War memory and emotional pedagogy in Japanese educational manga

In contemporary Japan, the collective memory of World War II (WWII) is shaped not only by institutionally curated sites, such as textbooks and museums, but also by commercially circulated manga – particularly gakushū (educational) titles – consumed by young readers in homes, libraries, and classrooms. These are not marginal materials; they are central to historical education. Publishers such as Shōgakukan, Kōdansha, and Kadokawa distribute them widely in bookstores, libraries, classrooms, and through reading initiatives. Surveys show that more than 90 per cent of school libraries had already stocked such manga by the mid-1990s (Japan Library Association, 2009). By blending word-based narratives with emotionally charged illustrations, these manga not only teach children about the war but also influence how they internalise Japan’s moral position within it (McCloud, Reference McCloud1993; Hirsch, Reference Hirsch2012). This article examines how WWII is remembered in educational manga, focusing on whether these narratives are one-sided, reproduce propaganda, or shift blame. I argue that, in the 2011–2022 corpus, gakushū manga combine peace-education aims with a nationally bounded distribution of empathy, whereby Japanese civilian suffering receives sustained visual attention, while the suffering of the Other – Asian populations – is comparatively under-visualised or relegated to paratexts. Notable exceptions exist, however, as in Shōgakukan and Shūeisha titles that adopt more balanced treatments, complicating the overall picture.

Building on existing work on manga and memory, this article treats gakushū manga not simply as didactic tools but as affectively charged popular media that integrate the past into everyday life (Otmazgin and Suter, Reference Otmazgin and Suter2016). Because they combine simplified narrative frames with emotionally dense images and serial reading habits, these books help structure how young readers learn to feel who suffered, who caused suffering, and whose stories deserve empathy. Rosenbaum’s analysis of Ishinomori Shōtarō’s long-form historical manga further shows how such works can function as quasi-historiographical projects for general audiences (Rosenbaum, Reference Rosenbaum2013). When titles marketed as educational are read both in school and at home, their capacity to shape children’s understandings of Japan’s wartime conduct and moral position in WWII is therefore likely to be considerable.

The recent expansion of comics scholarship into memory has concentrated on autobiographical or testimonial forms (Hirsch, Reference Hirsch2012). Recent exceptions within this special collection (Belia, Reference Belia, Saloul and Baillie2025; Nordenstam et al., Reference Nordenstam, Beers Fägersten and Wallin Wictorin2025) show that comics can function as activist pedagogies, yet they still focus on Euro-American graphic novels rather than on Japanese educational manga. Mainstream educational media, therefore, remains largely untouched. To address this gap, I situate this study at the intersection of comics theory and memory studies, drawing on work that clarifies how sequential art renders trauma and testimony (Merino, Reference Merino2010; Earle, Reference Earle2017), with Maus as a paradigmatic case of graphic witnessing that shapes cultural memory (Spiegelman, Reference Spiegelman1986, Reference Spiegelman1991). In addition, I build on formal studies of comics and manga’s historical representation (Groensteen, Reference Groensteen2007; Postema, Reference Postema2013; Rosenbaum, Reference Rosenbaum2013; Otmazgin and Suter, Reference Otmazgin and Suter2016) and on memory-studies debates concerning the competitive or complementary coexistence of different group memories – what Rothberg (Reference Rothberg2009) terms ‘multidirectional memory’ – a framework that helps explain how gakushū manga can simultaneously articulate Japanese civilian suffering and marginalise the memories of Asian colonial victims without overtly denying them.

Despite their cultural and pedagogical significance, educational manga have received only limited scholarly attention, and rarely in the precise context of memory studies or comics theory. While there is a growing body of research on war memory in Japanese popular culture – film, television and museums (Seraphim, Reference Seraphim2006; Yoshikuni, Reference Yoshikuni2014; Córdoba-Arroyo, Reference Córdoba-Arroyo2023) – and a smaller strand that examines manga in relation to pedagogy or national identity (Kinsella, Reference Kinsella2000; Aiba, Reference Aiba2019; Monobe and Ruan, Reference Monobe and Ruan2020), few scholars have analysed how mainstream gakushū titles published after 2011 visually and narratively frame WWII; to date, only Monobe and Ruan (Reference Monobe and Ruan2020) offer a comparative content analysis of older volumes, while dedicated, systematic treatment of the current corpus remains absent. This article, therefore, offers a multimodal study of Japanese educational manga issued between 2011 and 2022, focusing on works that occupy a middle ground between overtly nationalist texts such as Kobayashi Yoshinori’s Sensōron [On War, Reference Kobayashi1998] and critical autobiographical manga such as Nakazawa Keiji’s Barefoot Gen [Hadashi no Gen, Mizuki, Reference Mizuki1973].

