More than 250 copies of books about Anne Frank, the Jewish girl who hid with her family in a small apartment in the Netherlands during the Holocaust but later died in a Nazi concentration camp, have been vandalized in more than 30 libraries in Tokyo, CNN reports.
Antisemitism is quite rare in Japan, although occasional magazine articles appear that deny the Holocaust ever took place, the New York Times reported. But that has not stopped Jewish leaders from declaring a growing concern over the targeting of these books in Tokyo.
“The geographic scope of these incidents strongly suggest an organized effort to denigrate the memory of the most famous of the 1.5 million Jewish children murdered by the Nazis in the World War II Holocaust,” said Rabbi Abraham Cooper in a statement. He’s the associate dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, a leading Jewish human rights organization, which also houses a major exhibition on Anne Frank at its Museum of Tolerance in Los Angeles.
The BBC cited Professor Rotem Kowner, an expert in Japanese history and culture at Israel’s University of Haifa, as saying that sales of Anne Frank’s Diary of a Young Girl in Japan are exceeded only by those in the US. For Japanese readers, he said, the story transcends its Jewish identity to symbolize the struggle of youth for survival.
“In the 1950s and the 1960s, there were competitions in which Japanese teenagers had to reflect on the experience of Anne Frank. Thousands of teenagers sent their submissions to such competitions,” the BBC quoted Professor Kowner as saying. “It was a book about a war tragedy and the way youth experienced war. … For many Japanese they would view this as a tragic development.”
