Saturday September 10, the First Secretary of the Japanese Embassy in Moscow and his wife were attacked and injured. This information leaked to the Russian media on Monday.
The Japanese diplomat says that he and his wife were waiting for a trolley-bus near one of the stadiums, when three "normal looking" young men approached them and started an "uneasy conversation". Eventually, the young people decided that they just didn’t like the looks of these Japanese people, so they punched the diplomat three times in the face and hit his wife in the head. Just as the Japanese couple came under attack, the trolley stopped and the foreigners were able to escape the young thugs.
The diplomat consulted with his Embassy, and afterwards the Japanese Embassy sent a note to the Russian Ministry of International Affairs, requesting a thorough investigation, in light of the other attacks on Japanese citizens that took place in the past few years. In 2002, after the Russian national soccer team lost to the Japanese team, Russian soccer hooligans rioted in Moscow and severely injured five Japanese musicians, who had come to Russia for the Tchaikovsky Festival. On September 9, 2005 another Japanese citizen, the director of the Japanese Center, was attacked in Novgorod by several young men between 16 and 18 years of age.
Moscow is a megapolis of over ten million people with very diverse ethnicities, nationalities and interests. However, younger uneducated Russians, and people in the suburbs in general, still have a lot of racist attitudes towards people who aren’t "like them". In the Russian country-side, many gay people are getting attacked; and in the past few years there have been multiple attacks on people of many different races and nationalities, especially people who look like Caucasians, which doesn't mean "white-colored skin" in Russia, but describes someone from Chechnya, Azerbaijan or Georgia.
The attack on the Japanese diplomat followed attacks on Polish diplomats, and several assaults on black students studying at Russian universities.
