The rise of the right in Japan over China

“A country that cannot defend the Senkaku Islands cannot defend Okinawa; and a country that cannot defend Okinawa cannot defend any part of Japan.”
This was among the reasons cited by Eiji Kosaka, a local politician in Tokyo, for his participation in a nationalist boat trip to the disputed Senkaku-Diaoyu Islands in August.
Kosaka himself was among the ten activists who defied their own government and landed on the largest of the islets, called Uotsurijima in Japan and Diaoyu Dao in China, for about two hours.
Kosaka explains: “For decades, Red China has always been expanding. They took over the independent country of Tibet and then made East Turkestan into a Uighur colony. It’s the same with southern Mongolia… Now they are facing Taiwan and Okinawa—and the front line of Okinawa is the Senkaku Islands.”

 And while Tokyo Governor Shintaro Ishihara has been quite prominent for decades, never before his April announcement to an audience in Washington DC that the Tokyo Metropolitan Government intended to purchase three of the five disputed Senkaku-Diaoyu Islands from their private owner has he been so successful in driving the national government’s foreign policies and influencing Japan’s external relations with its East Asian neighbors.
Like Kosaka, Governor Ishihara makes no bones about the fact that he distrusts China and sees it as a security threat to the Japanese nation.
In a late May press conference at the Foreign Correspondents’ Club of Japan, Ishihara declared that his nation had better wake up to the threat soon or else it was liable to “become the sixth star on China’s national flag”.

Shintaro Ishihara would feel right at home in America's Klu Klux Klan if he had been born there given his views on foreigners in Japan.

Views on foreigners in Japan

On April 9, 2000, in a speech before a Self-Defense Forces group, Ishihara publicly stated that atrocious crimes have been committed repeatedly by illegally entered sangokujin (Japanese: 三国人 (third country national); a term commonly viewed as derogatory) and foreigners, and speculated that in the event a natural disaster struck the Tokyo area, they would be likely to cause civil disorder.^[24] His comment invoked calls for his resignation, demands for an apology and fears among residents of Korean descent in Japan.^[5] Regarding this statement, Ishihara later said:

I referred to the "many sangokujin who entered Japan illegally." I thought some people would not know that word so I paraphrased it and used gaikokujin, or foreigners. But it was a newspaper holiday so the news agencies consciously picked up the sangokujin part, causing the problem.

... After World War II, when Japan lost, the Chinese of Taiwanese origin and people from the Korean Peninsula persecuted, robbed and sometimes beat up Japanese. It's at that time the word was used, so it was not derogatory. Rather we were afraid of them.

... There's no need for an apology. I was surprised that there was a big reaction to my speech. In order not to cause any misunderstanding, I decided I will no longer use that word. It is regrettable that the word was interpreted in the way it was.^[9]

Much of the criticism of this statement involved the historical significance of the term: sangokujin historically referred to ethnic Chinese and Koreans, working in Japan, several thousand of whom were killed by mobs of Japanese people following the Great Kantō earthquake of 1923.^[5]
On February 20, 2006, Ishihara also said: "Roppongi is now virtually a foreign neighborhood. Africans — I don't mean African-Americans — who don't speak English are there doing who knows what. This is leading to new forms of crime such as car theft. We should be letting in people who are intelligent."^[25]
On April 17, 2010, Ishihara said "many veteran lawmakers in the ruling-coalition parties are naturalized or the offspring of people naturalized in Japan".

Don't fool yourself. 90% of Japan's politicians share Ishihara's beliefs they just choose not to express them in public so that the world will see them as enlightened which is far from the truth and reality.