Maruo Suehiro's ‘Planet of the Jap’: Revanchist Fantasy or War Critique?

Abstract

The graphic retelling of history in popular manga, particularly in the work of Kobayashi Yoshinori, has garnered attention in light of the resurgent nationalism of postbubble Japan. This article analyzes the visual-verbal language of cult manga artist Maruo Suehiro's ‘Nihonjin no wakusei: Planet of the Jap’ (1985). While appearing to revel in a violent depiction of an alternative outcome to World War Two, this manga spans allusions to the Emperor Meiji, the postwar Self-Defense Forces, and the suicides of General Nogi and Mishima Yukio, and aims through its portrayal to critique the links among the Japanese wartime state, contemporary nationalism, fascism and violence. Maruo's consistent use of fascist imagery consciously invites a dangerous voyeurism of traumatic historical events. This is an intentionally political move that forces the reader to realize that complicity in such violent spectacles is a necessary step to critiquing the extreme aggression Maruo attributes to Japan.

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank the Freeman Foundation and the James Monroe Scholars Program for funding the research for this article. We would also like to thank the two anonymous reviewers, Roman Rosenbaum, Kuroko Kazuo, Hiroshi Kitamura, Michael Cronin, and Elena Prokhorova for their insightful comments, assistance acquiring research materials, and interest in the project.

Notes

¹The title is given in both Japanese and English on the original title/splash page. This manga was originally published by Peyotoru Kōbō in Ginsei kurabu 5 (24 February 1985), and was reprinted in the collections Paranoia Sutā and Shin'nashonaru kiddo. Also see the English translation, Maruo, ‘Planet of the Jap’.

²Morris-Suzuki and Rimmer, ‘Virtual Memories’, 147.

³See for example, Sakamoto, ‘Will You Go to War?’; Ivy, ‘Revenge and Recapitation’; Gerow, ‘Fantasies of War’; and Yoda and Harootunian, Japan After Japan.

⁴Morris-Suzuki and Rimmer, ‘Virtual Memories’, 149. For war memory, see Igarashi, Bodies of Memory; Fujitani et al., Perilous Memories; Yoneyama, Hiroshima Traces; Hein and Selden, Censoring History.

⁵See Kobayashi's Sensōron, Taiwanron, and Okinawaron. For criticism of these texts, see Driscoll, ‘Kobayashi Yoshinori is Dead’; Ivy, ‘Revenge and Recapitation’; Marukawa, ‘On Kobayashi Yoshinori's On Taiwan’; Miyadai, Sensōron mōsōron; Morris-Suzuki, The Past Within Us.

⁶Sakamoto, ‘Will You Go to War?’.

⁷Schodt, Dreamland, 150.

⁸Ibid., 159–160.

⁹Maruo's earlier attempt at publication was rejected as too graphic by the weekly magazine Shōnen Jump.

¹⁰See the covers of Maruo's books: http://www.maruojigoku.com/works/list.html. For more on prewar erotic-grotesque-nonsense, see Silverberg, Erotic Grotesque Nonsense.

¹¹Schodt argues ‘right-wing novelist Yukio Mishima would have loved their [Maruo's] esthetic, and also have been disappointed when he realized many are a satire on militarism and warlike attitudes’. Schodt, Dreamland, 161.

¹²‘Nihonjin no wakusei’ was republished in Shin'nashonaru kiddo (New National Kid, 1999), a collection whose very title recognizes the birth of a new nationalism in Japan.

¹³Yomota Inuhiko, as quoted in Schodt, Dreamland Japan, 159; Maruo, ‘Planet of the Jap’, 218.

¹⁴Maruo, ‘Nihonjin no wakusei’, 183.

¹⁵Ibid., 209.

¹⁶See Igarashi, Bodies of Memory, 196, Figure 13.

¹⁷Ibid., 195.

¹⁸For a discussion of PM Abe's National Referendum Bill, see Akaha, ‘The National Discourse in Contemporary Japan’, 174.

¹⁹Fisher, ‘The Erosion of Japanese Pacifism’, 405–406; Itoh, ‘Japanese Constitution Revision’, 311.

²⁰Maruo, ‘Nihonjin no wakusei’, 187; Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, 896.

²¹Morris-Suzuki, The Past Within Us, 7.

