[Paleopsych] NYT: Ugly Images of Asian Rivals Become Best Sellers in Japan

[Premise Checker]

Ugly Images of Asian Rivals Become Best Sellers in Japan
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/11/19/international/asia/19comics.html

[The caption for the cartoon on the front page reads: "In an anti-Korean comic 
book popular in Japan, a Korean, right, has narrow eyes while two Japanese 
characters have Caucasian feature," including blond hair, I might add. Is the 
appeal of blondes universal? Certainly in Latin America. I'm not so sure about 
India.]

    By NORIMITSU ONISHI

    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."

    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."