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Kawasaki municipal multicultural educational facility Fureai-kan hall director Choi Kang-ija holds a press conference after filing a damages lawsuit, in Kawasaki's Kawasaki Ward on Nov. 18, 2021. (Mainichi/Yoshiya Goto)
YOKOHAMA -- A third-generation Korean resident of Japan has sued a man in his 40s via the Yokohama District Court's Kawasaki branch and demanded 3.05 million yen (roughly $26,700) in damages, saying that he repeatedly posted defamatory comments about her online.
Kawasaki municipal multicultural educational facility Fureai-kan hall director Choi Kang-ija, 48, filed the damages suit on Nov. 18. According to the suit and other sources, the man posted an online blog entry titled, "Choi Kang-ija, who do you think you are?" in June 2016. Among its passages, he wrote: "You enemy alien, who harms the nation of Japan. Go back to your home country quickly."
The blog service operator later deleted the post after Choi requested its removal. But then for some four years starting in October 2016, the man continued posting blog entries and tweets about Choi, in which he called her "a fake discrimination victim" and a "victim-status exploiter," among other names.
Choi argues the June 2016 blog included what the anti-hate speech law defines as "unjust, discriminatory remarks inciting possible acts of removal from a local community." She says the posts that followed were defamatory, and also claims the blog entries and tweets caused emotional distress.
Choi requested information disclosure in March 2021 to find out who was behind the online posts, and has identified the man, who lives in east Japan's Kanto region. In an exchange of letters with Choi, the man admitted to his actions and apologized for them, but she decided to nevertheless sue him because she felt his attempts to make excuses, including that he was "hurting over not having a job," showed that he wasn't remorseful.
In April 2020, the city of Kawasaki established an expert review committee based on the country's first municipal ordinance against racial discrimination that makes hate speech eligible for criminal punishments. The city requested website operators remove a total of 51 posts the committee recognized as hate speech. Of these, 37 have been deleted, but because the requests are not legally binding, the municipal government hasn't been able to act further on the remaining 14 posts.
Attorney Yasuko Morooka, who joined a Nov. 18 press conference with Choi, said, "The purpose of this lawsuit is to hold individuals accountable for what they have done. Her case will not be solved just with removal requests, and we've concluded we cannot let it go unchecked."
(Japanese original by Nao Ikeda, Yokohama Bureau)
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