Saturday, December 29, 2007

Chosun Ilbo: "How Manga Reflect Resurgent Japanese Chauvinism"

Park Soon-ae, a professor of Japanese at Gwangju's Honam University is troubled by a trend she sees in Japanese comics. From the Chosun Ilbo:
“Postwar Japanese comics have been through several stages -- fear of war, nihilism and otaku-like obsession. Now, they directly analyze the war and even support imperialism.” So says Prof. Park Soon-ae at the department of Japanese Language and Literature at Honam University. Prof. Park's paper about how manga deal with war, was published in the latest issue of the biannual magazine Japan Space.

I don't know anything about that, but Wikipedia tells us that both On War, a recent comic mentioned in the Chosun Ilbo article, and its author Yoshinori Kobayashi are pretty out there.

As an aside, I wonder if anyone over at Honam U. is aware that, among the letter blocks they've used to represent "English" on the English Language Department webpage is a number 4. Funny/sad. I would suggest that one of six the foreigners there fix it, but they are designated as lecturers, not professors, and are thus probably not qualified to make such an executive decision.

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