Japanese fad: Comics that degrade Chinese and Koreans
By Norimitsu Onishi
The New York Times
Sunday, November 20, 2005
Manga Kenkanryu. From right to left, below: ''And the Koreans who became Japanese received great benefits.'' ''For they could achieve modernization, which was impossible by their own efforts, with Japanese funds and technology, by sweat and blood of the Japanese.'' ''It's not an exaggeration to say that Japan built the Korea of today!!''
Sharin Yamano/ShinyushaTOKYO 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.
