Manga as propoganda?

I’m a comicbook fan, unapologetically so but, I never caught the Manga bug. Some of tha Manga drawing style has seeped into mainstream comics and I don’t have a problem with it as some of the old guard do. However, Manga is something that mainstream comics is not, it’s more popular, reaches a broader audience and manages to embody more than the comics themselves.

So, is it any kind of surprise when an art form is used for the purposes of propoganda?

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.

Here are two panels from a very popular and recently released Manga book in Japan (I’m just putting the images up, it’s in no way an endorsement of the views expressed):



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.

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.”



In one book, crazed Chinese communist guerrillas spray benevolent Japanese troops with cyanide. In another, savage Korean immigrants massacre innocent Tokyo residents in the wake of World War II...

“These books finally depict history from a Japanese perspective, and there is nothing wrong with that,” says Atsushi Iwata, 22, student at Tokyo’s prestigious Waseda University who attends a weekly seminar by a co-author of “Introduction to China.”

“It’s the right of any nation to interpret history as it feels it should,” he said.

Yes, proof once again that a-holes come in all sizes, shapes and colors - well, they say you can’t argue with an idiot.