the fact thathistorically, Japanese nationalism and nationalunity have been conceptualised around thenotion of ‘racial’ homogeneity and purity, inparticular, stressing the notion of blood.

Even though Japanese and Koreans are both‘Asians’ and therefore racial markers are lessclear than those for ‘whites’ and ‘blacks’, forexample, historically speaking, attempts todecipher and articulate subtle ‘racial’differences between Japanese and Koreanshave not been uncommon. It is always possible

to read differences into real or imagined slightshades of skin colour or the shape of eyes andessentialise them into racial differences. Indeedone might argue, as with Freud’s “narcissism ofsmall differences”, that the desire andobsession for locating subtle differences couldeven be stronger when two groups areapparently alike. 2-chan posters, however, donot seem interested in discussing ‘racial’features, possibly because their ‘Koreans’ arelargely symbolic, and not real-life flesh andblood ‘Koreans’.

Being an online community, 2-chan lackscorporeality and any physical marker of racialdifferences. This means that there is no way ofknowing for certain whether participants are infact racially ‘Japanese’. What’s on the screen,ultimately, is digitised data and text, not fleshand blood. It is impossible to identify theparticipants’ ‘racial’ or ‘ethnic’ identities. Theposters to the Tsushima threads showedconsiderable suspicion and paranoia over cyber‘racial passing’. They seemed particularlyvigilant toward trolling—anonymous non-Japanese participants planting provocativepostings to stir up and disrupt onlinediscussion—and other identity deceptions alongracial lines. For example, fear over the Other’sseeping into the online community wasexpressed in their speculations that someposters were pretending to be Japanese, to beKoreans or even to be Japanese pretending tobe Koreans pretending to be Japanese.

In their attempt to identify the infiltratingOther, participants sometimes said to thesuspected posters: ‘What’s your passportnumber? [a non-Japanese, passport numberwould look different]’ ‘Your grammar is a bitfunny [therefore you must be non-Japanese]’.‘No Japanese would specially claim that to beJapanese [since you say you are Japanese youmust be non-Japanese]’ and so on. There waseven a posting suggesting that the originalYouTube clip was planted by zainichi Koreans,thus rendering the whole thing a kind of joke

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played on the Japanese.

Such suspicions on one level reflect the factthat the Internet is a deterritorialised spacethat is open to the whole (IT-literate) world;information, images, and participantsthemselves can come from anywhere, theirorigin and identity blurred, hidden or unknown.Unlike the physical world, ‘Japanese’ identityonline is easy to perform and assume, as longas linguistic competency exists. In addition, theanxiety over the ‘true’ identities of theparticipants is further promoted by theaforementioned 2-chan culture of anonymityand cynicism, which makes pretending andother identity plays an accepted practice in thisparticular online community. The use of‘Korean’ voice and stance by Japanese users toachieve an ironical and mocking effect (say, byinserting Korean words like uri nara38 ornida39 here and there) for example, is fairlycommon in netto-uyo postings. Uncertainty of‘Japanese’ identity thus plagues the seeminglyconfident nationalist voice.

Does History Matter?

While the posters regularly refer to historicaland political issues between Japan and Korea,many do not seem to have much interest inactual history or politics. For example: ‘Koreais an enemy country that is invadingTakeshima; Japan is at war with Korea’; ‘InTsushima Koreans are doing every evil thingimaginable, including raping Tsushima women’,‘Koreans have a history of massacringTsushima people … Historically you Koreansowe Tsushima Islanders more than you canever repay’. Clearly, accuracy is not a majorconcern for these participants; it seems thatthese statements are not even meant to be arepresentation of reality. Strong words like‘evil’, ‘war’, ‘massacre’, ‘rape’, and ‘invasion’are exchanged as empty signs without anyhistorical or evidential basis. Disturbing visualimages are also circulated, for example,bleeding pheasants laid on a rising-sun flag,

Korean children’s ‘fuck Japan’ art exhibition, ora YouTube clip of ‘a Korean attacking aJapanese boy’. However, it is unclear whichwar, which invasion, or which massacre thesepostings refer to. In many cases they have noreferent to reality and no one seems to mind.The comments are discursively productive,consolidating the ‘us’/‘them’ antagonism andmaintaining the moral superiority of theJapanese who are constructed as a victim.

