Just opened, the Unfair bar has closed its doors in the trendy Minami area of Osaka, Japan.
“We sincerely ask apologies for the lack of knowledge and awareness, “said Host x Host, the company responsible for the nightclub, in a statement published on 11 October.
“We have caused the discomfort of many people. We will take into account the comments and we will work so that this type of thing does not happen again ”, added the text.
With “this kind of thing”, the document refers to the fact that the new bar chose the Nazi swastika as logo (printed even on the bottles) and to adorn the military-style uniforms that serve as official attire for the club’s male staff.
“Ignorance and stupidity” , wrote on Twitter the filmmaker Miki Dezaki, director of the documentary Shusenjo (2018), which addresses the history of “women of with ground “, as the sex slaves recruited by the Japanese military during World War II are known (1939 – 1945).
After an avalanche of criticism on the internet, the club’s administrators closed the official website and published their apologies.
According to the anthropologist Aleksandra Jaworowicz-Zimny , PhD from the University of Hokkaido (Japan) and current professor at Nicolaus Copernicus University (in her native Poland), the presence of Nazi symbols In the Asian archipelago today it is due more to a “lack of historical sensitivity” than to an ideological or political alignment.
“ Cosplay “ or Nazi role play
“Many Japanese know that the Nazis committed a crime s of war, but his knowledge is limited. Visually, they recognize the black uniforms of the SS , especially with the red armband, but not all Wehrmacht uniforms [las fuerzas armadas alemanas bajo el mando de Adolf Hitler] are an alarm signal for them ”, explains the Polish woman.
Author of a study on the Nazi cosplay , which refers to wearing Third Reich-related attire and imitation of period poses for public performances at festivals such as Japan’s Comic Market, Jaworowicz-Zimny believes that followers of this trend will not even reach the 50 .
Although it clarifies that it is difficult to specify the scope of the phenomenon.
According to her, it is as if the historical burden of Nazism is beyond the range of identification of the Japanese.
“Japanese society does not have the Holocaust recorded in their collective memory like Europeans and Americans. It does not have grandparents who were tortured or murdered by the Nazis, or monuments that commemorate the Nazi crimes in each city ”, he details.
Thus, the history of Nazism is much more distant from them. , which they know only from books and pop culture, with films like Hollywood Inglourious Bastards (“Bastardos sin glory ”or“ Damn basterds ”, 2009) or games like Wolfenstein .
“If the historical context is not taken into account, the image is seen as mere aesthetics by many Japanese ”, insists the anthropologist, who cannot imagine the opening of a pub with icons of this type in Poland, a country that was occupied by the Nazis and where one of the greatest symbols of the Holocaust was installed, the camp of Auschwitz concentration.
From Halloween to “My fight”
This is not the first time that Nazi symbols have been identified (and vehemently criticized) in Japan.
On Halloween of 2009, for example, the pop group Keyakizaka 46 took the stage of a concert in Yokohama, south of Tokyo, with black capes similar to those of the SS authorities .
The record company Sony Music apologized and, like the Osaka bar, claimed “lack of knowledge” to justify the incident.
Jaworowicz-Zimny considers the episode to be an example of the trend ia nazi chic , and not exactly from cosplay .
This is one more phenomenon wide and present not only in Japan, and which consists of the use of the image for its aesthetic appeal or capacity to scandalize, rather than for its sympathy with the Nazi ideology or the imitation of gestures of the time, such as the salute with the arm
In Japan, the historian Takumi Sato of Kyoto University also identifies a subculture called cul Nazi , which refers to the consumption of images related to Nazi ideology in the postwar period.
But there are different representations of the German military in Japan, according to academic Matthew Penney in the study “Rising Sun, Iron Cross”, published by the German Institute for Japanese Studies in Tokyo.
This collects from the idealization of Nazi figures c From noble heroes in certain manga to more complex perspectives, such as that of the series Adolf by Osamu Tezuka (1928 – 1989), featuring three men during World War II: Adolf Kamil, son of Jews; Adolf Kauffmann, son of a Nazi with a Japanese; and Adolf Hitler.
