Forum - View topicINTEREST: My Hero Academia Character Gets Name Change Following Controversy
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reanimator
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Yep. Media companies are like that picture below when it comes to China. 
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feitan000
Posts: 40 |
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Too late, they want him dead now lol
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Scion Drake
Posts: 941 |
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Eh they'll stop caring by the end of the month. By that point the shock value will have worn out and they'll move on to the next thing to treat like a big deal. These things eventually run their course. |
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Tripple-A
 Posts: 383 Location: Hamburg, Germany |
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It's a fitting name for an evil scientist who did human experiments to create the Nomu.
It was a mistake to apologize. As always it doesn't change anything you only hurt your integrity. They will soon lose interest in this farce anyway. |
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Marimo0
Posts: 186 |
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He was never meant to be a reference. And apologizing at least shows that regardless of what the name's intent was supposed to be, Horikoshi listened to those who were offended and removed the offending name with hopefully something that doesn't accidentally reference a war crime. Also, not sure the whole "it's fitting because he's evil" thing works as an excuse anyway since you'd be taking something that historically involved the Japanese army doing horrific war crimes, and then turning it into a guy who has no actual connection to those running Japan and is actually an enemy of the government. It's not done in a way to suggest this is payback against the Japanese government and they have to pay for their crimes nor does it have anything really to do with the people who were affected by unit 731. Yes, it uses the word "maruta" and has to do with human experimentation, but it erases the context that usage came from and has nothing to actually say about it besides the obvious "human experimentation is bad", and actually obscures the part where Japan itself was the villain that committed the atrocities on civilians of others countries. You wouldn't get any actual hint of the historical context from the text of the manga since that's not the kind of story My Hero Academia is about, you'd have to go to outside sources and bother to actually look up "Maruta". Involving real life historical events that negatively affected actual groups of people requires more sensitivity and thought behind the usage, and it just doesn't seem like it's worth the hassle in this case where the reference wasn't even intentional on Horikoshi's part, so he has no incentive to keep this controversy dangling over his story. |
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Panino Manino
 Posts: 734 |
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I was wrong because they "apologized". But again, referring just to a "tragic past". Not "something bad our country did", but the "past". |
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ThugsBunny3840
 Posts: 16 Location: The Milky Way |
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While weird for the author to name the dude after what had been done to the victims, this went way overboard. Definitely hope that this will let up and the series can eventually be legally available again in those countries.
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nargun
Posts: 924 |
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People say this. But... look at how the IJA gets portrayed in popular culture. For example, IJA only really shows up in anime as an antagonist organisation: bad guys, basically. Sometimes you might have a few isolated hero/good-guy people or a small unit, but organisationally it's pretty consistently depicted as unambiguously evil and run by evil/crazy people. I mean, Golden Kamui. Or... is it the first episode of Mayonaka no Occolt Koumuin, where the army buried a wartime zombie factory under a park? I'm reading Zettai Karen Children, about v30; in that case we've got a small unit of nominally good guys who are doing terrible things because of terrible orders from terrible people, and the nominal good guy squad are the subject of whack medical experiments and all die except for their two youngest members one of whom becomes a violent extremist. As near as I can figure based on mass-market media depictions, the japanese population regard the IJA as being run by a bunch of crazy violent racists who did crazy horrible medical experiments and killed people. The people -- at least the young and the middle-aged people -- know. [most of the positive depictions of wwii-military are navy, not army: army wore kakhi and had red/gold rank badges, navy wore black or white and had black/gold rank badges. Relations between the two forces were unbelievably bad -- the army built their own aircraft carriers -- and this was actually in part due to the navy hierarchy thinking that the army was run by crazy violent racists.] |
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tojikomori
 Posts: 71 Location: Minnesota |
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Whether or not Horikoshi should have known better, I respect the way he and Shueisha responded here: they acknowledge the offense, accept ownership of it, apologize, and describe how they plan to avoid a repeat. It takes a lot of maturity and a cool head to step back and see the bigger picture when you're called out on stuff like this.
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TheKillerAngel
Posts: 84 |
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It was never the author's intent to name the character after some crimes against humanity. The character's name was some Japanese wordplay based around his appearance that got horribly misinterpreted.
This is something many of the JP-ENG translators I follow pointed out was the likely choice behind said character's name. |
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enurtsol
 Posts: 14758 |
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Is the name/term not notorious enough in Japan that nobody else in the production line noticed it and flag a signal?
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residentgrigo
 Posts: 2418 Location: Germany |
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Unit 731 will hunt them forever but the Japanese government never did the proper outreach, unlike Germany, so this will continue to go on for decades. Sigh. We pay reparations to this day but no one of importance is complaining too much.
Interesting to see how severe the repercussions were. China still despises Japan and the reverse tensions equally exist, even in pop-culture. The new Death Note epilogue had a weird dig for example. |
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TheKillerAngel
Posts: 84 |
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No, because unlike Germany, Japanese war crimes don't carry the same sort of collective historical guilt and remorse that the Holocaust has left. I wouldn't be surprised if Japanese textbooks make no mention of Japanese warcrimes in the East/Southeast Asian theaters during WWII. |
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TarsTarkas
 Posts: 5823 Location: Virginia, United States |
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The Second World War was 75 years ago.
I believe most Americans would be hard pressed to even remember the leaders of the Allies and the Axis forces, much less the individuals under them. So it is not far fetched to believe that the majority of young men and women in Japan would not even know the details of a torture unit, unless they studied World War 2 and/or watched documentaries of that time. |
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encrypted12345
Posts: 717 |
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Yeah. Everyone in the US remembers Hitler, but Mussolini and Hirohito are less well known. Maybe they could name Franklin Roosevelt and Churchill, but that's pretty much the limit of layman's knowledge of the leaders of WWII. |
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