The Warring States of NPF - Ugly Images of Asian Rivals Become Best Sellers in Japan

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Ugly Images of Asian Rivals Become Best Sellers in Japan

I saw this in the New York Times, and I cared about it enough that I was going to type it up for the discussion forum. But, I thought, they might have it on the website--and lo and behold, they did (username: 69i812, password: 69i812).

I've also pasted the content of the story below.

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Ugly Images of Asian Rivals Become Best Sellers in Japan

By NORIMITSU ONISHI
Published: November 19, 2005

TOKYO, Nov. 14 - 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 book states that "there is nothing at all in Korean culture to be proud of."

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

In "Hating the Korean Wave," a young Japanese woman says, "It's not an exaggeration to say that Japan built the South Korea of today!"
Enlarge This Image

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 last 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 reveal 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, which is akin to Britain's apartness from the Continent. Much of Japan's history in the last century and a half has been guided by the goal of becoming more like the West and less like Asia. Today, China and South Korea's rise to challenge Japan's position as Asia's economic, diplomatic and cultural leader is inspiring renewed xenophobia against them here.

Kanji Nishio, a scholar of German literature, is 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.

Mr. 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 Japan should emulate the advanced nations of the West and leave Asia by dissociating itself from its backward neighbors, especially China and Korea.

"I wonder why they haven't grown up at all," Mr. Nishio said. "They don't change. I wonder why China and Korea haven't learned anything."

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

The reality that South Korea had emerged as a rival hit many Japanese with full force in 2002, when the countries were co-hosts of soccer's World Cup and South Korea advanced further than Japan. At the same time, the so-called Korean Wave - television dramas, movies and music from South Korea - swept Japan and the rest of Asia, often displacing Japanese pop cultural exports.

The wave, though popular among Japanese women, gave rise to a countermovement, 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 around $10, have drawn little criticism from public officials, intellectuals or the mainstream news media. For example, Japan's most conservative national daily, Sankei Shimbun, said the Korea book described issues between the countries "extremely rationally, without losing its balance."

As nationalists and revisionists have come to dominate the public debate in Japan, figures advocating an honest view of history are being silenced, said Yutaka Yoshida, a historian at Hitotsubashi University here. Mr. Yoshida said the growing movement to deny history, like the Rape of Nanjing, was a sort of "religion" for an increasingly insecure nation.

"Lacking confidence, they need a story of healing," Mr. Yoshida said. "Even if we say that story is different from facts, it doesn't mean anything to them."

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 attains a "correct" understanding of Korea. It begins with a chapter on how South Korea's soccer team supposedly cheated to advance in the 2002 Word Cup; later 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," Mr. Nishio said of colonial Korea.

But the comic book, perhaps inadvertently, also betrays Japan's conflicted identity, its longstanding feelings of superiority toward Asia and of 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 are unaware of it, has its roots in the Meiji Restoration of the late 19th century, when Japanese leaders decided that the best way to stop Western imperialists from reaching here was to emulate them.

In 1885, Fukuzawa - who is revered to this day as the intellectual father of modern Japan and adorns the 10,000 yen bill (the rough equivalent of a $100 bill) - wrote "Leaving Asia," the essay that many scholars believe provided the intellectual underpinning of Japan's subsequent invasion and colonization of Asian nations.

Fukuzawa bemoaned the fact that Japan's neighbors were hopelessly backward.

Writing that "those with bad companions cannot avoid bad reputations," Fukuzawa said Japan should depart from Asia and "cast our lot with the civilized countries of the West." He wrote of Japan's Asian neighbors, "We should deal with them exactly as the Westerners do."

As those sentiments took root, the Japanese began acquiring Caucasian features in popular drawing. The biggest change occurred during the Russo-Japanese War of 1904 to 1905, when drawings of the war showed Japanese standing taller than Russians, with straight noses and other features that made them look more European than their European enemies.

"The Japanese had to look more handsome than the enemy," said Mr. Nagayama.

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, and 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, in which historians say 100,000 to 300,000 Chinese were killed by Japanese soldiers in 1937-38, as a fabrication of the Chinese government devised to spread anti-Japanese sentiment.

The book also says the Japanese Imperial Army's Unit 731 - which 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.

"The only attractive thing that China has to offer is Chinese food," said Ko Bunyu, a Taiwan-born writer who provided the script for the comic book. Mr. Ko, 66, has written more than 50 books on China, some on cannibalism and others arguing that Japanese were the real victims of their wartime atrocities in China. The book's main author and cartoonist, a Japanese named George Akiyama, declined to be interviewed.

Like many in Taiwan who are virulently anti-China, Mr. Ko is fiercely pro-Japanese and has lived here for four decades. A longtime favorite of the Japanese right, Mr. Ko said anti-Japan demonstrations in China early this year had earned him a wider audience. Sales of his books surged this year, to one million.

"I have to thank China, really," Mr. Ko said. "But I'm disappointed that the sales of my books could have been more than one or two million if they had continued the demonstrations."

(Sorry to double post--I had to fit the article all into the first post!)

I am, as you probably all know, very interested in Japanese culture. But their xenophobia consistently disappoints me. They're such a country of hypocrisy and blithe corruption...it's depressing. Revisionism, conservativism...they're the norm. It just makes me want to scream, "今、どうするかな？！！"

It's also interesting how the anime 'style' that has become the norm really is totally caucasian, even though we characterise it as asian/japanese. The line about the Japanese and Russians in 1904/5 was particularly interesting to me. It's funny how the one minor character in Full Metal Alchemist (whaaat, I'm watching it now...and it's a perfect example) who looks actually Japanese stands out from the rest. Then again, that show is a baston of good ideas if there ever was one (equality, peace, etc.).