I t s e e m s t h a t d e h i s t o r i c i s e d a n ddecontextualised images and symbols aregathered together not to represent reality butto produce new humiliation, new trauma, andnew victimhood for Japan. In this sense theyare similar to Baudrillard’s ‘simulations’ or‘self-referential signs’, which are ‘objects anddiscourses that have no firm origin, no referent,no ground or foundation’ other than theirown.40 They operate outside the logic ofrepresentation, and hence are immune torationalist critique.41 Baudrillard’s point wasthat simulation proliferated as a result of thenew media like TV, but the Internet as aparticipatory medium carried this trend evenfurther. 2-chan users are not just passiveconsumers of such signs provided by the massmedia but are producing, performing, andexchanging referentless, decontexualised signsto generate a sense of belonging to a cybercommunity and a fantasy ‘Japan’.

With the Internet, gathering and producinginformation and images is easy, fast and cheap.We can access far more information far morequickly than we could before, and we do nothave to rely on mass media. If one wants to findout how “terrible” Koreans (or any other group)are, such information is only clicks away,within seconds. Information is available for‘superdistribution’ to anyone interested, wherethe content spreads quickly and effortlessly viadigital technology without being limited bynational borders, defamation laws ordistribution costs.

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Not Quite a Public Sphere

As briefly mentioned earlier, advocates of theso-called ‘virtual public sphere’ haveemphasised the Internet’s potential to promoteliberatory practices.42 Building on Habermas’snotion of public sphere, defined as a networkfor communicating information and points ofview, they have argued that electroniccommunication media have ‘unique capacitiesto create democratic, participatory realms incyberspace devoted to information anddebates’.43 Many studies of cyberactivismaround human rights, peace movements, racialequality and so on, seem to suggest thedemocratic potential of the Internettechnology.

Our example from 2-chan, however, makesclear that the technology and culture of theInternet, far from promoting public value ormutual understanding, sometimes contributesto the formation of a unique expression ofnationalism. As we have seen, 2-chan onlineexchanges appeared highly regulated andpatterned, allowing little room for democraticdiscussion. On the one hand, the potential fordemocratic communication certainly seems tobe there, as the 2-chan forum clearly providesan infrastructure for an information networkand open communication, and it has a largenumber o f pa r t i c i pan t s who speakanonymously, free of class, gender and otherconstraints. The participants seemingly havepolitical interest and intent, too. And yet 2-chanis a far cry from a ‘virtual public sphere’. Itdoes not function as a communication networkfor exchanging information and viewpoints topromote democratic values. If anything, whatgoes on there resembles private in-groupgossiping, insulated from competing views andr e i n f o r c e s i n s i d e r s ’ i d e n t i t y b yexcluding/ostracising outsiders. It seemssimilar to what Rheingold has called ‘single-n iche co lon ies o f peop le who shareintolerances’. 4 4

2-chan’s xenophobic nationalism could be aproduct of a phenomenon known as ‘grouppolarisation’, which refers to a pattern wherediscussion among people who share similarviews tend to radicalise each individual’soriginal position, leading the group as a wholeto thinking the same thoughts in a moreextreme fashion. According to one study, grouppolarisation is especially strong withanonymous online communication.45 This mayat least partially explain what we haveobserved: that netto-uyo are individuals withxenophobic and racist sentiments who gatheron specific online forums, where their viewsare reinforced via interacting with others of thesame persuasion.

At the same time, we need to caution againstseeing 2-chan nationalism merely as a moreintense version of pre-existing, real-life4 6 nationalism. Human behaviour isinfluenced by the environment in which itoccurs, and the Internet offers a uniqueenvironment, where people often behavedifferently from the way they do in the realworld. Correspondingly, discourses thatdevelop on the Internet may exhibit differentcharacteristics from those that form outside theInternet. In the following I look at how internet-related elements have contributed to thespecific articulation of 2-chan nationalism andpoint out that online nationalism challenges usto rethink our standard understanding ofnationalism.

