Hironobu Kaneko, a 21-year-old college student, remembers the powerful emotions stirred in him three years ago when he read a best-selling book of cartoons that extolled, rather than denigrated, the history of Japan's former Imperial Army.
The thick cartoon book, or manga, is called On War (
"This cartoon was saying exactly what we were all feeling back then," said Kaneko, an eager and articulate student who is spending his winter break working as an intern in the Japanese Parliament.
"The manga was addressing matters that many Japanese people have simply been avoiding, like we've been putting a lid over something smelly. I just felt it said things that needed to be said."
Asked exactly what that message was, he said, "That we should not be so masochistic about our history."
Unlike such countries as Austria and France, Japan has not had a prominent political party that has been aggressively nationalistic since World War II. Ultraconservatives from right-wing intellectuals to criminal syndicates have always maintained discreet contacts with the conservative governing party, the Liberal Democrats.
For decades after Japan's defeat in the war, the most visible sign of the survival of hard-core nationalists here was just as powerful a reminder of their fringe group status: the black sound trucks, mostly regarded as public nuisances, that blasted imperial hymns and xenophobic speeches on crowded streets.
But as attested by the huge sales of the nationalistic manga -- drawn and written by a best-selling author, Yoshinori Kobayashi (小林善紀) -- Japan's far right has been elbowing its way into the mainstream, at a time when the country is increasingly distressed about its political and economic decline.
Kobayashi's latest manga, On Taiwan (台灣論), has sold more than 250,000 copies since it was published in November and has created sharp tensions with Japan's neighbors for its depiction of the war. One frame, for example, says that Taiwanese women volunteered to become the sexual servants of Japanese soldiers and that the role even offered the women social advancement. The government has remained silent.
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