Sigh. I'm getting all farklempt. Discuss!

Hm. This whole thing is fairly... dissapointing.

Being critical of america as I tend to be, it cuases a kind of... I dunno... elevating of people who are not from america in my mind, I guess. As much as Japan has emulated western culture, I was under the impression, at least on a superficial level, that they as a nation were pretty tolerant.

This kind of stuff is esspcially weird, becuase it doesn't quite start out as racisim... its more critical of the politics and economics of China and Korea at first... but then it quickly slides into blatent xenophobia. It's troubleing, and made even moreso becuase it's met with very little resistance.

It's a damn shame that they can't understand their differences and let people be who they are. Who cares which country started what? How ridiculous and pathetic is it that the japanese are obsessed with western culture to the extent that they would like to look caucasian. And how unjust is it that they would re-write history for their nationalistic goals. The rape of nanking was horrible, absolutely horrible.

I think it's amazing that as Americans we are professional critics of ourselves for the things in our past (internment camps, killing off the native americans, dropping the A-bomb, various unnecessary wars, etc). We have a handle on our history. Other countries simply deny the facts they don't like. The japanese in terms of the rape of nanking, and I have read that the Germans don't teach their children in school about the causes of WWII or the evil of Hitler. Because of this there are large amounts of neo-nazis in Germany. History is repeating itself because they are covering up the truth. They'd rather be proud idiots then be both wise and humble.

Can we not start on the political stuff for a sec? America doesn't have a handle on ALL its problems from the past. We still have Native Americans that can't get worthy land, among other things.

And there are Nazis in the US. Should I say there's a large amount of them cuz they're based mainly in the Mid US where education isn't regarded as highly?

I'm not a fan of generalizations. True, Japan has been hypocritical for far too long. But China and Korea aren't too much better in that regard. Japan, from the article, can't figure out that China WILL BE a superpower in the next coming years. It ain't going to happen overnight. And quite frankly, all these people just read one little news column a week and suddenly they're experts on China and Korea?

I can't take that thing seriously. Every nation has a few things to "hide" and work on. And with so many people living their lives in different ways, I'm pretty sure those things aren't going to be solved anytime soon.

It's obviously from political tensions, JC. But who said anything about China/Korea not being "just as bad?" The topic was about Japan. If you'd like to bring up that, interestingly enough, those two countries are the same way, I suppose it's fine, but I don't think it makes Japan's racism any less fine.

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I was under the impression, at least on a superficial level, that they as a nation were pretty tolerant.

I've said it in some other threads, but foreigners, even the American Westerners their culture so (ostensibly) idolizes, have a really hard time getting pretty much anything legal done. The nationalism present in Japan has even deeper roots in the simple work ethic and concept of loyalty in the society.

Will Japan never become the destined paradise of Manly Love?

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Originally Posted by JC123

Not to take this too far off topic, but I think this is an important tangent. My friend lived in Germany for a couple of years. She went to high school there and told me that they outright don't talk about much less teach about the 1930s - 1940s time period. It's sort of stricken from the record. They are willfully ignorant. Someone on this forum recently claimed that Europe overall is a much more 'tolerant place' than America. I just find it laughable. Those Paris riots have spilled over and are occurring in other European countries now. Essentially an entire population is rising up in rebellion. Then you have those neo-Nazis causing trouble in Germany. They were "everywhere" according to my friend who lived there for 2 years. They regularly antagonized non-Germans. I think it's amazing that they openly oppose the government. My friend said the government is afraid to take them to task.

I can't speak for other school systems, I only know the education I received had an equal portion of liberalism and conservatism regarding the USA's mixed history. But what matters is that there was never a denial of history or coverup about the bad things in our past. When Columbus day rolls around we always had to write research papers about what he actually DID, just for a quick example. I know that I, personally, was exposed to a lot of material that I wasn't necessarily ready for, but nevertheless I was exposed to it and have knowledge of those things to this day. We talked about the founding fathers owning slaves. That is another issue. My point is, there was a dialogue about these issues. A wholesale denial of the facts which is occuring in Japan, China, Korea, and Europe is just so, so, so, SO dangerous. It is just making 180 degree turn to repeat the bloody 20th century.

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I'm more or less saying neither of the three nations in question have stones to throw. Korea's violent tendencies toward Japan and its protests against a nation, China and its current nationalism, and Japan and the denial of its past crimes.

I mean, I know about the xenophobic nature of Japan by experience. The guys just won't talk to you if you're different. Women are probably more social in that regard anyway. And finding service for a big guy that's not a superstar is kinda horrible... Correction, it's non existant UNLESS you're aggressive.

Still doesn't mean I won't go there to live one day. I still like America and all but it is kinda like my home since I didn't really grow up in the US.

My biggest hangup with this article is the fact that it doesn't resolve the issue or even try to give something to work with. "This is how it is, it won't change"
To my knowledge, that's how most of the major Asian countries and their people are. Which REALLY needs a swift kick in the gonads. You wanna change something, you do it yourself. A beginning, that's the main thing you need. And quite frankly, these beliefs that you can't talk to someone or only point out what's wrong with them is only going to lead to trouble as has been pointed out.