The Internet’s Role in the Formation of 2-chan Nationalism

Nationalism is usually associated withmodernity and nation-states.47 The collectiveidentity of national ‘we’ emerged withindustrialisation to support the newly unifiednation-states in Europe, and this model spreadto the rest of the world from the late 19thcentury onwards. In this process, modernnational media has played a significant role.Benedict Anderson’s classic study of modern

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nationalism, Imagined Communities, forexample, analyses nationalism in terms of thenational and territorial imagination supportedby nation-wide print capitalism. Reading anewspaper each morning, Anderson suggests,is an (imagined) shared experience, whichcontributes to the formation of nationalconsciousness.48

In contrast, the nation imagined via thesubculture of online netto-uyo community isdeterritorialised and does not exactly coincidewith the national boundary. And the mediacontent 2-chan users consume can be quitedifferent from that of national media. Asmentioned earlier, 2-chan users are highlycritical of mass media, and tend to gravitatetowards alternative and extreme perspectivesthat have little place in national newspapers orTV.

Today’s digitised media environment meansthat we are no longer reading the samenewspaper in the same way. As Cass Sunsteinsuggested with concepts such as the ‘Daily Me’and ‘customisation’,49 with the Internet andportable digital devices such as mobile phones,laptops and iPhones, each of us is constantlyclicking away to ‘filter in’ what we want to seeand ‘filter out’ what we do not want to see.Every time we access the Internet we arecustomising and personalising our exposure totopics and viewpoints that fit our interests andproclivities. This is a different activity from theritual of reading the same ‘national’ newspaperwith everyone else, every morning. With thepersonalised media of ‘Daily Me’, we areunlikely to be creating a single imaginedcommunity for a single nation-state. Chancesare , by access ing a customised andpersonalised set of news and information eachday, we are producing many, partiallyoverlapping—but never identical—imaginedcommunities both within and without thephysical border of a single nation-state.

As Yoshimi and Kan have argued,50 digital

media have eroded the national imaginarymaintained by national media such as TV andnewspaper. Mobile phone, laptop, iPod andother portable devices let people constantlyaccess information of their choice andencourages non - ter r i to r ia l and /ordeterritorialised imagination. Further to this,the new digital environment means that we areno longer passive consumers of media; unlikemass national print media, which offers one-way communication, the Internet allows each ofus to create our own set of information andeven feed it back to the public space of theInternet for others to consume, process, andpass on, all in bite-size. And unlike the nationalnewspaper, in which we inevitably encounternews that we did not intend to read, or ideaswe do not agree with, each of our ‘own set ofinformation’ we collect online can be highlypersonalized, narrow and fragmented.

2-chan nationalism can be seen as one suchtechnologically mediated small-scale site ofimagination. It is not a nation-wide imaginarythat is supported by national media andstretches as wide as the national territory.Rather it is a fragmented and customised ‘DailyWe’ nationalism, representing a small sectorand an extreme view. With the Tsushimathreads, by constantly monitoring, gatheringand consuming Korean news of an anti-Japanese nature, its participants werecustomising their information so as to reinforcethe view that ‘they’ hate ‘us’, in turn justifyingthat ‘we’ hate ‘them’. The Internet’s role hereis crucial, because without digitised electroniccommunication, it is difficult to efficientlyaccess and distribute the small, in many waysinsignificant, news articles and images thathave become central to netto-uyo chats.

2-chan Nationalism as Postmodern andSubcultural Nationalism

Implicit to many theories of nationalism is theexistence of the modern subject who voluntarilyidentifies with and commits to the nation. For

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example, one of Japan’s most influentialpolitical thinkers, Maruyama Masao, assertedthat ‘modern nationalism is characterised by itsmembers’ autonomy and subjectivity’.51 WhenAnderson talked about the ‘will to kill and diefor the nation,’52 he was alluding to the samepoint that nationalism arises out of a modernsubject with a commitment to nationalsolidarity.

In contrast, what we find on 2-chan is apostmodern subject characterised byfragmentation and cynicism. Even though thenetto-uyo discourse has a strong affinity withrevisionist politics, there is little sense of netto-uyo commitment collectively to any fixedposition (that is, beyond the basic xenophobiadiscussed earlier), including nationalist andright-wing positions. In fact, the posters in theTsushima threads tended to distancethemselves from the existing right-wingers andnationalist organisations. The occasionalattempts of such organisations to recruit netto-uyo via 2-chan were largely ignored.Announcements of right-wing demonstrationsdid occasionally appear in Tsushima threads;but they never produced enthusiasticresponses. Netto-uyo are far too cynical. Inresponse to invitations to join right-wingactivities outside cyberspace, they suggestedthings like ‘right-wingers are in fact zainichiKoreans’ and ‘right-wingers and Koreansshould both leave Japan’, maintaining adistance from real-life nationalists.53 Netto-uyo’s anti-Korean sentiments do not necessarilymean they identify with nationalist politicalactivists, as is seen, for example, in thefollowing comment on the original YouTubevideo of the right-wing demonstration onTsushima: ‘There go the bloody right-wingersagain. They are no different from the crazyKorean guy who set a rising-sun flag alight’.