Finally, and in line with the aims of this special collection, I also read gakushū manga as components of peace-education infrastructures and as forms of ‘memory activism’ that normalise particular ways of seeing the past in classrooms and libraries (Gutman, Reference Gutman2017; Wüstenberg, Reference Wüstenberg2017; Gutman and Wüstenberg, Reference Gutman and Wüstenberg2023). In the Japanese context, however, such activism cannot be separated from the long-standing rekishi mondai (often translated as the ‘history problem’ or ‘memory wars’), through which interpretations of the Asia-Pacific War have been fiercely contested (Saaler Reference Yoshida2005). These debates unfold across courts, classrooms, shrines, diplomacy, and the media. From the Tokyo Trial and the ‘Reverse Course’ of the 1950s to Ienaga Saburō’s textbook litigation and disputes over ianfu [‘comfort women’] and forced labour, the question of responsibility has remained unresolved (Dower, Reference Dower1999; Yoshimi, Reference Yoshimi2000; Ienaga, Reference Ienaga2001; Totani, Reference Totani2008). I, therefore, read gakushū manga as one vernacular arena in which these conflicts are normalised for young readers, complementing screen and museum cultures that mediate catastrophe, heroism, and blame (Seraphim, Reference Seraphim2006; Seaton, Reference Seaton2007).

My initial goal was to explore how these works construct a narrative of Japan’s wartime experience. I specifically asked three questions: (a) How is Japan’s involvement in the war contextualised?; (b) What narrative and visual strategies are used to represent different forms of suffering?; and (c) How is responsibility for wartime actions assigned, either explicitly or implicitly, through language, framing, and visual composition?.

What emerged from this enquiry is a pattern consistent with Lim’s (Reference Lim2025) ‘victimhood nationalism’: a mode of memory that centres national identity on collective suffering. Unlike ethnocentric or exclusionary nationalism, which emphasises racial purity, territorial sovereignty, or military pride, victimhood nationalism fosters emotional identification through trauma. It does not deny past violence but selectively highlights it, portraying the nation as a morally wounded subject. In the manga I analysed, Japanese civilians, especially children, are consistently depicted as tragic victims of unprovoked or abstract violence. In stark contrast, non-Japanese victims (particularly Chinese, Korean, or Southeast Asian civilians) are visually marginalised, textually backgrounded, or entirely omitted.

To support this claim, I analysed all available post-2011 gakushū manga volumes related to WWII produced by the six major educational publishers in Japan – virtually the entire market for this genre. For each publisher, I examined the volumes corresponding to the wartime period, ensuring comprehensive coverage of the Asia-Pacific conflict as presented in these series. The mixed-methods approach used in this work combines qualitative visual analysis with a systematic coding of themes related to suffering, responsibility, nationalism, and emotional tone. Building on prior work in comics theory (Groensteen, Reference Groensteen2007; Postema, Reference Postema2013), visual memory (Assmann, Reference Assmann, Tilmans, van Vree and Winter2010), and media representation of war (Seaton, Reference Seaton2007), I position these manga as emotionally resonant yet structurally selective tools of mnemonic victimisation.

The findings reveal four major thematic patterns. First, empathy is unevenly distributed: Japanese victims are depicted with rich, emotional detail (eg, through close-ups of grief-stricken faces, intimate scenes of mothers shielding children, or elderly survivors sifting through rubble). In contrast, non-Japanese Asian victims are often mentioned only in text or censored in sensitive events like the Nanjing Massacre. Second, responsibility is more widely distributed than in other media: while political leaders are blamed, the manga also depict the press, social institutions, and even ordinary civilians as complicit. This contrasts with film and television, which tend to isolate blame to a military clique. Third, the emperor is carefully sanitised, either visually distanced from acts of violence or shown in moments of empathy or sorrow, sometimes even portrayed as a pacifist, a decisive protector of the nation, or, in postwar depictions, a gentle elder monarch. In some educational manga, this figure is further rendered kawaii [a visual media aesthetic that softens authority through childlike or benign features], leaving him without any responsibility for a war that was fought in his name. Fourth, traditional wartime ideals of heroism (rooted in self-sacrifice, martial virtue, and the gunshin [war god] archetype) are largely absent or reinterpreted in ambivalent terms, with ‘heroes’ portrayed less as paragons of virtue than as figures of endurance, pragmatism, and constrained agency.

Together, these trends expose a paradox: the manga aim to educate by fostering compassion, yet they do so through a selective and nationally bounded lens. Rather than denying history outright, as some ultranationalist narratives do, they acknowledge certain imperial crimes but in ways that render them morally and visually peripheral. For instance, forced labour, conscription, and cultural erasure under the Kōminka Seisaku are mentioned in relation to Koreans (Kodansha 18), alongside Taiwanese and older Japanese recruits, yet Koreans are never depicted graphically, reducing their presence to textual references and erasing their agency as victims. Similar patterns occur in the treatment of wartime atrocities, which are neither denied nor represented but simply omitted (Conan 12; Kadokawa 15). Even in the most critical manga, non-Japanese Asians are portrayed in limited ways: Vietnamese appear briefly as faceless bystanders to Japanese expansion into French Indochina (Shueisha 16), and Filipinos are absent, even in accounts of the occupation of the Philippines and the Bataan Death March (Shōgakukan 17). These omissions reflect a broader narrative tendency to foreground Japanese suffering while sidelining the violence inflicted on colonial subjects, contributing to a mnemonic regime in which victimhood is central to identity and accountability is displaced from both the visual field and the narrative core.

