IHT, November 20, 2005
Japanese fad: Comics that degrade Chinese and Koreans
By Norimitsu Onishi, The New York Times

TOKYO A young Japanese woman in the comic book "Hating the Korean Wave"
exclaims, "It's not an exaggeration to say that Japan built the South
Korea of today!"

In another passage, the text says, "There is nothing at all in Korean
culture to be proud of."

Another comic book, "Introduction to China," portrays the Chinese as a
depraved people obsessed with cannibalism. In it, a woman of Japanese
origin says: "Take the China of today - its principles, thought,
literature, art, science, institutions. There's nothing attractive."

The two comic books, portraying Chinese and Koreans as base peoples and
advocating confrontation with them, have become runaway best sellers in
Japan in the past four months.

In their graphic and unflattering drawings of Japan's fellow Asians and
in the unapologetic, often offensive contents of their speech bubbles,
the books display some of the sentiments underlying Japan's worsening
relations with the rest of Asia.

They also point to Japan's longstanding unease with the rest of Asia and
its own sense of identity. Much of Japan's history in the past century
and a half has been driven by the goal of becoming more like the West
and less like Asia. Today, the rise of China and South Korea to
challenge Japan's position as Asia's economic, diplomatic and cultural
leader is inspiring renewed xenophobia against them in Japan.

Kanji Nishio, a scholar of German literature, is the honorary chairman
of the Japanese Society for History Textbook Reform, the nationalist
organization that has pushed to have references to the country's wartime
atrocities eliminated from junior high school textbooks.

Nishio is blunt about how Japan should deal with its neighbors, saying
nothing has changed since 1885, when one of modern Japan's most
influential intellectuals, Yukichi Fukuzawa, said that Japan should
emulate the advanced nations of the West.

Fukuzawa also said Japan should leave Asia by dissociating itself from
its backward neighbors, especially China and Korea.

Nishio, who wrote a chapter in the comic book about South Korea, said
Japan should try to cut itself off from China and South Korea, as
Fukuzawa advocated.

"Currently we cannot ignore South Korea and China," Nishio said.

"Economically it's difficult. But in our hearts, psychologically, we
should remain composed and keep that attitude."

The emergence of South Korea as a rival became apparent to many Japanese
in 2002, when the countries were co-hosts of soccer's World Cup and
South Korea advanced further in the tournament than Japan. In the same
period, a so-called Korean Wave of television dramas, movies and music
from South Korea swept Japan and the rest of Asia, often displacing
Japan's own cultural exports.

The wave, though popular among Japanese women, gave rise to a counter
movement, especially on the Internet. Sharin Yamano, the young
cartoonist behind "Hating the Korean Wave," began his strip on his own
Web site then.

"The 'Hate Korea' feelings have spread explosively since the World Cup,"
said Akihide Tange, an editor at Shinyusha, the publisher of the comic
book. Still, the number of sales, 360,000 so far, surprised the book's
editors, suggesting that the Hate Korea movement was far larger than
they had believed.

"We weren't expecting there'd be so many," said Susumu Yamanaka, another
editor at Shinyusha. "But when the lid was actually taken off, we found
a tremendous number of people feeling this way."

So far the two books, each running about 300 pages and costing the
equivalent of about $10, have drawn little criticism from public
officials, intellectuals or the mainstream media.

Yutaka Yoshida, a historian at Hitotsubashi University in Tokyo said
that as nationalists and revisionists have come to dominate the public
debate in Japan, figures advocating an honest view of history are being
silenced. Yoshida said a growing movement to deny history, including
incidents like the Rape of Nanjing, in which historians say 100,000 to
300,000 Chinese were killed by Japanese soldiers in the late 1930s, was
a sort of "religion" for an increasingly insecure nation.

"Lacking confidence, they need a story of healing," Yoshida said. "Even
if we say that story is different from facts, it doesn't mean anything
to them. Many historians feel exhausted in trying to fill the gap
between facts and what people want to believe."

The Korea book's cartoonist, who is working on a sequel, has turned down
interview requests. The book centers on a Japanese teenager, Kaname, who
comes to have a "correct" understanding of Korea. It begins with a
chapter that says South Korea's soccer team cheated to advance in the
2002 Word Cup; subsequent chapters show how Kaname realizes that South
Korea owes its current success to Japanese colonialism.

"It is Japan who made it possible for Koreans to join the ranks of major
nations, not themselves," Nishio says, claiming that Japan even gave
Koreans their identity because "they had no pride in their history."

But the comic book, perhaps inadvertently, also betrays Japan's own
conflicts on its identity and its longstanding feelings of superiority
toward Asia and inferiority toward the West. The Japanese characters in
the book are drawn with big eyes, blond hair and Caucasian features; the
Koreans are drawn with black hair, narrow eyes and very Asian features.

That peculiar aesthetic, so entrenched in pop culture that most Japanese
nowadays are unaware of it, has its roots in the Meiji Restoration of
the late 19th century, when Japanese leaders decided the best way to
stop Western imperialists from reaching Japan was to emulate them.

As those sentiments took root, the Japanese in popular drawings began
acquiring Caucasian features.

Many of the same influences are at work in the other new comic book, "An
Introduction to China," which depicts the Chinese as obsessed with
cannibalism and prostitution. It has sold 180,000 copies.

The book describes China as the "world's prostitution superpower" and
says, without offering evidence, that prostitution accounts for 10
percent of the country's gross domestic product. It describes China as a
source of disease and depicts Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi saying,
"I hear that most of the epidemics that broke out in Japan on a large
scale are from China."

The book waves away Japan's worst wartime atrocities in China. It
dismisses the Rape of Nanjing as a fabrication of the Chinese government
devised to spread anti-Japanese sentiment - "postwar China's biggest hit."

The book also says the Japanese Imperial Army's Unit 731, which
reportedly researched biological warfare and conducted vivisections,
amputations and other experiments on thousands of Chinese and other
prisoners, was actually formed to defend Japanese soldiers against the
Chinese.

http://www.iht.com/articles/2005/11/20/news/comics.php

 

 

__________________

with kind regards,

Matthias Arnold
(Art-Eastasia list)

http://www.chinaresource.org
http://www.fluktor.de

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