Why This Topic Landed in Japan
Even as people brushed it off with "it doesn't matter if I never go to China," the very real fear of extraterritorial reach—"you could be detained at the border over a single online post"—struck home. On top of that, a message board culture that turns the domestic left-right divide into entertainment amplified the spread, using a law that threatens free speech as fodder.
Key Reaction Themes
- A decisive "China risk" — Brush-offs and pessimism: "I can't go to or invest in China anymore."
- Fear of extraterritorial reach — Concrete worry about "arrest at the border using SNS posts as evidence."
- Folded into domestic ideological feuds — Jeers like "a leftist's paradise" and "a nation of ultranationalists" pulling it into Japan's left-right sparring.
What Japanese Netizens Are Saying
Worry over speech controls and extraterritorial reach, plus jabs at domestic rivals
Pessimism that "China risk has peaked" and fear of extraterritorial reach mixed with a tendency to turn the issue into domestic left-right point-scoring.
Sources: Yahoo! news, 2ch
Comments:
- "I'll never go to China in my life, so do whatever you want."
- "Another idiotic law."
- "China risk, you know..."
- "And this is supposedly a country ruled by law."
- "Nyah nyah, Xi Jinping's an idiot."
- "Apparently China has a flag-desecration law too."
- "If they're going to bother, Japan should make a proper flag-desecration law like China's, instead of this spineless one."
- "So you'll get arrested on entering China, with your 5ch posts as evidence?"
- "What are the lefties going to do about this? Freedom of speech is disappearing in Japan too, you know."
- "Well, it's a nation where every citizen is an ultranationalist, after all."