Exactly.
My point is that the Japanese population has always had xenophobic overtones (more so than here and most other westernized countries IMO). Their history has some ugly chapters written in it, and the chapters are often started when popular leaders in the community begin to accept and promote xenophobic principles. The fact that one of the leading newspapers is not shooting this crap down, and that any of the academics at all are in favor of it, smacks of the old days.
Cleansing the text books of known attrocities that no one would've questioned a few years ago, is also not a good sign. Japanese are notorious group-thinkers. Sometimes it works in their favor (when all the economic ideas and forces are good ones), sometimes not.
Maybe it's nothing; we'll see how these comics and comments continue to sell / grow in number over the next few months. When things go wrong economically and otherwise in Japan, they are not known to be rational people even though they always appear to be very calm and polite people (other than the flamboyant talk show hosts I mean).