Overall, the Tsushima threads were dominatedby fragmented, decontextualised and bite-sizedimages and statements. Despite the abundantnationalistic vocabulary and sentiments that

positioned ‘Japan’ over ‘Korea’, thesefragmented postings did not develop into acoherent narrative that legitimates andpromotes the modern nation-state.54 There wasa strong undercurrent that everyone andeverything be relativised rather thancommitted to or taken seriously, which renders2-chan nationalism postmodern. The historicallack of a modern subject in Japan has oftenbeen pointed out. Masao Miyoshi, for example,has observed that ‘the dispersal and demise ofmodern subjectivity … have long been evidentin Japan, where intellectuals have chronicallycomplained about the absence of selfhood’.55 Itis possible that 2-chan nationalism is simplyreproducing this ‘Japanese’ tendency online. Itis also likely that this is combined with theInternet’s tendency to promote a postmodernsubject. Mark Poster’s work, which examinesthe link between postmodern subject andelectronic media, for example, suggests that‘electronic communications constitute thesubject in ways other than that of the majormodern institutions,’56 rendering them‘unstable, multiple, and diffuse’ (Poster 1995).In Cyberspace, markers of social belongingsuch as ethnicity and gender are invisible andirrelevant (as they say, ‘On the Internet nobodyknows you are a dog’). Subjects are virtual anddisembodied. One can assume and experimentwith multiple subjectivities, and Cyberspacehas become a ‘significant social laboratory forexperimenting with the constructions andreconstructions of self that characterisepostmodern life’, where one could try ondifferent identities and personalities.57 Such anenvironment encourages speaking from aposition without full commitment and withoutletting that position subsume one’s sense ofidentity and belonging. With 2-chan, too, thepossibility that some of the posters are‘experimenting’ with nationalist subjectivitiesthere, while trying out other types ofsubjectivities on other sites, cannot be entirelyrejected.

The lack of modernist commitment and weak

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sense of subjectivity means that perhaps wecan see 2-chan nationalism as a ‘subcultural’and ‘apolitical’ nationalism that is akin to aleisure pursuit, hobby or style that functions tocreate an in-group feeling of belonging to thisonline community. The obsession andattachment to the fantasy Japan in thisdiscourse, I suspect, is not the real, existingnation-state, Japan, but ‘nat ion as afetish,’58 which is highly media-led, and image-oriented. I t is not the classic kind ofnationalism based on national pride andbelonging to the imaginary community of fellowJapanese. Rather, the driving force behind it isthe failure to enter the mainstream resulting infrustration and anxiety, which is then projectedon the ‘enemy’ f igure and imaginaryfictionalised and idealised Japan.

Conclusion

To conclude, netto-uyo nationalism isaggressive and shrill, but fragmentary. Itscoherence mainly comes from the symbol of the‘Koreans’ as Japan’s detested Other. While thehostility towards Korea, as well as towardsChina and North Korea is a shared trendamong all variants of neo-nationalism andrevisionism in post-1990s Japan, there aresome elements that are unique to netto-uyonationalism: it is a postmodern and subculturalnationalism aided by digital media and globalaccessibility to information. A product ofborderless Internet technology, 2-channationalism also exhibits parochial principles ofnationalism. Rather than a virtual publicsphere, the global and transnational electronicnetwork has in this case produced an inward-looking and xenophobic nationalism with littleawareness of the outside world. The oft-pointedout democratic potential of the Internet has, inthis instance, been aborted.

While I am hardly suggesting that the Internet‘caused’ nationalism, I hope to have shown thatcertain Internet-specific elements (such asanonymity, speedy information exchange, easy

monitoring of global news) have contributed tothe particular style of online neonationalism.Netto-uyo nationalism is not the archetypalunifying ideology of the nation-state that isreproduced through a different channel andchallenges us to rethink our understanding ofnationalism in the age of global electronicmedia. As electronic media and the globalinformation network is turning the imaginationinto a global affair, Japan as an ‘imagined’community is also being deeply affected.

