I’m sure by now you’ve heard of the My Hero Academia controversial name change of Maruta that has occurred in the manga. Normally, I wouldn’t talk about it but seeing as so many people don’t seem to understand why the change was made, I thought I’d take some time to explain it.
You see, Maruta Shiga, specifically Maruta is a name that also meaning log, and was the dehumanizing term used by Imperial Japanese Unit 731 during WW2 to refer to the people they conducted inhumane human experiments on. During WWII, Unit 731 experimented upon and killed approx. over 3,000 Chinese and Korean people.
There’s a lot more horrific war crimes that the Japanese had committed, like that the Massacre of Nanking that still leaves tension among the two nations, and with the fact that the Japanese government has never actually fully acknowledged or formally/ sincerely apologized for these crimes, it’s no wonder the Chinese people have reacted the way that the have.
Well, when say that, it is true that the Prime minsters of Japan have apologized in some occasion, however, the apologies never seem to be an effort to amend for there since, but rather to downplay the whole thing. You can tell by the lack of knowledge Japanese seem to have over the Nanking event in comparison to the Germans and the Holocaust.
Of course, over here in the West, many are also ignorant of why China has reacted this way and people have just chucked it down to folks or SJW’s been sensitive without understanding why Kohei Horikoshi decided to change the name in the paperback and possibly in the anime. Yeah, it’s a clever pun to that fits what the character in the manga is doing, however with how murky the relation between China and Japan is right now, it’s better to avoid anymore controversies.
