Paper short abstract:

The genre of “hate books” has encouraged racism and historical revisionism since the 1990s. This presentation analyses the Japanese publishing industry which induced two booms of hate books and its insiders’ stance on hate books, based mainly on qualitative interviews with 30 editors.

Paper long abstract:

In 2017, the anti-Korean and Chinese book written by Kent Gilbert, an American TV celebrity, became one of the best-selling books in Japan. Since then, the genre of “hate books” (heito-bon) has enjoyed a “second boom” (Kawai 2020). The book genre has encouraged racism and historical revisionism since the late 1990s. Just after the Hate Speech Law was passed in 2016, “hate books” decreased in number. However, the second boom of “hate books” continues also during the pandemic. How did the Japanese publishing industry induce the two booms of hate books? How did its insiders recognize the problem of “hate books”?

While the readership and rhetoric of hate books have attracted scholarly attention (Kurahashi 2018; Kawai 2020), the stance of the publishing industry, especially editors, has never been investigated, because editors of the major publishing houses are less accessible to scholars. Several academic and nonacademic articles have pointed out that the rise of hate books resulted from the publishing industry’s slump since the latter half of the 1990s (Kiyohara 2017; Lee 2017; Nagae 2019). To get out of the slump, the Japanese publishing industry started to publish hate books as a new form of entertainment (Kiyohara 2017; Lee 2017; Nagae 2019). To protest the publication of hate books, a part of the insiders of the Japanese publishing industry established “BLAR (Book Lovers against Racism)” in 2014. However, no academic research investigated into editors who have been involved in the production of hate books and the countermovement.

Thus, this presentation analyses the relation between the publishing industry and “hate books”, focusing on editors’ stance on “hate books”, the decision-making structure within publishing houses, and the insiders’ protest against hate books. The analysis is based on qualitative content-analyses of academic and non-academic literature on hate books and explorative interviews with ca. 30 editors.