Every now and then I see a post about Japan not having any Islamic terrorism, implying that their strict immigration policy and fairly uniform ethnicity keeps the nation safe, and yes it is true that Islamic terrorism in Japan is extremely rare, with a single islamic terrorism incident over the last few decades.
However, Islamic attacks on Tokyo would make about as much sense as the IRA bombing Tokyo, given that Japan is not considered an enemy to Islamists… And more importantly, their uniformity does not mean that the Japanese don’t suffer terrorism or mass attacks. Extreme left wing activists did multiple attacks in the 70s, the nationalist right in the 80s and onwards (with 23 attacks in 2002-2003 alone, and let’s not forget the 600 people injured in the Matsumoto sarin attack in -94, the 5,500 people who went to hospital after the sarin attack in the subway of Tokyo in -95, the 67 injured in the Wakayama arsenic attack of -98, or the nail bomb attack in Sapporo in 2000, or the man stabbing eight people to death in a school in Ikeda, or the man driving a truck into a crowd and then stabbing people in Tokyo in 2008, or the man who stabbed a number of people in Ibaraki in 2010, or the man who wounded 20 and stabbed 19 people to death in 2015 at a handicap facility. Mass murder is not a rare thing in Japan, despite the low numbers of muslims.
