Editor's note: Wang Yichen, a special commentator for CGTN, is an associate research fellow at the Institute of Japanese Studies, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. The article reflects the author's views and not necessarily those of CGTN.

In late September, a notice appeared at a baseball venue of the Aichi-Nagoya Asian Games 2026 in Japan, telling spectators not to bring in the rising sun flag, the banner under which Japan’s imperial army and navy invaded much of Asia. The notice did not stay up for long.

After protests from right-wing groups, the organizing committee took it down and apologized for it being "inappropriate." Soon the flag was waving in the stands at the judo mixed team final. A host that apologizes for restricting a militarist symbol tells the region a great deal about itself. And the episode is anything but isolated.

For decades, Japan's historical revisionism announced itself openly, through politicians' visits to the Yasukuni Shrine, the controversial shrine in Tokyo commemorating convicted war criminals, rewritten textbooks, and outright denial of the Nanjing Massacre, the 1937 destruction of China’s then capital city, resulting in the death of more than 300,000 Chinese.

Each provocation met firm opposition from Asian countries and from many in Japan itself. Right-wing forces have drawn a lesson from this. Rather than arguing about history in the open, they now slip their messages into what young people watch, play and cheer for.

The resulting cases are too many and too consistent to be dismissed as isolated accidents. In June, the rising sun flag appeared in the stands when Japan played Tunisia in the World Cup, although stadium security had stopped the same flag at the Qatar tournament four years earlier. In April, a Ground Self-Defense Force regiment unveiled an artificial intelligence-generated emblem showing an elephant in camouflage with a rifle and a skull badge, and withdrew it only after Japanese netizens condemned it as warlike.

Popular culture tells the same story. In January, a Pokemon card game event for children and families was scheduled to be held at the notorious Yasukuni Shrine. The event was subsequently canceled, and the Japanese media franchise acknowledged that it should never have been held there.

In 2020, the manga My Hero Academia named a villainous doctor "Maruta," the word Unit 731, the Japanese military's secret biological and chemical warfare research unit, had used to denote the victims of its human experiments. It was changed only after an outcry.

On screen, the box-office hit The Eternal Zero, adapted from a novel by Naoki Hyakuta, who has publicly denied the Nanjing Massacre, turns a kamikaze pilot into a devoted family man, while the Asian victims of the war he fought are nowhere to be seen.

Each time, the defense is the same: This is only sport, only entertainment, and culture has nothing to do with politics. The claim does not survive scrutiny.

First, symbols do not shed their history by changing venue. A flag flown by invading armies does not become a harmless cheering prop in a stadium, any more than a shrine honoring war criminals becomes a playground because a children's game is scheduled there. No one in Europe would accept Nazi insignia in the stands as fan culture, and international sports bodies bar political symbols for precisely this reason.

Those who insist that culture is apolitical are the very ones bringing politics into it. What is presented as freedom of expression and mass entertainment is in fact a three-step operation. A symbol is first neutralized by detaching it from the crimes committed under it. It is then aestheticized, made cute, cool or heroic. Finally, it is normalized through repetition, until those who object are dismissed as oversensitive.

The target is the young. As the generation with direct memories of the war passes away and textbooks soften their account of aggression, what many young Japanese know of that history comes increasingly from screens and stadiums. A generation that is shown the kamikaze as romance and the Yasukuni as a venue for a card game will have little reason to question the Sanae Takaichi government's record military budgets, its push for constitutional revision, or its hollowing out of the exclusively defense-oriented policy. Cultural infiltration thus prepares the social ground for Japan's neo-militarism.

Sport and culture carry public values and a society's historical conscience. Japanese anime and athletes have long won real affection across Asia, including in China, and that goodwill is exactly what the right wing is spending. To repackage the symbols of aggression as merchandise is to treat the suffering of tens of millions of victims as raw material for entertainment.

Opposing this is not hostility toward Japanese culture or the Japanese people. It was Japanese netizens who forced the withdrawal of the skull emblem, and a Japanese company that admitted the Yasukuni event was wrong. They understand what the right wing would prefer the world to forget.

International sports organizations should enforce their own rules against militarist symbols consistently. Japanese publishers, broadcasters and event organizers should exercise the historical due diligence their global audiences expect.

Above all, the Japanese government should face its history of aggression squarely instead of indulging those who repackage it. War guilt is not a product to be rebranded and sold to the next generation. It is a responsibility, and no amount of entertainment can make it disappear.

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