Popular culture and historical memories of war in Asiasimplistic, affectively appealing representations—there is the issue of the political context in
which the consumption of popular culture takes place. Reading and viewing always happens
in context, and the increasing tension over historical issues in East Asia is a major context
that frames and shapes people’s engagement with texts that deal with historical memory. The
Japanese manga discussed above, The Country is Burning, was quickly labeled—in both Japan
and elsewhere—as a “Nanjing manga” without much interest in what else went on in this long
series of nine volumes. Rather, it became a symbol over which the familiar and predictable bat-
tle between revisionists and their critics was fought. Often, popular representations of war and
imperialism are all too quickly perceived as a “Nanjing film,” a “comfort women documentary”
and so on, followed by the question of which “side” it takes. This tendency works against the
articulation of non-nationalistic historical memory in East Asia through popular culture.
Another element that works against popular cultural development of more nuanced and
shared perspectives towards East Asian historical memory is, ironically, cultural globalization.
Today’s digital networks and deterritorialized media space mean that the consumption of enter-
tainment commodities often takes place without regard to national borders. This is particularly
true in Asia, where the majority of the world’s Internet-connected population lives. On the one
hand, the increased exchange can lead to mutual interest and appreciation, as is seen with the
Korean Wave; on the other hand, it also means that nationalistic popular cultural content is now
easily and quickly circulated, exchanged, and commented upon across national borders, often
in the form of fragments. As a result, nationalistic sentiments are sometimes intensified by the
inter-Asian movement of popular culture, creating further friction.
For example, news of Kenkanryu (Yamano 2005), a Japanese “Hate Korea” manga, quickly
traveled to Korea, where some bloggers uploaded it for Korean readers together with trans-
lations and commentaries on some particularly problematic pages. This was then followed by a
couple of “Hate-Japan” comics penned by Korean comic artists, which were then introduced by
Japanese bloggers to the Japanese audience. Japanese translations of Korean “Hate-Japan” comics
then followed with the catchphrase “you must read this to understand the anti-Japanese senti-
ments of Koreans.” What we are witnessing here is cyclic exchanges of nationalistic sentiments,
images, and discourse in popular media, amplified by the affective and visual form of manga, and
transmitted and made easily accessible via digital technology.
More recently, news of the Chinese “anti-Japanese” games Glorious Mission (2013) and Shoot
the Devil (2014) quickly appeared in the Japanese media. The former simulates the takeover
of the Senkaku/Diaoyutai Islands by the People’s Liberation Army (the game was developed
jointly with the PLA), and players fight against the Japanese SDF to recover their “stolen ter-
ritory” (Japan Times 2013). The latter, in which Chinese gamers shoot Japanese war criminals
(including Tojo Hideki and Matsui Iwane, the wartime prime minister and the command-
ing general in Nanjing at the time of the Nanjing Massacre, respectively) was released on the
microblog of People’s Daily Online. According to the developer, the game was created to “expose
the war crimes of the Japanese invaders” and to allow players to “forever remember history”
through the popular game form (Feng 2014). Predictably, Japanese online commentators and
conservative media condemned the games as anti-Japanese propaganda. Japanese Internet users
republished, blogged, and tweeted news of the games, and uploaded segments of the games on
YouTube. While neither game is particularly commendable from the perspective of building a
common future in East Asia, sensationalist reactions are not helpful, either.
Prior to the digital age, events like these would have gone unnoticed outside the countries
of their origins. Now they can be immediately shared and circulated beyond national borders,
spreading through the Web in the form of sound bites and image bites, turning up in the per-
sonalized and affective space of social media and mobile devices. While the increasing cultural