Tokyo – Several hundred people, most of them expatriate Americans, held a protest on Friday in the Japanese capital, Tokyo, against U.S. President-elect Donald Trump, hours before his inauguration in Washington.
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Some people held up electric candles and others carried placards reading “Love Trumps Hate” and “Women’s Rights Are Human Rights”, as they marched along a downtown street.
“Trump presidency gets my blood boiling … Everything we value could be gone. It’s time to speak your mind and concerns and to do our best to salvage the values we cherish in America,” said Bill Scholer, an art teacher.
“I grew up in the 1960s, and it feels like we are going backwards, and am very worried that we will lose all of the advances we have made over these years,” said Holly Thompson, a writer.
Women’s rights activists plan protests in various Asian cities on Saturday.
In the Philippines earlier on Friday, about 200 demonstrators from a Philippine nationalist group rallied for about an hour against Trump outside the U.S. embassy in Manila.
Some held up signs demanding U.S. troops leave the Philippines while others set fire to a paper U.S. flag bearing a picture of Trump’s face.
Trump’s presidency is being viewed with caution in some parts of Asia.
He alarmed China by breaking with decades of precedent last month by taking a congratulatory telephone call from Taiwan’s President Tsai Ing-wen.
China regards Taiwan as a renegade province and objects to countries interacting with it as a violation of Beijing’s “one-China” principle. Trump has even raised questions about the U.S. position on the principle.
Trump has also criticized China’s trade practices and threatened to impose punitive tariffs on Chinese imports.
He has also said he would kill an ambitious Asia-Pacific trade pact, raising questions about the prospects for globalization and free trade.