If you are talking about this specific issue/scenario… that’s from within Japan. I think they understand anime there.
Given that he’s a guy from WWII who killed hundreds of people with his sword, that would mean that ya… he was pretty much murdering civilians and POW’s with it.
We’re talking about a fictional anime about a guy (who i seem to recall knew special anime style sword skills in his Japanese life) reincarnating in to a fantasy world with magic. I still don’t see how it is unreasonable to assume that he was killing soldiers with guns while using a sword. This is 100% not a historical story grounded in any sort of realism.
I tend not to assume that fictional world’s have the same history aw the real world. Unless it is pretty explicitly stated that it was actual WWII, with America, and the “Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere” and all that, I tend to assume that anime world’s are a historical pastiche, where “the war” is usually an amorphous thing in the past but doesn’t map directly to any real world conflict. Call it the “Miyazaki model”.
That being said, I haven’t read any of these works so it’s entirely possible that there was nuance/dog whistling that’s clear to a Japanese audience. It sounds like the author has made some pretty overtly racist statements in other contexts though, so it seems likely that the reference was deliberate.
From this article:
…the original light novels center on a Japanese protagonist who killed more than 3,000 people with a Japanese sword in the Second Sino-Japanese War, a conflict between China and Japan that ran from 1937-1945 and became part of World War II.
Oh. Well, turbo-fuck that guy, then.
Ok I don’t know what the “average” Japanese person’s take is, but I can say that a Chinese person definitely pictures pregnant women being massacred and cut up for fun while the soldiers laughed. The war was very cruel and many people died. My grandparents were young and remember some.
The thing is, yeah, a fictional soldier from the past, cool. Talk about how your young men were drafted and died in wars, yeah cool. But when you make it a WW2 soldier, and (presumably) glorify the actions… that’s too recent and it hurts.
I would not be surprised if a lot of the controversy is from more engaged Chinese net citizens. As the economy grows and opens up, the online influence grows as well.
There’s a good reason that Japan mostly only talks about the A-bomb when they talk about WWII. Their behavior during the war was monstrous.
If you ever visit Tokyo I’d reccomend a trip to the Yuushuukan, where you can learn all about Japanese right-wing revisionist history and how ‘evil President Roosevelt craftily maneuvered Japan into attacking Pearl Harbor and how they helped liberate their Chinese allies’.
It was hard to feel neutral about the Yasukuni shrine after going through that museum.
I wasn’t much aware of that. Reading through the controversy page includes this:
It is thought that enshrinement is permanent and irreversible by the current clergy.
Which seemed like a charming humorous note, although upon further review it apparently gets to the core of some of the controversies, that there are convicted war criminals who included in the souls housed in the shrine, and there are various proposals to expel those souls while still honoring the, er, “innocent” dead.
It’s actually a bit worse than that - most of the Class A war criminals were initially not enshrined at all and kept separately but were moved into Yasukuni in 1978, which caused the whole controversy in the first place.
Ever since this happened almost all high-ranking Japanese politicians, including the emperor, has stopped visiting the shrine at all but some still do so in a non-official capacity, especially if they are currying favor with the ultra-conservatives in Japan.
The older generation that remembered talked about Japanese bayoneting babies in hospitals. Reddit has photos.
Members of my family fought the Japanese during their occupation of Malaya. The stories I grew up hearing used to make me so angry.
Yeah, not my experience, man.
It is definitely considered racist by non-racist people, and you will not see that on TV or such without a moderate outrage (whether there is a lot of ingrained racism in Spain due to the country being pretty closed off till the 80s, is a different question. There’re a lot of people not bothered by this stuff, but it is considered racist).
Okay. But what about those Olympic teams who took the chinky eyed pictures in Beijing Olympics? It was more than one team.
It keeps happening which leads me to assume there are no real consequences or that it’s viewed as a very small delito.
What consequences would you expect? That something is considered racist and of bad taste does not mean people have to be sacked for it, unless they are public employees, and sometimes not even then.
You hear racist shit against Hispanics in the US and politicians do not lose their job because of it either. It is still considered racist, though.
It’s worth noting in this discussion that the current government in Japan is trending towards Fascism. They express open admiration for the Nazis (at least two cabinet members were members of the Japanese Nazi party) and Imperial Japan and they feel that Japan has needs to stop apologizing for their actions in WWII as they did nothing wrong and were the aggrieved party
And because I don’t know how reputable The Daily Beast is, here’s an article from the National Review:
I think it’s relevant to this conversation as there is clearly a growing extreme right wing movement in Japan and it seems likely this author was tapping into the spirit of that movement
There is clearly a growing extreme right wing movement in the whole world right now. Just saying.
I’m not sure I fully agree with that characterization - by most measures I think the current US Administration would be considered more hardline than Japan (then again I guess this doesn’t conflict with some peoples view of Trump :) ) but I do agree that Abe strongly leans right and has an explicit goal of changing the Japanese constitution to allow for remilitarization.
The Trump - Abe dynamic is pretty interesting btw since Abe desperately wants Trump support on this issue and while Trump does seem supportive, he has also cut Japan off entirely in the Korea peace talks, which undermines Japans leadership in the region
Yeah, you’re seeing a rise of fascist nationalism, the likes we have not seen since WWII.
But hey, that shit worked out pretty well back then.