{"id":5179,"date":"2004-10-14T01:28:46","date_gmt":"2004-10-14T06:28:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.froginawell.net\/japan\/?p=9"},"modified":"2004-10-14T01:28:46","modified_gmt":"2004-10-14T06:28:46","slug":"temporary-suspension-of-the-country-is-burning","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/froginawell.net\/frog\/2004\/10\/temporary-suspension-of-the-country-is-burning\/","title":{"rendered":"Temporary Suspension of “The Country is Burning”"},"content":{"rendered":"

A comic series tracking the life of a bureaucrat in early Showa Japan has been suspended<\/a> because of its September 16th and 22nd editions that contained descriptions of Japanese soldiers massacring civilians in Nanjing, China. The comic, which is by Hiroshi Motomiya (本宮ひろ志) is called “The Country is Burning” (国が燃える) and is published in the “Weekly Young Jump” magazine (「週刊ヤングジャンプ」). The Japan Times reports that 37 members of local assemblies protested because “the massacre was presented as if it really happened.” However, both that article and mention of this in an Asahi article<\/a> seem to indicate that the comic was suspended because of a problematic photograph. The magazine is looking into the use of “inappropriate materials” (「不適切な資料を引用していた」). You can track this<\/a> in the Japanese media via Google’s news service.<\/p>\n

Many Japanese, even those who are not enthralled by the delusions of a few revisionist historians who reject the existence of a massacre outright, wonder why the Nanjing massacre issue is still so full of energy and emotion, especially among the Chinese. I think part of the answer is that, as Joshua Fogel has said in a historiographical work<\/a> on the massacre, “Of all [the] massive, man-made atrocities, only in the case of the Nanjing Massacre has a whole school – actually, several – developed that completely denies or significantly downplays it.” (p. 4) The local assembly members above are a good example, as are the authors in a recent Bungei Shunjū<\/a><\/em> article I have written about. Fortunately, there are historians in Japan and elsewhere who are making it more and more difficult to play these games, thanks in part to the oral testimonies of former soliders. I wrote about and translated a few quotes from one such recent work on 102 former soldiers in Nanjing<\/a> which is available in Japanese and I recently saw it in Chinese translation at a bookstore in Beijing. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A comic series tracking the life of a bureaucrat in early Showa Japan has been suspended because of its September 16th and 22nd editions that contained descriptions of Japanese soldiers massacring civilians in Nanjing, China. The comic, which is by Hiroshi Motomiya (本宮ひろ志) is called “The Country is Burning” (国が燃える) and is published in the…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[119,187],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5179","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-english","category-memory"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p9yoH3-1lx","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/froginawell.net\/frog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5179","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/froginawell.net\/frog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/froginawell.net\/frog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/froginawell.net\/frog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/froginawell.net\/frog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5179"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/froginawell.net\/frog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5179\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/froginawell.net\/frog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5179"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/froginawell.net\/frog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5179"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/froginawell.net\/frog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5179"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}