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Crazy 1930s-40s Extremists Who Tried to Rewrite Japan’s History

Khalid Elhassan January 29, 2025 14 min

Japanese - League of Blood members await trial — League of Blood members await trial. Wikimedia

11. Japanese Radicals in Brazil

Japanese immigrants hard at work in a Brazilian coffee plantation. Historic Museum of Japanese Immigration

The League of Blood that terrorized Japanese politicians and strove to push the country into wars that ended up catastrophically for Japan was bonkers. However, it was just one of a number of loony (and lethal) Japanese nationalist societies. An even odder one emerged during and after WWII in, of all places, Brazil. South America does not usually come to mind when people think of WWII. Nor does it often conjure images of fanatical Japanese, refusing to accept that their country had been defeated. However, South America’s biggest country, Brazil, witnessed just that during the war and in the years after its conclusion. The country was shaken by fanatical Japanese immigrants who formed a group that waged a campaign of terror against other immigrants deemed disloyal to Japan.

Written by

Khalid Elhassan

A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.