It contains portions that warrant consideration as appropriate reading material for children.

Have to keep the victim "Japan" image at all costs.

Spot on with the above comment!

It has only be pulled from school I libraries but can be had at any store that sells Manta. Idiotic move and useless.

Buy a manga set for your home, for your families, for your kids, for your friends. Buy it online even!

Help keep Mr. Nakazawa's message alive!

It was pulled because a single person complained that scenes that depicted the beheading and stabbing of prisoners by Japanese troops were - in the complainant's eyes - 'exaggerations and events had never occurred'.

Since it is well known that such atrocities were committed, and even the author stated that he had actually 'toned down' those aspects of the comics for the sake of younger readers, this is a blatant example of revisionism, and is EXACTLY the kind of thing that other nations find so hard to swallow about Japan. If the 'education' board had even an ounce of integrity they should have refused the request to withdraw the books.

Inundate the schools with copies of the manga

I've read this manga and I'm not entirely comfortable with little kids reading it. It is very heavy stuff, and I'm not sure that it is appropriate for JHS kids.

That being said, I think it is a fair and accurate portrayal of events, and is fairly balanced (yes, it shows Japanese troops killing POWs, but it also shows U.S. troops harvesting organs from dead bodies for medical research).

I don't object to it being withdrawn from JHS libraries, but rather I object to the REASON for which it is being withdrawn.

The kids who read this before it was pulled probably thought it was fiction.

Kind of like U.S. WWII troops vs. zombies or something.

Frungy: I agree. That kind of thing would be quite difficult for a junior high school kid to process. High school sounds like the more appropriate age group for that kind of thing but then again, even then someone would probably have complained.

While before it was a historical manga in the school library that kids would never have gone near, making it "not freely accessible" and making a big deal about that in the media will result in kids going out of their way to get a copy, then tear through it looking for the grodies. Take a look- it is now sold out on Amazon. Whether you think kids should or should not read this manga, I think nobody will be happy.

Shouldn't read: many will be reading it now who never would have Should read: they will be reading it for the wrong reasons

My son and others read and are shocked by the new rules, he is turning 13 next month. What will the ruling to about him and others that know about it .....

Lets just have a big cup of "denial". I'll have a double shot thanks.

Asahi shinbun...

So what happened was that in August last year, there was a complaint made to the city about this manga being inappropriate for young children, and Furukawa along with the head of Matsue education board considered that the images of Imperial soldiers cutting throats or women being assaulted were inappropriate and verbally instructed the meeting of headmasters to limit the viewing of this manga by school children to require the approval of a teacher. He did not inform the Board of Education when he made this decision, and he stated that he did not think it was required at the time. And that he regrets his actions. He stated that he received quite a shock at seeing the images of sexual assaults and felt that it should not be made so easily available to young children. He did not want to criticize the manga itself, and that he was only concerned about how it should be made available to school children. The Matsue education board received over 979 emails and 205 phone calls of which over 90% were complaints about the right for children to know and for the freedom of expression.

One should read the manga and see its contents before making a judgement on something like this which is all too easy to link to historical revisionism or denial. And read other source material on exactly what happened and not take a single quotation and make interpretations of the events.

But I suppose this kind of article is supposed to bring on controversy.

'exaggerations and events had never occurred'.

Who are you quoting? That is not true at all. I have been following this on the news (tv / newspaper / internet). Some parents were uncomfortable with children seeing some of the pictures (eg. people with melting / peeling skin from the atomic bomb, dead people with maggots crawling on them).

My son asked me to get all the books.

He was impressed by the 6th graders that did a show about a show about the B-29 bombings that hit before the fire-storm on Tokyo.

****mrkobayashi

I was paraphrasing, not quoting, but here is quote from the Asahi Shinbun article...

http://ajw.asahi.com/article/behind_news/social_affairs/AJ201308170055

In August last year, a Matsue citizen filed a petition with the municipal assembly to remove the copies from elementary and junior high schools.

“Children would gain a wrong perception of history because the work describes atrocities by Japanese troops that did not take place,” the citizen argued.