IN A Tokyo nightclub Scramble, a rock band, is at full kilter, belting out songs full of nationalist bile. In “Kill Koreans”, Rariko, the band’s lead singer, calls South Korea a “filthy” country and says Koreans are trying to humiliate Japan by lying about war crimes. Flag-waving fans chant along to her hateful lyrics.

Scramble is a fringe attraction in a country where snarling xenophobia remains rare. Yet popular culture in Japan is increasingly taking up nationalist causes. Several bands have penned songs about territorial disputes with China and South Korea. The most popular film of the year eulogises wartime kamikaze pilots. Bookshop shelves in Tokyo groan with a category known as kenchu-zokan: “dislike China, hate Korea”.

Several of last year’s bestselling paperbacks belonged to the hate genre. “Introduction to China”, a manga (Japanese comic book), claims the Chinese are incapable of democracy and are the source of most of Asia’s contagious diseases. Its author Ko Bunyu, a Taiwanese-born Japanese, also develops the poisonous notion that China, not Japan, was the wartime aggressor in Asia.

Chinese school textbooks rehearse in grim detail the history of Japan’s full-scale invasion and occupation of China from 1937-45. Meanwhile, a policy of “patriotic education” fosters growing anger at Japan even as first-hand memories of the second world war fade. By contrast, Japanese textbooks skim over the war in a handful of pages of sparse fact. Yet in popular culture, history is open to all-comers. Yoshinori Kobayashi, a conservative commentator, has penned dozens of manga about Japan’s undigested history. Young Japanese have learned about the war from them.

Popular culture in Japan has not always been so nationalistic. Novelists once looked unflinchingly at wartime misdeeds. Anti-war films such as “The Harp of Burma” and “The Human Condition” are bitterly candid. But under Shinzo Abe, a nationalist prime minister—and with relentless criticism of Japan from China and South Korea—reflection has morphed into rejection. School boards have demanded that libraries remove copies of the manga “Barefoot Gen”, an anti-war classic about the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. The board of the national broadcaster, NHK, includes revisionists such as Naoki Hyakuta, a novelist who denies that the Nanjing massacre of 1937-38 ever happened.

Mr Hyakuta’s phenomenal success is a sign, says Rariko, that the tide has turned against Japan’s “masochistic” view of its history. Younger Japanese like her are fed up living under the opprobrium of events more than 70 years ago.