The wit and wisdom of Ishihara Shintaro

I dearly love the Governor of Tokyo, re-elected yesterday for another four years.

On Koreans and Taiwanese: "with Sangokujin [a wartime and post-war racist slur referring to Koreans and Taiwanese] and foreigners committing serious crimes, we should prepare ourselves for possible riots that may be instigated by them at the outbreak of an earthquake". He is presumably advocating their being beaten to death by mobs like the unfortunate Koreans after the 1923 earthquake.

On foreigners: "Roppongi is now virtually a foreign neighborhood. Africans — I don't mean African-Americans — who don't speak English are there doing who knows what. This is leading to new forms of crime such as car theft. We should be letting in people who are intelligent."

On the unsuitabilty of French as an international language: "it is a language in which nobody can count".

On women: "old women who live after they have lost their reproductive function are useless and are committing a sin". In refusing to apologise for this comment, he suggested that criticism of him was driven by "tyrant old women".

His current major target: hayfever.