In a landmark ruling against hate speech, a Japanese court is ordering a nationalist group to pay damages to a Korean school for staging loud and nasty protests against a Korean school in Kyoto.  It turns out that calling people “cockroaches” and threatening to “throw then into the sea” isn’t “freedom of expression” after all.

Many visitors to Japan have seen them, the “Uyoku Dantai” groups which stage loud protests from their black vans against foreign residents and call for a return to pre-World War II militarism (which didn’t work out to well for Japan).

This particular group, “Zaitokukai”, targeted the kids at the pro-Pyongyang Kyoto Chosen Daiichi Elementary School, shouting slogans such as “throw Korean schools out of Japan,” and “children of spies,” through loudspeakers, disrupting classes and causing some students to complain of stomach pains.  The group even posted the videos online.  The school sued, and Zaitokukai will have to pay around A$125,000 in damages as well as to move their demonstrations 200 meter away from the school.

The ruling doesn’t ban hate speech outright, but it moves certain expressions of it into the category of racial discrimination, which is banned in Japan (though rarely enforced).

Hundreds of thousands of ethnic Koreans live in Japan, many being the descendants of Koreans forcibly brought over as laborers from when Japan occupied Korea during 1910 – 1945.