This pattern of selective inclusion and omission not only shapes the historical narratives available to young readers but also frames the moral boundaries within which empathy, causality, and responsibility are taught. Understanding how these narrative choices operate is essential for situating the analysis within broader debates on comics and memory studies, and for explaining the methodological framework through which I examine them. The article proceeds as follows: the next section situates the work within the fields of comics and memory studies and details the coding methodology. This is followed by three analytical sections focusing on the themes of empathy, causality, and responsibility. I conclude by reflecting on the implications of these findings for the politics of memory in children’s media.

Visual pedagogies: Educational manga and the politics of historical memory

The pedagogical and ideological functions of comics and manga have long attracted scholarly attention. In the United States, Fredric Wertham’s Seduction of the Innocent (Wertham, Reference Wertham1954) famously claimed that sequential art threatened juvenile morality, associating comics with rebellion, deviance, and non-normative identities. Although widely discredited today (Nyberg, Reference Nyberg1998), recent decades have seen a renewed scholarly interest in the potency of visual media – particularly comics – as vehicles for shaping political consciousness and cultural memory. This resurgence is evident in works such as Satrapi’s Persepolis (Satrapi, Reference Satrapi2000), which demonstrates how the interplay of image and text can convey complex historical and ideological narratives with immediacy and affective depth. As McCloud (Reference McCloud1993) argues, this hybrid form possesses a unique cognitive power, enabling audiences to assimilate layered messages with remarkable efficiency.

In the Japanese context, manga have been employed to convey sharply divergent ideological positions. As exemplified by Ishinomori Shōtarō’s Manga Nihon no Rekishi (A History of Japan in Manga 1985), such works are crafted not merely to inform or entertain, but to cultivate historical consciousness and national subjectivities (Kinsella, Reference Kinsella2000; Rosenbaum, Reference Rosenbaum2013). For example, Kobayashi Yoshinori’s Sensōron (On War, Reference Nyberg1998) asserts ultranationalist views (denying the existence of Korean comfort women and dismissing the Nanjing Massacre as fabrications), exploiting the narrative power of manga to propagate denialist fantasies. In stark contrast, Shigeru Mizuki’s Sōin gyokusai seyo! (Onward Towards Our Noble Deaths, Reference Mizuki1973) offers a deeply humanistic and antimilitarist memoir of his time in New Guinea, using stark, personal imagery to critique militarism and foster empathy, and in other works explicitly portrays the suffering of a young Chinese woman captured by the Japanese army and subjected to sexual abuse en route to captivity. Against these poles, gakushū manga are typically expected to adhere to a fact-based and peace-oriented stance shaped by Japan’s heiwa kyōiku (peace education) framework (Monobe and Ruan, Reference Monobe and Ruan2020).

Within Japanese educational historiography, WWII remains a deeply contested field, characterised by enduring disputes over textbook content (Hein and Selden, Reference Hein and Selden2000; Nozaki, Reference Nozaki2008). On the one hand, critics argue that official curricula downplay Japan’s wartime aggression (Ienaga, Reference Ienaga2001; Hein and Selden, Reference Hein and Selden2000; Nozaki, Reference Nozaki2008). On the other hand, conservative politicians and intellectuals have claimed that overly negative portrayals erode national pride (as documented in Nozaki [Reference Nozaki2008]). In response to this contentious landscape, manga has emerged as a widely consumed informal educational resource, found in public and school libraries across the country (Aiba, Reference Aiba2019). These gakushū manga, frequently supervised by academic historians, have since the 1970s played a central role in transmitting collective memory to younger audiences (Monobe and Ruan, Reference Monobe and Ruan2020). Their narrative framing typically presents the Asia-Pacific War not as a heroic struggle, but as a tragic descent into militarist excess and national catastrophe, often emphasising the perils of war and the moral imperative of peace. However, as I will seek to show in this study, even so-called pacifist representations are not exempt from problematic implications.

Recent scholarship has highlighted the internal diversity of the gakushū manga genre. Monobe and Ruan’s (Reference Monobe and Ruan2020) comparative analysis of popular educational manga on WWII demonstrates that these works vary significantly in their selection and framing of historical events, with notable differences across target age groups, publishers, and authorial approaches. For example, while some titles aimed at older students include multi-page, graphically illustrated accounts of the Nanjing Massacre or Japan’s wartime atrocities in China, others designed for younger readers offer only brief, text-heavy descriptions with minimal or softened imagery. Similarly, portrayals of the Asia-Pacific War’s human toll oscillate between highlighting Japanese civilian suffering – such as the devastation of American air raids – and balancing it with depictions of violence committed by Japan abroad. In many cases, an overtly didactic narrative voice guides readers towards moral lessons about the tragedy of war, whereas other works adopt a more ostensibly neutral tone. These differences in narrative tone, visual intensity, and thematic emphasis underscore that gakushū manga, far from transmitting a uniform pacifist message, actively construct historical memory in ways that, whether consciously or inadvertently, reflect the priorities and ideological leanings of their creators.

