Kirk here. This is only tangentially related to Kumamoto but I think it's interesting (and, unfortunately, rather disturbing) nonetheless.

Today I searched Google news for "Kumamoto" to see if there was anything I should share on this page. The following article came up because of a Twitter post with a Photoshopped image of a Lion prowling the streets of Kumamoto that became an issue after the 2016 quakes. The Lion prank caused people who had already been traumatized by the quakes additional worry and so I can understand why the poster was punished.

The case reported in this article, however is far, far darker. In 1923, baseless rumors about Koreans poisoning wells after an earthquake led to the murder of significant numbers of innocent Koreans living in Japan. Some hate-filled person or persons seem to have been intent of spreading the same kinds of vile rumors almost 100 years later. The article says that the rumors "filled Twitter, YouTube and other social media outlets." I'm not sure if they have been taken down or not but I wasn't able to find them. By the way, I should point out that Black people . . . who probably don't even live the area in any significant numbers . . . have been made an addition target.

As I say, I'm not sure how many people participated in this latest activity. Hopefully, it was a small number of deranged idiots. But I think it's important to note that the issue of what happened in 1923 remains part of contemporary Japanese politics. Tokyo's governor, KOIKE Yuriko, may not be actively spreading negative rumors about Koreans but she's certainly not interested in encouraging people to learn from history:

"A committee organizing the ceremony commemorating the post-quake Korean massacre issued a statement saying the governor's response is 'saying that murder victims and those who lost their lives in a natural disaster are equivalent and thus she does not need to send a tribute.'"

Tokyo governor skips tribute to Koreans murdered after 1923 quake
https://english.kyodonews.net/news/2017/09/6ac88cff4a6a-tokyo-governor-skips-tribute-to-koreans-murdered-after-1923-quake.html

There are many more articles about Koike and criticism of her. I chose the one above because it refers to her official reasoning. The article says "equivalent" but the explanation I remember from Japanese was that there was no need for a separate ceremony just for the murder victims -- all victims of the quake are remembered in the city's ceremony. I won't bother to try to point out the flaws in this excuse.

English article on most recent hate speech
https://mainichi.jp/english/articles/20210215/p2a/00m/0na/016000c

Japanese original
https://mainichi.jp/articles/20210214/k00/00m/040/249000c