'Cartoon campaign' to erase old scars of Japanese brutality finds lukewarm success in China

A screen grab of a viral Twitter post by Japanese user @FGO424.

Japanese netizens have invented a number of cartoon characters and named them "Ri Ben Gui Zi," a term Chinese people have used since the early 1900s to refer to brutal Japanese soldiers invading China. The campaign aims to replace the violent images that turn up in search results for "Ri Ben Gui Zi" with their own cartoon characters, and let the painful history gradually be forgotten.

A viral Twitter post by Japanese user @FGO424 revealed how Japanese netizens came up with the plan to alter the connotation of “Ri Ben Gui Zi,” literally meaning “Japanese devils” in Chinese. Since 2010, Japanese web users have been trying to use cartoons to "mesmerize the Chinese people,” ultimately imbuing the term with new meaning.

"Usually when you search the term, search engines turn up images of anti-Japanese protests or bloody scenes. But what would happen if they instead showed pages of a super cute cartoons? Would people laugh and be enchanted by it?” a post wondered.

The chosen catroon image of Ri Ben Gui Zi.

Netizens later designed and uploaded a variety of images. In the end, they voted for the “most adorable” one: a cartoon girl. On Nov. 1, 2010, the chosen image even had a Wikipedia page established on its behalf.

These endeavors seemed to have had an effect. Chinese editors from Guancha.com recently typed the term into both Google and a Japanese version of Yahoo. The cartoon took up half the results on Google's first page, and almost the entire first page on the Japanese site.

The cartoon took up half the results on Google's first page.

But Chinese people have taken a skeptical approach to the matter.

“The results in search engines might change, but history remains the same, and we will never forget it," one online comment read.

Another netizen advised, “Instead of attempting to blur the vision of the Chinese people, the Japanese would do better to face the past.”

The First Sino-Japanese War took place between China's Qing Dynasty and the Empire of Japan from 1894 to 1895. The Second Sino-Japanese War, between the Republic of China and the Empire of Japan, took place between 1937 and 1945, becoming part of World War II in 1941.