Although some recent gakushū manga attempt to incorporate global historiographical perspectives, such as Kadokawa’s New World History Series (2021), which frames WWII through the lens of the Allied powers, most works continue to reproduce a distinctly national perspective. As Monobe and Ruan (Reference Monobe and Ruan2020) observe, many popular educational manga on WWII convey explicit messages of peace and criticism of war, but often do so from a Japan-centred perspective. These works tend to avoid demonising foreign enemies, focusing instead on Japanese domestic suffering, and frequently attribute responsibility for the war to specific political or military leaders rather than to systemic or structural forces. This narrative framing reinforces a template that emphasises victimhood and moral introspection, while downplaying or omitting broader geopolitical responsibility.

Still, the template is not monolithic. Building on the insights of Monobe and Ruan (Reference Monobe and Ruan2020), the findings in this work confirm many of their observations, particularly the emphasis on Japanese civilian suffering, the avoidance of overt enemy demonisation, and the framing of militarism through the actions of villainous individuals rather than structural critique. However, the analysis also identifies additional tendencies, such as the frequent omission by manga authors and publishers of non-Japanese victims (even in volumes that explicitly address war crimes), and the visual privileging of emotionally charged depictions of Japanese suffering (eg, bombings or family separations) over sustained historical contextualisation of Japan’s aggression in Asia.

Analytical framework and methodological approach

This study seeks to identify durable patterns in a defined corpus and to ground interpretation in transparent procedures open to inspection. Although interpretation is never neutral, it can be disciplined through shared definitions, explicit decision rules, and page:panel evidence. By specifying the codebook, outlining consistency checks, and anchoring claims to citable examples, I minimise subjectivity and invite replication and critique.

This study uses a mixed-methods design combining quantitative coding with qualitative analysis. The corpus consists of six volumes published between 2011 and 2022, a period marked by rising nationalist discourse under the Abe Shinzō administrations, and includes all post-2011 WWII-related titles from Japan’s major educational publishers that are available through commercial circulation and in public and school libraries.

To ensure methodological consistency, I applied the following inclusion criteria: (1) the format had to be manga; (2) the content had to qualify as gakushū (ie, explicitly educational); (3) the subject matter had to be historical; (4) the narrative focus had to be the WWII (excluding other periods); and (5) the date of publication had to fall within the 2011–2022 range. Manga were identified by their abbreviations throughout the article, with a full list provided in the Appendix. Additional materials are provided in the Supplementary Material.

Only works that fulfil the formal criteria of educational manga – as defined by Rosenbaum (Reference Rosenbaum2021, p. 5), who describes gakushū manga as a genre of ‘edutainment’ developed in Japan since the 1980s and systematised through Ishinomori Shōtarō’s Manga Nihon Keizai Nyūmon – were considered. These texts constitute a form of modern ‘edutainment media’ that blends structured pedagogical aims with graphic storytelling. Manga that merely depict war scenes without an explicit educational framing were excluded.

Quantitative analysis involved the systematic counting of character representations by national or ethnic identity, following Sugiyama (Reference Sugiyama2010), to assess whose stories are told and who is visually victimised. The diegetic period of each narrative was also recorded to capture how the war’s temporality is represented, for example: 1923–1936, 1936–1945, and 1943–1945. This distinction matters greatly, as a ‘story’ set between 1943 and 1945 – focused on Japan’s defensive endgame – inevitably frames the war as a short-lived national tragedy, whereas a narrative beginning with the expansionist annexation of Taiwan in 1895, the colonisation of Korea in 1910, or the outbreak of the Second Sino-Japanese War in 1937 embeds the conflict within a longer history of imperial aggression.

Characters were classified into three primary categories, drawing from the schema proposed by Hashimoto (Reference Hashimoto2015): victim, perpetrator, and heroic consciousness. A fourth category, ‘difficult judgement’, was created for ambiguous or multidimensional portrayals that did not fit into conventional roles. This framework enabled the detection of both formulaic and subversive narrative structures.

Each category was supported using predefined criteria: victims were identified through depictions of torture, air raids, forced combat, or sexual exploitation; perpetrators were defined by acts of violence against civilians, the use of torture, or active participation in war crimes; heroes were defined by their demonstrations of self-sacrifice, resistance to injustice, or exceptional acts of protection.

Visual and textual cues, such as character expression, lighting, framing, and speech, were used to support these classifications. Where cues are conventional in Japanese visual language, I treat them as lexical items that map form to meaning and code their presence accordingly (eg, motion lines, sweat drops, ‘anger veins’, or a nose bubble for sleepiness) (Cohn, Reference Cohn2013; Reference Cohn2019; Reference Cohn2020). These mappings are not casual inventions of artists but entrenched conventions that have been shown, in cognitive and neurocognitive research, to be systematically processed by readers (Cohn, Reference Cohn2020). Readers extract and interpret such cues rapidly and in patterned ways, drawing on shared knowledge stored in long-term memory, rather than relying on universal perception alone. In other words, the cues function like words in a visual lexicon, accessible to anyone socialised into manga reading. All claims in this study are therefore anchored to concrete page:panel examples.

