ABSTRACT
Japanese manga artists, especially newspaper cartoonists, expressed their love of country during the 1930s and 1940s by contributing to the wartime national propaganda effort. Their works whipped up the public’s fighting spirit while depicting the corruption and weakness of the ‘ABCD’ (America, Britain, China, and Dutch) enemies. In the decades since 1945, rightist revisionist manga seeking to explain Japanese wartime history have asserted the benignity of Japanese attempts to liberate their nation and the region’s peoples from the yoke of Western imperialism. Kobayashi Yoshinori’s Gōmanism Sengen series is arguably the best and most sophisticated representative of an immensely popular genre that bridges the pre-war and post-war era in advocating that the East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere was an essential part of a larger ‘just war’. Today Kobayashi’s and kindred works have fostered a new popular appreciation of old ultra-nationalistic ideas and an understanding of Japan’s modern past more resembling an anodyne dream state than reliable history.