Of course, the bigger questions of if, and how,such a subcultural, postmodern and onlineneonationalism is linked with more directlypolitical nationalist ideas and movementsoutside cyberspace, needs to be examinedfurther to assess its political efficacy. Althoughnetto-uyo nationalism currently remains largelywithin cyberspace, and although cynicismseems to prevail over modernist commitment toa f ixed meaning, the potential for i tspoliticisation and mobilisation exists. As SlavojZizek argued in his work on ideology andpostmodern cynicism, the lack of consciouscommitment does not stop one from acting as ifthere is such a commitment: ‘even if we do nottake things seriously, even if we keep anironical distance, we are still doing them.’ Asone of the many strands of nationalisms thatconstitute contemporary Japan’s neonationalistlandscape, 2-chan online nationalism shouldnot be dismissed as mere chatter.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Matt Allen, StephenEpstein, Manying Ip, Matthew Penney andMark Selden for their valuable feedback on theearlier versions of this paper.

Appendix: typical netto-uyo chats – from athread about the rejection of Korean rescueteam to enter New Zealand following anearthquake in February 2011.

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1 ： [―{}@{}@{}-] Korean Monkeys φ★：2011/02/25(Fri)

ID: ???

Earthquake-hit New Zealand rejects Koreanrescue team due to a concern with foot andmouth disease.

6 6 0 ：Rokudaimhamadadenzaemon◆AKUMA/.c.o：2011/02/27(Sun) 10:22:22.44 ID:Cg4n2goz

This shows that today’s Korea is a real sourceof trouble.

6 6 1 ：（ ´・ω・ ｀）（｀ハ´）：2011/02/27(Sun) 10:24:56.64

ID:H4GeBAxG

The Japanese are ostracising us Koreans.(partially written in mock Korean)

6 6 2 ：（ ´・ω・ ｀）（｀ハ´）：2011/02/27(Sun) 13:12:29.58

ID:FqpSFRYw

Koreans will behave disgustingly toget praise, which will only lead totheir bad reputation. If acceptedhelp from Korean, NZ will foreverdemanded to thank Korea. NewZealand knew this and that’s whythey rejected Korean team.

Korean monkeys have vanity, butnot sincerity, modesty, respecttowards others.

Even though half of Koreanpopulation are Christians, theirChristianity has produced evilChristians who are totally differentfrom Christianity.

There are no other shameful

people like this.

6 6 3 ：（ ´・ω・ ｀）（｀ハ´）：2011/02/27(Sun) 13:20:48.40 ID:iYOJxnTz

No country wants Koreans to come.

6 6 4 ：（ ´・ω・ ｀）（｀ハ´）：2011/02/27(sun) 14:02:23.53 ID:TXghT97S

Concern with looting, rape, rescue dog eaten,using pet medication.

6 6 5 ：（ ´・ω・ ｀）（｀ハ´）：2011/02/27(Sun) 14:04:39.41 ID:xKeHh4np

Japan should ban Koreans.

6 6 6 ：（ ´・ω・ ｀）（｀ハ´）： 2 0 1 1 / 0 2 / 2 7 ( S u n ) 1 4 : 1 7 : 3 9 . 6 4ID:H4GeBAxG

>>664

You exposed us. (in mock Korean)

(￣∀￣)

6 6 7 ：（ ´・ω・ ｀）（｀ハ´）：2011/02/27(Sun) 17:51:41.19 ID:6t+ujcZr

Let’s ban Koreans from Japan.

6 6 8 ：（ ´・ω・ ｀）（｀ハ´）：2011/02/27(Sun) 18:22:48.49

>>660

No, now just now but also the past.

669 ：Asahiruyasuzakijouha＠FREE　TIBET◆giKoK4gH6I ：2011/02/27(Sun) 19:23:12.80ID:IHRyVVDZ

>>662

There was a Korean who died in trying to savea Japanese person at a train station. I have notintention to speak badly of him.

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15

6 7 0 ：（ ´・ω・ ｀）（｀ハ´）：2011/02/27(Sun) 19:43:02.18

We don’t need looters.