Beyond coding, a hermeneutic reading of the text was conducted to uncover deeper ideological messages. The manga were treated as discursive texts that reveal collective memory narratives rather than as neutral media (Sturken and Cartwright, Reference Sturken and Cartwright2001). Through vignette and dialogue analysis, where a ‘vignette’ denotes a contiguous unit of one or more panels and ‘semiotic techniques’ refer to panel composition, transitions, page layout, lettering, and related formal cues, narratives were disaggregated into smaller units and reconstructed to expose both explicit and implicit discourses about Japan’s role in WWII.

Drawing on the discursive typology established by Córdoba-Arroyo (Reference Córdoba-Arroyo2022), this study applies four analytical categories to examine how the origins of the Asia-Pacific War are framed in gakushū manga. These categories are: leaders’ responsibility, which attributes the outbreak of war to the deliberate decisions and expansionist ambitions of Japan’s militarist leadership; justification, which frames the conflict as a defensive necessity in response to perceived external threats; imperialism, which acknowledges Japan’s aggressive expansion and colonial ambitions in Asia; and historical inevitability, which portrays the war as an unavoidable tragedy arising from structural geopolitical forces. By including these categories in the analysis, I assess the extent to which educational manga reproduce, adapt, or challenge these established discursive frames in narrating Japan’s wartime past.

All manga were read in their original Japanese. I coded them manually using categories drawn from prior scholarship (Sugiyama, Reference Sugiyama2010; Hashimoto, Reference Hashimoto2015) and applied a pre-specified codebook of decision rules. Classifications relied not only on visual cues but also on textual context, narrative perspective, and paratextual information. Many visual markers are conventional in Japanese comics and, therefore, widely recognisable. Borderline cases were noted in an audit sheet and revisited in a second pass to check for consistency. No analysis software was employed aside from Microsoft Excel and Word for data entry and classification.

The study acknowledges that the majority of characters adhere to clear-cut archetypes, reinforcing mainstream war narratives (victims, perpetrators, and heroes). However, several works introduced more complex figures who embodied contradictory moral positions. These exceptions are crucial for understanding how hegemonic discourses are occasionally challenged within the manga genre.

Findings: Narrative architectures of war memory

The findings reveal four major thematic patterns. First, empathy is unevenly distributed. Japanese victims are depicted with rich visual cues (eg, close-up panels of anguished faces, dense cross-hatching and shadowing to suggest devastation, and detailed linework that accentuates grief and vulnerability), while non-Japanese Asian victims are often mentioned only in text or reduced to blurred or symbolic panels (as in the case of the Nanjing Massacre).

Second, gakushū manga depart from what Akiko Hashimoto (Reference Hashimoto2015) has termed the ‘catastrophe narrative’ (a mode of memory in which the war appears as a natural disaster, without origin, enemy, or aftermath beyond Japanese suffering). That narrative has been widely reproduced in cinema, television, newspapers, and political discourse. By contrast, the manga do not portray the war as an inexplicable rupture but rather assign blame within recognisable frameworks. They largely reproduce the so-called ‘leaders’ responsibility’ perspective (shidōsha sekinin shikan) (Yoshida, Reference Yoshida2005), which attributes the conflict to a narrow group of militarist elites while shielding the emperor and ordinary citizens. Nevertheless, they also diverge from that framework by extending complicity to a wider spectrum of actors, including the press, social institutions, and even civilians themselves.

Third, the emperor is carefully sanitised. He is either visually distanced from acts of violence or shown in moments of empathy or sorrow, sometimes even idealised as a pacifist, a decisive protector of the nation, or, in postwar depictions, a gentle elder. He is never shown as a sovereign decision-maker.

Fourth, traditional wartime ideals of heroism, rooted in self-sacrifice, martial virtue, and the gunshin archetype, are largely absent or reinterpreted in morally ambivalent terms, with ‘heroes’ portrayed less as paragons of virtue than as figures of endurance, pragmatism, and constrained agency.

Uneven empathy and the representation of victims

A notable feature of the corpus is the disproportionate affective weight assigned to Japanese civilian suffering compared to that of other Asian victims. Across series, such as Shōgakukan 17 and Kadokawa 15, Japanese victims of aerial bombardment are rendered with meticulous visual and emotional detail. Close-up panels capture children clutching charred family photographs, mothers shielding infants against the shockwave of explosions, and elderly survivors sifting through rubble with trembling hands. The framing often lingers on the bodily experience of loss – grief-stricken faces, physical injuries, and the sensory disorientation of war – while providing readers with prolonged visual engagement and narrative pacing that invites identification.

