Gusts Of Popular Feeling: Kenkanryu in the Realm of the Revisionists

Although I've been reviewing Goong all this time, I finally hit something completely different: Kenkanryu, the "Hating Korea Wave" (or as the article linked below argues, "the 'Hate Korea' Wave").

"Kenkanryu in the Realm of the Revisionists"

I appreciate Matt for his sincere investigation of this very controversial topic. This Matt is much more reliable and genuine than the Matt of Occidentalism, who sounds pretty much like a typical western Japanophile having set out to defend pretty much anything negative about Japan.

These are his posts regarding Kenkanryu. Compare them with the Occidentalism posts: "Kenkanryu in the New York Times" and "A final word on Kenkanryu."

I liked them at first. They are rather more about the New York Times' article, "Ugly Images of Asian Rivals Become Best Sellers in Japan", by Norimitsu Onishi, than the comic itself. Ok. This was the first thing that made Occi Matt sound a little fishy:

"So who is the writer of the article? Judging from his name, ‘Norimitsu Onishi’,
it would seem that he is Japanese, but I have my doubts about that. I would be
willing to bet that he is actually an ethnic Korean.

Norimitsu Onishi just doesnt hate Japan, he seems to hate the US too. In an article for the New York Times, he described terrorists killed by US soldiers as ‘victims‘, putting them in the same category as innocent restaurant workers killed by terrorists."

Strangely enough, one of the characters in the novel is Norimitsu Onishi (the scanlation could be wrong). Anyhow, occi Matt writes in his 2nd post:

"including the author of the NYT article, hack writer Norimitsu Onishi"

Why can't a Japanese be not be anti-Korean? Or rather, why does someone got to be a Korean if he's an anti-Japanese? Then I guess Hideki Kajimura, who made a very neutral presentation of the Dokdo/Takeshima dispute in his article "The Question of Takeshima/Tokdo," isn't a Japanese? And then he tries to get away with all this mischaracterization by saying it doesn't matter if he's a Korean or not. How pathetic.

• "'It’s not an exaggeration to say that Japan built the South Korea of
  today!' In another passage the book states that 'there is nothing at all in
  Korean culture to be proud of.'"

"In fact, it is clear from reading the comic that the character means that
Japan had laid the foundation of modern development in Korea, by bringing
modernization, economic growth, and social reform."

Simply it's this. These quotes all sound just really dumb, prejudiced, and uninformed, but as you can see Occi Matt tries to defend them as some sort rational historical arguments.

"Actually, not every character Japanese character is drawn with western features,
so this is a huge exaggeration on the part of the author of the article. He can
only get away with it because he knows that the majority will never actually see
the comic."

Actually, Occi Matt can get away with making this claim (not) because the majority will never actually see the comic (not).

"In the picture below, it may be possible to discern which characters are meant
to be perceived as Japanese and which are meant to be perceived as Korean:"
-Matt (Gusts of Popular Feeling)

"Interesting. Let's make a comparison here. Let's say that it was said that in the comic, apples were all drawn to look fresh, but the oranges were drawn to look rotten. The rebuttal to this? "Not all of the apples look fresh. See? I leave it to your judgement." How can anyone judge when no one is shown any oranges?" -Matt (Gusts of Popular Feeling)

Well, I also want to add that I just really love how all the links (or most of them) that Matt put out for us are "Not Found"; this article's a goner and the Nissan Institute of Japanese Studies at the University of Oxford got rid of Cleansing History, Cleansing Japan: Kobayashi Yoshinori’s Analects of War and Japan’s Revisionist Revival. I'm okay with a blog post or an MSN space disappearing, but definitely not a scholarly journal article from public view. So, here's the exact article that I accessed as HTML by Google in doc format.