Rumi Sakamoto is a senior lecturer in theSchool of Asian Studies, the University ofAuckland, New Zealand, and a Japan Focusassociate. She is the coeditor with MatthewAllen of Popular Culture, Globalization andJapan.

R e c o m m e n d e d c i t a t i o n : R u m iSakamoto, ‘Koreans, Go Home!’ InternetNationalism in Contemporary Japan as aDigitally Mediated Subculture, The Asia-PacificJournal Vol 9, Issue 10 No 2, March 7, 2011.

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Notes

1 Link (Accessed on 19th Feb 2010; this videohas since been removed due to a copyrightclaim by the nationalist group that organisedthe Tsushima campaign.)

2 Tsushima is about 700 square kilometres inarea, and has a population of about 30,000 (asof 2010). It is the closest Japanese territory toany foreign country; on a fine day, one canactually see Busan from Tsushima (it is, in fact,the only place in Japan one can see a foreignterritory with the naked eye.). For an exampleof recent conservative/nationalist take onTsushima as a ‘national defense issue’, seeMiyamoto (2009); Yamamoto (2010)

3 The city council in Masan passed the‘Tsushima Day’ bill, commemorating June 19 asthe day when a 15th century general led forcesto take over Tsushima.

4 See Oguma and Ueno (2003) for Japan’sgrass-roots nationalism; for Japan’s historicalrevisionism, see Iwasaki et al. (2008).

5 McCormack 2011.

6 Zaitokukai was established in 2007 and nowboasts several thousand members (according toits website) and many branches throughoutJapan. Its original focus was the so-called

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‘special privileges’ of Korean residents inJapan; but their target has now expanded toforeigners in Japan.

7 Shuken kaifuku o mezasu kai was establishedin 2006, with a stated goal of ‘fighting againstthe attempts of China and communism toinvade and colonise Japan’ (from the group’swebsite).

8 Tanimichi 2005.

9 In Appendix I have provided a shorttranslation from a typical anti-Korean thread onanother topic, to show 2-channeru’s style,visual quality and subcultural mode ofexpression.

10 While China and North Korea, too, areroutinely othered and demonized, Korea is 2-channeru’s favourite other. Responses toKorea-related topics are almost guaranteed on2-channeru. This focus on South Korea incontrast with offline neo-nationalists’ focus onChina and North Korea (and the US) as Japan’sthreat, is likely to be a product of the earliercontext for the emergence and crystallization ofnetto-uyo. Examples include 2-channeru users’heated online indignations at South Korea’srough play and the referee’s bias towardsSouth Korea in the 2002 World Cup Soccer,Korean netizens’ 2004 cyber ‘attack’ on 2-channeru over Dokdo/Takeshima in 2004, thephenomenon of the ‘Hate-Korea’ web comic in2005 which was largely about 2-channeruusers’ backlash against the extreme popularityof Korean TV drama and other cultural importsin early 2000s (Sakamoto and Allen 2007).

11 An important exception is Mark McLelland(2008), who challenges the ‘Anglophone’understanding of the online discourse of ‘race’by closely examining the 2-channerudiscussions on Korea and Koreans. Heconcludes that 2-chan racial thinking is morepreoccupied with the link between ‘blood’ and‘cultural competence’ than that in multiculturalsocieties like the US or Australia, where ‘Asian

race’ is conceptualised as a single category.

12 Sasada (2006); Honda (2007).

13 Habermas (1984).

14 Negroponte (1996: 236).

15 For example, Bakker (2001); Chan (2006);Eriksen (2007); Candan and Hunger (2008).

16 Erikson (2006: 6).

17 Gries (2005); Zhou et al. (2005); Liu (2006).

18 Yang (2003: 405-406). Another view is thatthe Chinese government manipulates cybernationalism to put pressure on Japan withoutletting anti-Japanese demonstrations get out ofhand.

19 For example, Mixi, Japan’s most popularsocial networking service has about 5 millionusers, which is about half the number of 2-chanusers. It is also the case that while 2-chan hasbeen described as the world’s largest BBS, thenumber of YouTube or Twitter users exceeds 2-chan users. See Net Rating/Nielsen Online(Nov 2008) [online] Available here [Accessed 7Oct 2009].

20 From 2003 IP addresses of the users havebeen recorded, so strictly speaking 2-chan is nolonger entirely anonymous. A vast majority stillpost as ‘anonymous’, while some choose to usepseudonyms.

