'Race' on the Japanese internet: discussing Korea and Koreans on '2-Channeru'

This paper investigates discourse about race on the Japanese Internet, particularly regarding resident Koreans and their relationship to the Japanese. One board relating to arguments about Korea on the notorious ‘Channel 2’ BBS, Japan’s most visited Internet site, is investigated, since it is one of the main public forums in which racial vilification takes place, perpetrated by both Japanese and Korean posters. Nakamura’s (Cybertypes) contention that the Internet is ‘a place where race is created as an effect of the net's distinctive uses of language’ is taken as a starting point to investigate the differences between Japanese and Anglophone notions of racial inclusion and exclusion and to draw attention to the particularities of racial discourse that take place in this virtual Japanese space.