The DHC controversy led me to find something unique about right-wing extremism in Japan. (1/6)

The US has Alex Jones, the UK has Katie Hopkins and far-right extremism is not unique to one place. But what I find interesting in Japan or perhaps in East Asia in general is that there is a real lack of beat reporting on online extremism and disinformation. (2/6)

It's hard to imagine a columnist who openly talked about wanting to go to war with Korea and cut people with a katana, to be close enough with an incumbent prime minister to speak to him on the phone. (3/6)

Or to be invited by a foreign correspondents' club to speak on the issue of free speech.

It sounds absurd but it is what's happened in the last few years. (4/6)

It would have been also newsworthy enough had it happened in the West. Yet, there is little to no international media coverage of such figures despite many foreign correspondents stationed in Japan. (5/6)

And the DHC controversy is the latest example of my observations that there is a real information/perspective gap between the West and Asia, especially in a year that the Black Lives Matter movement and the rejection of Trump drove the discourse of racism. (6/6)

I do wonder whether the lack of diversity among foreign correspondents (although it's becoming more diverse) has something to do with it, as the book "The Future Foreign Correspondent (2019)" analyzes.