21 McLelland (2008: 821).

22 Tsuji (2008: 11).

23 Motomiya Hiroshi’s historical comic, Kuni gamoeru (The Country is Burning), whichincluded depiction of the Nanjing Massacre,became a target of criticisms from netto-uyoand some conservative politicians, ending withan apology, termination of the series anddeletion of references to the Nanjing Massacre

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when the comic was published in book form.

24 Seto (2008); Tsuji (2008).

25 Kondo and Tanizaki (2007: 156).

26 Seto (2008: 76); Kimura (2008: 129-30).

27 2-channeru (2006: 177). A majority of 2-chanusers are said to be youth and young adults(Sasada 2006: 119; Nimiya 2003: 5); but thisview has been challenged by one recent surveythat found that the largest age group of theusers has gone up to 33-44. See J-cast News(2009).

28 Nimiya (2003: 11-13).

29 Takahara (2006).

30 Kondo and Tanizaki hold a similar view(2007: 156-165). For a general discussion ofyouth employment problem, freeters andNEETs in Japan, see Kosugi (2006) and Slater(2010).

31 Ogura (2005: 188).

32 These are examples of jobs often taken byimmigrant workers in countries like Europe,USA, UK, New Zealand and Australia.

33 A city council in Masan passed the ‘TsushimaDay’ bill in 2005, commemorating June 19 asthe day when a 15th century general led forcesto take over Tsushima (Card 2006). For anoverview of the Takeshima-Dokdo issue, seeWada (2005). Following the nationalists-rightwing campaigns and publicity via right-leaningmedia, there have been mainstream reportsabout the Korean presence on the island, too.

34 Often minor news starts the netto-uyoconversation. Examples include an anti-Japanese statement made by a Korean blogger;a Korean media’s critique of a YouTube video ofKorean ‘foul play’ in the 2002 World Cup; orsomeone crossing out ‘Japan Sea’ and writing

‘East Sea’ on a world map exhibited in amuseum in Berlin.

35 In this respect it is interesting to note thatthe Korean presence in Tsushima is regardedas external pollution and invasion, despite thehistorical Korean presence in Tsushima.Contemporary nationalist discourse seems tobe attempting to purge the historical presenceof Korea and the islands’ memory of it by newlyreconstructing Korea as an external figure.

36 Oguma (1995). War-time multiculturalismwas quickly forgotten after the war. SeeMorris-Suzuki (2011), for example, for Japan’spostwar border control against illegal Koreanentry in the immediate postwar period. Eventhough many such Koreans were formerres iden ts re turn ing to J apan a f te rdecolonisation, they were treated asproblematic outsiders and foreigners.

37 If indeed netto-uyo are economically andsocially disadvantaged young people, as hasbeen suggested, this type of anti-Koreansentiment may share something with the well-documented pattern of the underprivilegednational self blaming the immigrant Other –‘they’ are stealing ‘our’ jobs.

38 A Korean word for ‘my country’.

39 A Korean word to mark a polite ending of asentence.

40 Poster (2001: 1).

41 Poster (2001: 7).

42 Rheingold (2003); Langman (2005).

43 Langman (2005: 44).

44 Rheingold (1993: 207).

45 Sia et al., 2002.

46 In this article by ‘real-life’ I simply refer to

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non-electronic environments outsidecyberspace.

47 Gellner (1983); Anderson (1991); Breuilly(1994).

48 Anderson (1991).

49 Sunstein (2001).

50 Yoshimi and Kan (2001).

51 Maruyama (1964).

52 Anderson (1991).

5 3 This attitude is reciprocated by thetraditional neonationalists, who tend to bedismissive of netto-uyo for their lack ofrigorous ideology as well as their hiding behindanonymity, which they consider to be a sign of

netto-uyo’s lack of commitment.

54 A number of core posters attempted to dothis, but they failed to define the overalldiscourse.

55 Miyoshi (1989).

56 Poster (1995).

57 Turkle (1995: 180).

58 Iida (2003: 93).

59 While Korea is constructed as Japan’s Otherin the Tsushima threads discussed here, ‘China’and ‘tokutei-ajia (‘certain Asia’; a 2-chan slangthat refers to China, South Korea and NorthKorea) appear similarly othered in netto-uyodiscourse in general.

60 Zizek (1989: 33).

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