Chinese cartoon angers Japanese

TOKYO — Japan protested Wednesday to China over a newspaper’s depiction of exploding mushroom clouds in a map of Japan, calling it offensive.

Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga said Japan, as the only nation to have suffered atomic attacks, will “never tolerate” such a depiction. It was “extremely imprudent” of the newspaper, he said. “And it rattled the nerves of atomic bomb survivors and their families.”

The Chongqing Youth News carried a full-page color map of Japan, with the cartoon drawing of an exploding mushroom cloud over Hiroshima and Nagasaki and a title saying “Japan wants a war again.” In the map, the green Japanese archipelago on the blue background was marked with the names of the two cities and Tokyo, in both English and Chinese.

It was unclear if the map was an advertisement or a graphic meant to accompany a commentary on the next page. The commentary — titled “Have we been too friendly to Japan in the past?” — criticized Tokyo’s decision to allow Japan’s military to use force to defend its allies, an action previously banned as unconstitutional.

The newspaper was published July 3, two days after Japan reinterpreted its war-renouncing constitution to allow a greater role for its military.

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