²²Ibid., 8.

²³Maruo, ‘Nihonjin no wakusei', 191.

²⁴Maruo, ‘Nihonjin no wakusei’, 192–193. This is our translation of the Rosenberg quotation from Maruo's Japanese. We were unable to locate the original source.

²⁵ Dower, War Without Mercy.

²⁶Maruo, ‘Nihonjin no wakusei’, 194–195.

²⁷Ibid., 198.

²⁸Dower, War Without Mercy, 77–93.

²⁹Maruo, ‘Nihonjin no wakusei’, 202–203. For examples of wartime propaganda posters, see Minear, Dr. Seuss Goes to War, 65, 108, 144; Dower, War Without Mercy, 189, Figure 13.

³⁰Maruo, ‘Nihonjin no wakusei’, 201.

³¹The rolling of MacArthur's head ends in the final panel of this sequence with the katakana sound ‘kōtton’. Maruo, ‘Nihonjin no wakusei’, 208. When combined with the subsequent panel of Emperor Meiji, these images recall the controversial scene in Fukazawa Shichirō's ‘Furyū mutan’ (1960), in which the severed heads of Crown Prince Akihito and bride Michiko make the metallic sounds ‘suten-korokoro’ and ‘suten-korokoro karakarakara’, ‘as if the heads belonged to robots’. The transliteration of this sound of the heads rolling was what provoked outrage among ultranationalists and caused Fukazawa to flee for his life. Treat, ‘Beheaded Emperors and the Absent Figure’, 103.

³²Maruo, ‘Nihonjin no wakusei', 209.

³³Karatani, ‘The Discursive Space of Modern Japan’, 210.

³⁴Karatani argues that Mishima's anachronistic death brought a symbolic end to the Shōwa period. Mishima's suicide was a ‘non-tragic farce’ that ‘existed so that we could part cheerfully from Shōwa’. Karatani, ‘The Discursive Space of Modern Japan’, 196, 217.

³⁵DiNitto, Uchida Hyakken, 132–36.

³⁶Maruo, ‘Nihonjin no wakusei’, 189.

³⁷The rendition in the English translation, ‘The Japanese died valiantly’, completely misses the point.

³⁸Maruo, ‘Nihonjin no wakusei’, 188.

³⁹Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, 34.

⁴⁰Fujitani, Splendid Monarchy, introduction; Doak, History of Nationalism, chapter 2.

⁴¹Dower, ‘The Bombed’, 279.

⁴²Morris-Suzuki, The Past Within Us, 159–164. For more on textual renderings of the A-bombs, see Treat, Writing Ground Zero.

⁴³Dower argues that ‘Hiroshima and Nagasaki became icons of Japanese suffering – perverse national treasures, of a sort, capable of fixating Japanese memory of the war on what happened to Japan and simultaneously blotting out recollection of the Japanese victimization of others’. Dower, ‘The Bombed’, 281.

⁴⁴Mayer, The Rise and Fall of Imperial Japan, 92–93, 94–95.

⁴⁵The application of the term ‘fascist’ to Japan is a complicated one. See Tansman's introduction to The Culture of Japanese Fascism. In this section we draw on a broad definition of fascism encompassing the Axis countries and their military and cultural strategies during the war.

⁴⁶See the cover image at: http://www.maruojigoku.com/works/list/shin_national_kid.html (accessed 10 April 2010).

⁴⁷Maruo, Shin'nashonaru kiddo, 157–162.

⁴⁸The volume is littered with images of dismembered bodies.

⁴⁹Passmore, Fascism, 11.

⁵⁰Morris-Suzuki, The Past Within Us, 196.

⁵¹Ibid., 196–197.

⁵²Sontag, Under the Sign of Saturn.

⁵³Ibid., 99.

⁵⁴Taylor, Disappearing Acts, 4–5, 7, where she discusses similar issues with regard to the Argentine play Paso de dos.

⁵⁵Sontag, Under the Sign of Saturn, 101.

⁵⁶Bennett, Empathic Vision, 17.

⁵⁷See Nozaki and Inokuchi, ‘Japanese Education’, specifically figures 4.3–4.5.

⁵⁸See Kobayashi, Sensōron, 151–171, and Sensōron 2, 337–355, for images of the Nanking Massacre.