By contrast, atrocities committed against Chinese, Korean, and other Asian civilians appear far less frequently and, when present, tend to receive briefer or less visually developed treatment. The Nanjing Massacre, for example, is referenced in Shueisha 17 only as a textual note in the margins, accompanied by a blurred archival photograph that diminishes its affective impact. However, the portrayal of WWII in these works is not entirely devoid of transnational acknowledgement. At least one title in the sample (Shueisha 17) explicitly mentions the Invasion of China alongside acts, such as civil ultranationalism and the killing of Koreans; others refer to forced labour, including the exploitation of Indonesian Romusha (forced labourers), the abuse of Korean ianfu (comfort women), and the killing of Chinese civilians and prisoners of war. Additional instances include references to the bombing of Chinese cities, the Kominka assimilation policies in colonial Taiwan and Korea, and the conscription of Koreans and Taiwanese for military service. These inclusions indicate that the corpus is not wholly ethnocentric in its thematic scope. The limitation lies more in the marginal, often text-based nature of these depictions, and in the fact that they rarely receive the sustained visual dramatisation afforded to Japanese suffering.

This asymmetry becomes particularly evident in works aimed at younger audiences. Even in manga that omit depictions of foreign victims, tragic scenes involving Japanese civilians – including children – are common and emotionally intense. The absence of equivalent visual investment in non-Japanese suffering cannot be explained solely by a desire to avoid traumatising young readers, as such restraint does not apply when the victims are Japanese. Instead, these representational choices appear to reflect a hierarchy of empathy in which the suffering of co-nationals occupies the emotional core of the narrative, while foreign suffering, though sometimes acknowledged, remains peripheral.

American prisoners of war are depicted with individualised features, recognisable emotions, and dialogue, occasionally engaging in cooperative interactions with Japanese characters. Filipino prisoners of war (POWs) are mentioned textually but remain visually absent, while Southeast Asian forced labourers (‘Romusha’) appear only as faceless masses in scenes of exploitation. This pattern establishes a racialised hierarchy of victimhood in which visual empathy extends selectively: American captives receive sustained humanisation, Asian resisters are acknowledged yet denied visual presence, and colonised labourers are rendered anonymous and undifferentiated. The paratextual apparatus of these works occasionally attempts to broaden the moral frame. Sidebars, appendices, and statistical tables acknowledge Japanese aggression and enumerate casualties in other Asian countries. However, their peripheral placement, combined with the absence of integrated visual storytelling, tends to dilute their emotional and pedagogical impact. For example, Shōgakukan 15 lists the number of civilian deaths in China, Korea, and Southeast Asia, but these figures are presented without accompanying scenes or characters, rendering them inert compared to the full-page spreads devoted to Japanese urban bombings. No other manga includes a list of this sort.

This pattern resonates with scholarship on postwar Japanese media, which has identified a persistent ‘victim consciousness’ (higaishaishiki) that centres Japanese suffering while downplaying or reframing Japan’s role as perpetrator (Dower, Reference Dower1999; Yoshida, Reference Yoshida2005). The gakushū manga corpus does, however, demonstrate that references to Japan’s perpetration exist – sometimes in surprisingly candid terms – but are typically less emotionally anchored, less visually elaborate, and positioned at the margins of the main narrative arc. As a result, the affective and mnemonic economy of these works continues to privilege the imagined national community, even as they acknowledge, in passing, the broader human cost of the Asia-Pacific War.

Expanded responsibility and complicity

The second major finding is the more expansive attribution of wartime responsibility compared to other media forms, such as film and television. While political and military leaders remain central targets of blame – figures such as Prime Minister Tōjō Hideki or General Itagaki Seishirō are frequently portrayed as obstinate, self-serving, or strategically incompetent – educational manga broaden the spectrum of culpability to include non-military actors. The press, for instance, is depicted as complicit in manufacturing public consent through selective reporting and outright propaganda. In Shōgakukan 17, editorial meetings are shown where headlines are altered to conceal defeats, with journalists expressing private doubts yet conforming to institutional pressure.

This framing builds upon a long-established postwar narrative in Japanese media that attributes wartime responsibility primarily to a small political and military elite, thereby absolving both the emperor and ordinary civilians of direct culpability. As demonstrated by Dower (Reference Dower1999) and Yoshida (Reference Yoshida2005), this discursive pattern has been central to the construction of public memory, producing an image of the emperor as detached from operational decision-making and of civilians as passive victims of events beyond their control. All the educational manga in the corpus adhere to this foundational narrative by maintaining the emperor’s exoneration and reinforcing the condemnation of named political and military leaders.

However, the medium introduces a significant shift: civilians and civil institutions are now also depicted as active participants in the wartime system. Across all the titles in the corpus, teachers appear to indoctrinate students with nationalist slogans, community leaders are shown organising send-off ceremonies for soldiers, and local women’s associations enforce food rationing while shaming dissenters. In some narratives, ordinary citizens inform on neighbours suspected of dissent, spread rumours reinforcing militarist ideology, or embrace wartime fervour without reflection.

This broader framing stands in contrast to the tendency in Japanese postwar society to isolate blame within a narrow political elite (Yoshida, Reference Yoshida2005), often leaving ordinary citizens and civil institutions outside the moral frame. By depicting responsibility as dispersed across multiple layers of society, educational manga invite a more complex engagement with the dynamics of wartime complicity.

