The Endless Culture War in the Pacific - Belated Post-mortem

Raging like it's 1945

Just as a lot can happen in three years, much can remain the same. This holds as true to my old piece for Areo Magazine in 2020, coincidentally one of the earliest to get published there:

To this day, My Hero Academia remains in circulation and is still one of the most popular manga IPs in modern times. Except in the People’s Republic of China, that is. Not only are the manga and its myriad offshoots still banned in the country, but simply bringing it up in a positive light can also risk drawing its people’s ire. Just ask KPop star Karina of idol group Aespa.

Following her endorsement of the anime adaptation, she met of torrent of harassment and indignation from Chinese netizens over the course of June 2023, with many citing claims of a character's name referencing Unit 731 and demanding that she apologize for supposedly helping whitewash war crimes. While her apology on social media by the end of the month seemed to put an end to it, the whole affair once more shed light on both history and misinformation around it continue to be exploited, if not propagated in Asia.

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The people involved may change, as would the subject of scorn for the week. Yet be it endorsed on an institutional level, pushed by vocal activists, or exploited on social media, the Culture War in the Pacific discussed three years go is, alas, still very much alive.

Which in turn continues to color discourse around Japan online, whether due to the lack of familiarity around the Pacific War in the West compared to the fight against Nazi Germany, or for certain content creators, the shock and outrage value that comes with “exposing” supposedly hidden atrocities yet to be atoned for. It’s one thing to shed light on a murky aspect of history like Unit 731, or to encourage dialogue on how the Japanese ought to deal with their past. But with the way said “discourse” is thrown about, you’d be forgiven for thinking that things like Unit 731 were some closely-guarded secret, that Japan will re-invade China and Korea any minute now, or that anger seems so fresh that it might as well be 1945.

This, however, isn’t quite the full story. Setting aside how much of what I wrote in 2020 is still applicable, there has been a shift in the discourse. In South Korea, the “anti-Japan tribalism” (weaponizing memories of the War, comfort women, and colonial rule) brought up by author and academic Lee Wooyoun in his controversial 2019 book of the same name, doesn’t just appear to be waning. As he remarked to Japanese journalists in September 2023, a combination of growing cultural ties between Koreans and Japanese, as well as growing weariness towards both the Korean left and right, reflect a changing tide in the public zeitgeist away from rehashing old shibboleths.

Speaking of shibboleths, even the familiar narrative of keeping wounds from World War II open has met greater scrutiny in the West with far-reaching ramifications, even if the sensationalism online might suggest otherwise. According to Australian scholar Robert Cribb in February 2023, the exploitation of the past doesn’t just rehash old racist propaganda, which ironically whitewashes the Nazis “as relative gentlemen in comparison with the allegedly barbaric Japanese.” It’s also detached from reality, both in neglecting what has happened since 1945 and in keeping people from moving on to focus on the present.

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I would like to think the Culture War in the Pacific will eventually end…as it has for the most part here in the Philippines, where though the legacy of the conflict lingers on, bygones be bygones is the order of the day. Alas, there still sadly remain incentives to keep it going in the meantime. What comes next? Time, as always, will tell.

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