/leftypol/ - Leftist Politically Incorrect

I’ve always wondered how modern American leftists, Marxist or otherwise, react to the anti-Asian history of the American left and labor movement. I’m referring to things like the anti-coolie movements that spread across the Western Hemisphere during the nineteenth century. Anti-coolie activism itself originated in Chile, while countries such as Mexico and Peru saw anti-Asian violence fueled by competition with Asian indentured workers. In the United States, this often erupted into outright anti-Chinese violence and pogroms, whether in the 1871 Los Angeles massacre—considered by some historians to be the deadliest lynching in American history—the Rock Springs massacre, the Tacoma riots of 1885, or the anti-Asian agitation associated with the Workingmen’s Party of California under Denis Kearney, which became infamous for its role in the 1877 San Francisco riots that left numerous Chinese laborers dead.

The same pattern arguably resurfaced in a different form during the 1970s and 1980s with the wave of Japan-bashing that swept through much of the white working class. This hostility was often encouraged by politicians aligned with the Democratic Party, who were eager to attack Japanese economic competition while the Reagan administration and the GOP were generally more receptive to Japanese investment in the United States, even as the American automobile industry was struggling.

What I find particularly creepy and strange is how many white Americans today, on both the left and the right, have become outright weeaboos or at least highly positive toward Japan despite the fact that it was not even a century ago that Toyota vehicles were being vandalized by disgruntled union workers employed by Ford and other American manufacturers. Books such as Japan as Number One became bestsellers, while Hollywood frequently portrayed Japanese corporations as sinister or unstoppable economic rivals, especially in films like Blade Runner and Rising Sun.

I would argue that this continued into the 1990s, when many moral guardians began targeting Japanese anime as satanic or as a vehicle for spreading Japanese wartime nationalism. One only has to look at the various newspaper columns attacking series such as Dragon Ball, Sailor Moon, and even Pokémon for allegedly promoting Satanism, homosexuality, or whatever other cultural boogeyman happened to concern the American Christian right at the time—a movement which, it should be remembered, also preached that AIDS was divine punishment for homosexuality. To be fair, these same moral crusaders targeted plenty of domestic subcultures as well, including Dungeons & Dragons and heavy metal music. Still, anime and manga being foreign products certainly did not help, especially given that they came from a country that had once been America’s enemy during World War II and that many veterans of that conflict still openly harbored anti-Japanese sentiments.

Even during the 2000s and early 2010s, long after anti-Japanese sentiment had largely faded, being an anime fan was still often regarded as something only weirdos were into, somewhere on the same spectrum as being a furry or a brony. I remember how many commentators at the time described anime and manga as “cringe” and something to be embarrassed about. A good example is when PewDiePie made a video discussing his interests in the early 2010s and mentioned the manga Blame!. Unlike his other hobbies, he seemed almost apologetic about having a favorite manga at all.

Compare that with today, when mainstream platforms such as Netflix actively license anime for global audiences and even helped distribute the live-action adaptation of One Piece complete with dubs in numerous languages.

One could argue that this shift toward weeabooism occurred because Japan ceased to be perceived as a threat after the collapse of its asset bubble and the onset of the so-called Lost Decade. The stagnation of the Japanese economy effectively ended the economic miracle that had once led Americans to fear another “rising sun.” At the same time, Millennials and especially Zoomers grew up with anime and manga as a normal part of their media consumption rather than as a niche interest.

After all, many Americans who had once been intensely anti-Chinese became highly vocal about Imperial Japanese atrocities in China. The famous 1937 photograph Bloody Saturday is one example of how outrage over Japanese actions spread through the American public. Yet much of that outrage emerged during a period when Chinese immigrants themselves were no longer viewed as the primary Yellow Peril. By then, that role had largely been transferred to Japan. The Chinese Exclusion Act and other racist immigration policies, including the Immigration Act of 1924, had dramatically reduced Chinese immigration and the overall size of the Chinese diaspora in the United States. How convenient.

Even if this explains the transformation in attitudes toward Japan, it does not fully explain the recent growth of online sinophilia. This is occurring despite the fact that many people on the American right continue to view the PRC as a major geopolitical threat, even if anti-left contrarianism occasionally leads some of them to praise China as a way of criticizing contemporary America.

My own suspicion is that weeabooism has contributed to a broader fetishization of East Asia among certain segments of the American population, particularly among younger right-wing internet users. This tendency has only intensified as more Americans become disillusioned with their own country. Even with Trump in office, political messaging cannot entirely obscure the fact that many young Americans have lost confidence in the future of the United States. America is obviously not collapsing into Third World conditions, but that does not mean confidence in its institutions and long-term trajectory remains high.

At the same time, forms of anti-Asian prejudice still exist on the left. One can point to hostility toward Indian immigrants rooted in competition for white-collar jobs, feminist criticisms of sexism in countries such as Japan and South Korea that sometimes drift into cultural essentialism, or anti-CCP rhetoric that can range anywhere from principled anti-communism to outright Sinophobia.

So my question to American leftists is this: what do you think about the anti-Asian history of the American left and labor movement, and how do you explain the rapid shift toward various forms of sinophilia and weeabooism over the course of a few decades? More importantly, as a leftist, how do you think the American left should confront and address this aspect of its own history?

What surprises me is that the people who most often bring up this subject tend to be either liberal identitarians or conservative commentators who use the historical racism of the labor movement primarily as a way of attacking Democrats, socialists, or the broader Western left.