Today Kiyomi and I were in Nagoya going to see one of her friends play in an orchestra. Walking to the hall along the one of the main roads we heard a sound behind us, turned around but could see nothing out of the ordinary (people, cars etc), turned back and kept walking.
Two minutes later we heard it again, sounded like a lot of voices all shouting/cheering. “There must be a parade on today” I thought, the sound kept getting closer and closer then we saw what was causing it:
Three black jeeps and four big black busses of the uyoku or ultra-nationalists driving through the city spewing out their right-wing messages. Each jeep had two speakers on top and each bus had four to six BIG speakers/megaphones on top of it. The noise was deafening. Kiyomi was right next to me, she said something and I couldn’t hear a word she said, then again I couldn’t hear myself think (and the busses were still two blocks away).
On passing us (they were on the other side of the road (4 lanes plus a centre strip) the noise was just ear shattering. You know when you listen to really loud music through ear phones and after you take your ear phones off it takes a few moments for your ears to re-adjust before you can hear again, well it was like that.
You can read a bit about uyoku here, or do a google search. A quote that stands out “To most people, though, uyoku are an embarrassment best ignored” – would like to but it’s a bit hard when it’s broadcast at over 300 decibels.
— David