On 1989, the manifest Mein Kampf ( “My fight” ), written by Hitler, was adapted to the manga. On 2017, the government of Prime Minister Shinzo Abe authorized the use of the autobiography in Japanese schools.
More recently, in 2019, the anime “ Attack on Titan “ became the target of criticism for containing supposedly imperialist and fascist messages.
In 2021, it was the turn of Tokyo Revengers , an anime released from the manga by Ken Wakui, which features the Buddhist swastika manji as a symbol of the youth band that stars in the series.
What to remember r
Manji is not a Nazi symbol. It is the icon to indicate Buddhist temples on the maps of Japan where there are more than 45 millions of followers and 75. 10 temples , shrines and other Buddhist organizations.
Outside of Japan, however, the swastika became synonymous with fascism after anti-Semitic nationalists appropriated it to spread the idea among Germans that they belonged to an ancient, Aryan, and higher lineage; the specific emblem of the Third Reich is the black swastika within a white circle and with a red background.
In Germany, the symbol was banned after the war.
“In Europe there are young people who carry the flag of the rising sun as an expression of interest in Japan. Already in China or Korea, the brand is recognized as a symbol of Japanese imperialism . It is possible that Europeans do not associate the image and do not realize how controversial its use is ”, acknowledges the anthropologist Jaworowicz-Zimny.
On 2020, as Japan prepared to host the Olympic Games (postponed to 2021 due to the pandemic), South Korean activists and politicians lobbied for the host of the games not to display the flag of the rising sun , similar to the national flag but with red rays.
In the 19th century it was used in the imperialist incursion of Japan when occupying China and Korea, and in World War II it was used became a banner of the Navy.
“A solid historical education that includes stories from other parts of the world and It is key to educating and raising awareness about the war memories of others, and both the media and the universities have a lot of work to do in this area, not only in Japan ”, reflects the Polish researcher.
“There are those who prefer to remember certain moments in history and forget others,” says historian Mario Marcello Neto, author of the article “Between the atomic bomb and war crimes: denialism and Japanese historiography in perspective” and the thesis “The brightness of a thousand suns: history, memory and forgetfulness of the atomic bomb in the United States and Japan”, presented in the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul, in Brazil.
What you want to forget
“What happens is that many times we prefer not to talk about war crimes , as if it were a hornet’s nest that nobody wants to touch . It is still a taboo subject, ”he says.
According to Neto, a member of the Interdisciplinary Research Laboratory in Entertainment and Media at the Federal University of Pelotas, in Brazil, Japanese historiography has less emphasized Japan’s alignment with the Nazis and has emphasized the memory of the archipelago as the target of the atomic bomb dropped by the United States.
Under this argument, minimize the memory of war crimes (the massacre of Nanking, cannibalism of the troops, forced labor, torture, among others) would allow a certain tolerance with the authoritative ideas and images to this day.
Neto cites examples of this tolerance, such as the founding of a neo-Nazi party by Kazunari Yamada in 1982, and the Yasukuni Jinja, a temple that today receives visitors interested in the monument to Hideki Tojo, Japanese prime minister at the time of the war, and others remembered as “martyrs unjustly accused by the allies”: France, United Kingdom, United States and the USSR.
“Obviously there are exceptions, but in general terms, in Japan there was much more persecution of the student and communist movements than an in-depth criticism of what was fascism and the Second World War. With the amnesty, the Japanese empire never responded, nor recognized what it did, ”he says.
The archipelago has already had famous discussions about the teaching of the history of World War II, such as those carried out by Saburō Ienaga, the historian censored over the years 50 for publishing books with a critical analysis of the country’s role in the conflict.
Or by Fujioka Nobukatsu, an author who openly defended the elimination of accounts of crimes committed in textbooks and who favored a “positive” image of Japan.
“You can only understand how it is possible that a Nazi-style bar opens in 2021 in this historical context. It is extremely symbolic of oblivion. ”
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