Sanitisation and idealisation of the emperor

The third pattern concerns the representation of the emperor, who is consistently sanitised across the corpus. Visual and narrative strategies either distance him from acts of violence or depict him in moments of moral reflection, deeply concerned for the Japanese people. Across the works, his figure is marked by composure and serenity, often contrasting with the more aggressive or volatile depictions of political and military leaders, such as Tōjō Hideki or Konoe Fumimaro. In most cases, he is framed as a pacifist constrained by reckless ministers, a decisive leader determined to protect the nation by ending the war, or, in postwar settings, a gentle elder. The shift from military uniform to the smiling, approachable figure of the junkyo tours (public tours of imperial inspection and mourning at sites of suffering, especially in the immediate postwar period) reinforces this carefully managed transformation.

Common narrative and visual patterns emerge across the corpus. Artistically, panel composition tends to situate the emperor in elevated or central positions, often framed by wide spaces or backgrounds devoid of military paraphernalia, which isolates him from the instruments of violence. Facial expressions are limited to a small repertoire – serenity, measured concern, or dignified sadness – while more intense emotions, such as anger or agitation, are conspicuously absent. Dialogue often centres on humanitarian themes (‘saving the people’ and ‘ending the suffering’), avoiding explicit discussions of imperial strategy or culpability. When historical events, such as the acceptance of the Potsdam Declaration or the 15 August 1945, radio broadcast t the nation by Emperor Hirohito announcing Japan’s surrender in WWII are depicted, they are rendered with an emphasis on emotional gravitas – close-up shots of moist eyes, pauses between lines of speech, and the silent deference of subordinates – rather than the political calculations behind the decision. This representational pattern has long been noted in historiography and memory studies, where debate continues over the emperor’s agency and culpability (Dower, Reference Dower1999; Bix, Reference Bix2000; Yoshida, Reference Yoshida2005).

What is conspicuously absent is the portrayal of the emperor as a sovereign decision-maker with sustained agency over wartime policy. Instead, responsibility for military excesses and strategic blunders is displaced onto cabinet ministers, military chiefs, or the intransigence of foreign leaders, such as Chiang Kai-shek, whose refusal to surrender is occasionally framed as prolonging the conflict. In some works, the emperor’s political interventions are shown, such as presiding over Gozen Kaigi (Imperial conferences at which the emperor and his senior advisers formally approved major wartime decisions), but these remain rare exceptions. In most, he is either a passive recipient of information or a moral figure who intervenes only at moments of dramatic closure, most notably the acceptance of the Potsdam Declaration in August 1945, often with tears as a sign of humanity. In Kadokawa 15, for example, the emperor’s role in the surrender is narrated as a personal moral awakening prompted by the suffering of his people, reinforcing the image of a benevolent patriarch rather than that of a fully accountable political actor. This visual and narrative pattern contrasts with historical scholarship such as Bix (Reference Bix2000), which portrays Hirohito as more actively engaged in decision-making, working through intermediaries, and bearing responsibility for Japan’s wartime conduct. The distance between these historical interpretations and their absence in gakushū manga highlights how the medium continues to shield the emperor from sustained scrutiny. While Japan’s postwar constitution guarantees freedom of speech and of the press, in practice, publishers are constrained by what is often described as jishuku (self-censorship). This is not simply a matter of editorial caution but reflects a broader climate in which overt criticism of the imperial institution has historically carried social risks. A striking example was the 1960 assassination of Socialist Party leader Asanuma Inejirō, stabbed to death during a televised debate by a right-wing extremist, an event that crystallised the potential dangers of being perceived as unpatriotic. Within such a context, educational publishers may have regarded avoiding direct criticism of the emperor as a form of risk management in Japanese public discourse.

This sanitisation aligns with longstanding trends in Japanese postwar society (Bix, Reference Bix2000) and in visual media (Córdoba-Arroyo, Reference Córdoba-Arroyo2023), where the emperor is positioned as a symbolic, almost apolitical figure, his moral authority preserved by careful narrative curation. Gakushū manga reproduces this tradition while adding a pedagogical layer that presents his actions as morally exemplary to younger audiences. While the extent of political engagement or internal struggle varies – some works depict him privately frustrated with advisers, others omit such introspection entirely – the dominant pattern is one of protection from moral scrutiny.

Reinterpreted heroism and the decline of the gunshin archetype

The fourth core finding is the marked reconfiguration of wartime heroism in the gakushū manga corpus. In contrast to the often revanchist and ultranationalist portrayals in postwar film, where the gunshin archetype (martial fearlessness and glory) sanctifies sacrifice for the emperor and the nation (Standish, Reference Standish2000), the manga under study largely strips this figure of his ideological armour. Here, the ‘hero’ is no longer a flawless soldier embodying bushidō or martial destiny, but a man caught in an unforgiving set of circumstances, doing the best he can to protect his family or fulfil a personal moral code. His death, when it comes, is framed as a personal tragedy rather than as a glorious act of patriotic martyrdom.

