Korea Times, USFK squabble

The Korean reporter must have read too much Manga. Japan Focus: Nationalism and Anti-Americanism in Japan – Manga Wars, Aso, Tamogami, and Progressive Alternatives

Japanese popular culture, however, also sees the contextless use of anti-Americanism and vague but nonetheless meaningful images that glorify Japan`s 20th century wars. Morikawa Joji’s Hajime no Ippo (Fighting Spirit) is a popular boxing manga currently running in leading boy’s weekly Shonen Magazine. In one chapter, an elderly Japanese trainer recalls his youth during the American occupation.

The future trainer, Gen, and his friend encounter an American officer – a man they had seen brutally beating a much smaller Japanese boxer in an earlier exhibition match – chasing down a young woman in his jeep. The pair are no match for the American, but they begin a strict training regimen in hopes of challenging him in the ring. Morikawa represents their “passionate feelings” with a war image.

The boxers were not pilots. They did not fight in the war and Japan had no air power early in the occupation, all aircraft having been destroyed following the surrender. This is a fantasy image included at the beginning of a chapter and has nothing to do with the narrative. It very clearly, however, relates a vaguely conceived “war” with postwar acts of defending Japanese honor. There are grounds on which American occupation era behavior can be criticized, but glorifying Japanese bravado in the Asia-Pacific War is a distraction at best.

When the final battle takes place, Japanese revenge is carried out with predictable brutality. Readers are treated to “x-ray” drawings of the American’s ribs and internal organs being destroyed by the smaller Japanese fighter’s blows.

Morikawa says nothing about the war and nothing substantive about the Japanese-American relationship. These images are more or less a dead zone of historical awareness. Evident, however, is a lingering sense of Japan’s victimization at American hands. The manga expresses frustration at Japan’s defeat and a sense that Japan was victimized in war – with hundreds of thousands of civilians killed in incendiary and atomic bombings – and during an occupation that stripped away the nation’s sovereignty. Even in works of popular culture that show little historical awareness, the past can be an open wound.

http://www.japanfocus.org/-Matthew-Penney/3116