Racist Images Lead To Recall Of Comic Book

A comic book has been recalled after a civic group charged it contained an image depicting blacks and Native Americans in a derogatory manner.

Ozora Publishing, which produced the two-volume “Princess Anmitsu,” said it was withdrawing all copies and planned to reissue the comics with the offending panel changed.

The panel shows a medieval Japanese princess who cries in fear after hearing that she will get a tutor from a foreign country. She protests that foreigners are not human and eat other people.

In a bubble depicting her imagination, she pictures three foreigners: a black man carrying a spear, another man carrying a tomahawk and a third who looks like a long-nosed Japanese devil.

In the end, the princess gets a beautiful, white female tutor from an unspecified Western country and overcomes her resistance to studying.

Ozora decided to stop distributing the book after being contacted by a civic group in the western city of Osaka. The group called the image racist, said an Ozora official who spoke on condition of anonymity.

The official said the firm did not intend for the image to be racist, but decided to change it after realizing that it could be taken as disparaging toward blacks and Native Americans.

The story is set in Japan’s Edo period, which lasted for about two centuries until 1868. During that time, the country was almost completely closed to foreigners. Blacks are still rarely seen in Japan.