Japan's coolest cartoonist redraws wartime history

EVERYWHERE you go in Japan you will come across people reading manga - comic books. There are kids' manga about sci-fi robots, sentimental "ladies' manga", and sexually graphic manga for the men. But this year's most fashionable and original comic book could hardly be more different: its 400 pages are packed with dense, polemical text, carrying the solemn title of Sensoron, or Theory About The War.

Its author is Yoshinori Kobayashi, a lean, bespectacled young intellectual, frequent guest on television and the principal character of his own comic strip.

In his book, Mr Kobayashi orchestrates historical argument, dramatised scenes of past and present, and horrible caricatures of his intellectual adversaries to present a simple message: that, contrary to the view propagated in the West, Japan's invasions of Asia during the Pacific War were not the brutal actions of a predatory coloniser. They were a valiant undertaking, carried out with discipline and restraint, and their effect was to liberate Asians from the colonial dominance of Western imperialists.

Yesterday, a group of former Allied PoWs left Tokyo bitterly disappointed after losing their claim for compensation and apology. The pages of Sensoron, it is fair to predict, would leave them in despair.

A typical sequence of frames shows ugly Caucasians with fat lips and outsized noses sticking Union Jacks, Stars and Stripes and Tricolours into a map of Asia. In the next box, stern but noble Japanese soldiers surge across the map, snapping the puny flags to the chagrin of the hideous whiteys."The white Western countries thought of coloured people like us as primitive monkeys and colonised the countries of East Asia," runs the text. "It was the Japanese army which beat them. Let's give them a round of applause."

There has always been a strain of such thinking in Japan - in Tokyo and most big cities, so-called "rightists" can be seen every day blaring martial music from black trucks painted with rising suns, and eulogising the Emperor.

Despite the din, few Japanese regarded them as more than noisy middle- aged eccentrics. Mr Kobayashi, by contrast, is young, widely read and cool. In the past two years, the success of his comic has fostered a surprising and in some ways an alarming trend - a revival of right-wing revisionism about the war among the youngest and cleverest Japanese.

"I never used to talk to my friends about these things, but it has all changed in the last two years," says Tomomi Yamada, a 26-year-old magazine editor, and a fan of Sensoron. "If you are Japanese and you start raising questions about Japan in the war, people always used to point the finger and say, `rightist'! Now my friends talk about it and a lot of them agree with me. It's terrific, and Kobayashi has had a big influence."

Japan's right-wing revival has little in common with those of Europe and Ms Yamada - with her polite English and fluffy sweater - could hardly be further from a drooling neo-Nazi.

Once a month she attends a discussion group to hear speeches by conservative historians. As many as half the members of the audience are her own age; three years ago, very few were.

"What the speakers were saying was so different from what we were taught in school, that Japan fought an aggressive war," she says. "It was shocking and new, and very attractive."

A frequent subject of discussion is the 1937 Rape of Nanking. According to most Western and many Japanese historians, the imperial army embarked on an orgy of killing, looting and rape which left at least 100,000 dead. The Chinese reckon it could have been as many as 300,000, and the question of a war "apology" has flared up once more during the visit to Japan by President Jiang Zemin of China.

But Mr Kobayashi, whose book has gone through 17 printings and sold some 400,000 copies, asserts: "To kill 300,000 you would need two nuclear bombs. It couldn't be done with Japanese guns."