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A skit reenacting former Japanese President Shinzo Abe’s assassination—staged throughout a highschool area day in Zaozhuang, Shandong—has reignited on-line debate over rising anti-Japanese sentiment in China. Abe’s assassination in 2022 shocked the world; the Chinese language authorities’s official assertion mirrored that sentiment. However on Chinese language social media and in some offline corners of the nation, a a lot completely different sentiment predominated: glee. On Weibo, some hailed Abe’s murderer as a “hero of the Anti-Japanese Warfare” (as World Warfare Two is referred to in Chinese language), and at the very least one restaurant supplied an “Abe Banquet Meal Deal” on the meals supply app Meituan in celebration. A wave of anti-Japanese incidents adopted, together with the arrest of a lady who paid for memorial tablets for Japanese conflict criminals in a Nanjing temple, the cancellation of a collection of long-running Japan-inspired festivals, and the arrest of a lady in Suzhou who wore a kimono in public. Anti-Japanese sentiment maybe reached a brand new apogee with the discharge of handled wastewater from the Fukushima nuclear plant into the Pacific Ocean in late August 2023. The Shandong college students who carried out the skit reenacting Abe’s loss of life drew a connection between the 2 unrelated occasions—Abe’s assassination and the Fukushima wastewater launch—by unfurling a banner that learn, “Two Gunshots Go away A Chilly Corpse, Wastewater Launch Leaves A Lengthy Aftermath,” for the time being of the actor-Abe’s collapse. Video of the incident was posted to X, previously referred to as Twitter:
On Weibo, reactions to the skit have been blended. Some celebrated the skit, others laughed it off, some made ghoulish jokes about Abe’s lack of response, and a small minority wrote of the way it left them troubled:
@大风吹奏: “Japanese devils, take a chilly sip.
In the event that they’re on a prepare, hope their legs are shattered in the event that they slip,
In the event that they’re at sea, hope they go down with the ship”We grew up singing songs like that. What’s so mistaken about some children placing on a skit? For these criticizing the children, the place have been you when Abe visited the “Yashitkuni Shrine?” [Editor’s note: OP used a scatalogical near-homophone to refer to Yasukuni Shrine.] All actions have causes and penalties. If Japan hadn’t invaded China, would we hate them? We don’t educate hatred however forgetting historical past can be a betrayal.
@苏堤柳_WKLY：Abe himself has no touch upon the matter, so why ought to we give a crap?
@手掰蒜头子: What’s there to analyze? It was only a skit. No motive to raise it right into a political battle.
@裤衩都特么笑掉了：YES! What’s mistaken with the skit? This hatred runs within the blood of our nation. The youngsters did properly.
@月为2011：Everybody within the remark part helps them. That’s fairly scary. Remembering historical past just isn’t equal to unfiltered hatred.
A hashtag associated to the skit rose to quantity two on Weibo’s trending chart earlier than a curiously sharp decline in engagement, indicating that Weibo censors might have aimed to “management the temperature” on the controversy. The chart beneath reveals the hashtag’s precipitous rise and fall, inside a matter of hours:
Though it’s inconceivable to establish whether or not sure feedback have been deleted by censors or upon second thought by customers, at the very least one standard remark was deleted after it went viral. The Weibo account @浙人无为 opposed the skit, intimating that Japanese college students would possibly mimic it by changing Abe with Xi Jinping: “I’m against the skit. Too many individuals are ignorant and short-sighted. If we do that to them, gained’t they do the identical to us? How would you’re feeling if some Japanese folks placed on a skit concerning the assassination of China’s _ _ _? If you happen to curse out one other child’s mother and father, naturally the opposite child goes to get mad and curse your mother and father again, get it?”
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