This recalibration carries a positive dimension: it shifts the moral focus from collective, state-centred duty towards an ethics of care, perseverance, and individual integrity. In works such as Shōgakukan 17, decorated soldiers are portrayed not as fearless warriors but as reluctant participants in a destructive conflict, their acts of endurance – against hunger, illness, and separation from loved ones – valued above martial conquest. Likewise, Kadokawa 15 presents a naval officer whose defining act of ‘heroism’ is diverting resources to evacuate civilians during an air raid, blurring the line between military obligation and humanitarian impulse.

However, the displacement of militarist heroism does not fully escape nationalistic undercurrents. The tragic hero of kamikaze films, once a vessel for revanchist sentiment, risks being reframed in gakushū manga simply as another instance of victimhood nationalism. In this context, the reimagined hero becomes less a cautionary figure against militarism and more an emblem of a nation that suffered nobly, thereby sustaining a bounded, ethnocentric moral universe.

From a sociological perspective, this evolution reflects a shift from heroic nationalism – which glorifies martial sacrifice as the ultimate expression of loyalty – to a form of post-heroic commemoration that privileges resilience over victory. However, the moral capital of such resilience remains largely confined to Japanese subjects, as Asian civilian heroes or acts of cross-national solidarity are almost absent from these narratives.

Visually, this reinterpretation is reinforced through subdued panel compositions: muted tones replace the dynamic, high-contrast imagery of prewar and wartime heroism, and ‘heroic’ moments are frequently intercut with scenes of suffering or loss. For example, in Shueisha 17, a celebrated pilot’s final sortie is framed not as a glorious sacrifice but as a sombre farewell, his aircraft depicted against a vast, empty sky. Such aesthetic choices invite mourning rather than glorification, making the portrayal more compatible with postwar pacifist sensibilities – while simultaneously reinforcing a national frame in which Japanese endurance remains the central moral focus.

Discussion: Implications for Japanese nationalism and pacifism

The findings from the analysis of gakushū manga offer a lens through which to examine the complex and often contradictory relationship between Japanese nationalism and pacifism. These texts do not merely recount historical events; they actively participate in the pedagogical construction of a national memory of WWII, shaping how younger generations understand peace, responsibility, and national identity. The result is a hybrid discourse in which pacifist sentiment and nationalist perspectives coexist without fully resolving their inherent tensions. The central paradox is a form of ‘victimhood nationalism’ that fosters a powerful anti-war message, sincere in its emotional content, yet ultimately circumscribed by nationally bounded dissonance. This logic intersects with two adjacent media phenomena. First, Sudō’s (Reference Sudō2013) notion of ‘self-centred nationalism’ in Japan Self-Defense Forces (JSDF) cooperation films shows how individually framed tales of resilience normalise respect for soldiers. Second, Warrack’s (Reference Warrack2025) account of cultural remilitarisation in recent Self-Defense-Force manga highlights how affective vulnerability invites readers to honour bodies and minds willingly sacrificed for the nation. When seen alongside these media, gakushū manga emerge as part of a wider ecology that rearticulates militarism through tropes of suffering, care, and endurance rather than through overt calls for martial glory.

This dynamic is most evident in the uneven distribution of empathy, or what has been called a ‘hierarchy of victims’ (Dower, Reference Dower1999, pp. 504–505). This asymmetry reflects the boundedness of collective memory, concentrating empathy within the ‘imagined community’ of the nation. Rather than fostering a universal moral obligation to avoid war, this narrative architecture construes peace as a self-protective measure to safeguard ‘our’ people from harm, thereby reinforcing national solidarity while delimiting the scope of peace education.

This nationally circumscribed pacifism is further reinforced by the manga’s treatment of responsibility and heroism. The attribution of blame is indeed more expansive than in other media, extending beyond the militaristic elite to include the press, civic institutions, and even ordinary citizens for their complicity. This distribution of responsibility encourages internal reflexivity and self-critique.

Wartime heroism is reconfigured from the traditional gunshin to one of resilience, endurance, and survival, aligning with post-war pacifist ideals. Figures are praised not for battlefield prowess but for perseverance, such as a nurse treating the wounded or a worker repairing tracks under fire. However, this resilience can be mobilised in nationalist rhetoric to valorise the Japanese spirit’s capacity for sacrifice, while the emperor remains sanitised and idealised, his moral authority preserved through shifting responsibility onto others. This framing stabilises the post-war imperial institution without confronting its historical culpability.

Taken together, these narratives reveal a pedagogical landscape in which the anti-war message is genuine yet limited, for although the manga avoid ultranationalism and present a broadly neutral stance, they fall short of a universal pacifism by sidestepping visual representations and sustained narrative development of non-Japanese Asian victims. The uneven empathy, domestically focused responsibility, sanitised sovereign, and reinterpreted heroism coalesce to produce a vision of the nation that looks inward, concentrating moral concern on Japanese suffering while leaving the experiences of non-Japanese victims largely outside the frame. This hybrid construction reflects the contemporary coexistence of pacifist discourse and nationalist policy in Japan, as political actors draw upon moral outrage at the suffering caused by war whilst simultaneously promoting military readiness and revisionist histories. In this way, gakushū manga about the Asia-Pacific War actively shape the moral parameters within which nationalism and pacifism are negotiated, preserving a memory that is emotionally potent, but historically incomplete.