Attack the Devils: history, nationalism, and overreaction to China's anti-Japan flash game

Over the weekend, news spread worldwide about Attack the Devils, a flash game designed by China’s state-owned media arm People’s Online. You can play the game using the link above, but in case you don’t want to, here’s the basic thrust: the game asks you to choose a WWII-era Japanese military leader, and then shoot moving targets with that leader’s face using a handgun while cheery music plays in the background.

Escalating tensions between Japan and China over territorial issues like the Senkaku/Diaoyu Islands may be partially to blame for this provocative game. But the real reason behind it is the lingering resentment in China towards Japan over what China perceives to be a lack of remorse for the atrocities Japanese troops committed in China during the World War II.

Its development was likely provoked by specifically by Japan’s prime minister Shinzo Abe’s visit to the Yasukuni Shrine late last year. Japanese officials maintain that the shrine honors all of Japan’s war dead, and characterized the move as an anti-war gesture. But in China and elsewhere in Asia, the visits are seen as disrespectful because the Yasukuni Shrine honors some of the leaders of Japan’s military during the second world war, including convicted war criminals.

In fact, the 14 Japanese leaders you can choose to shoot in Attack the Devils (打鬼子 some media have translated this title as “Kill the Devils”, but 打 does not mean “kill”) are the 14 convicted Class A war criminals that were enshrined there in 1978: Hideki Tōjō, Seishirō Itagaki, Heitarō Kimura, Kenji Doihara, Akira Mutō, Kōki Hirota, Yoshijirō Umezu, Kuniaki Koiso, Hiranuma Kiichirō, Toshio Shiratori, Shigenori Tōgō, Osami Nagano, and Yosuke Matsuoka.

Some of the choices in ‘Attack the Devils’

Many of these men were found guilty of permitting, and in some cases encouraging, the inhumane treatment of prisoners of war, and some of them have even darker backgrounds. Kenji Doihara, for example, served as an intelligence officer in China and was directly responsible for crimes like the addicting thousands and perhaps millions of unsuspecting victims to opium by mixing it into tuberculosis medication, as well as abducting Chinese women for Japan’s “comfort women” system of forced prostitution (institutionalized rape, in other words). Akira Mutō was responsible for civilian massacres in the Nanjing campaign in China and the further massacre of civilians in the Philippines after he was transferred there in 1944.

It’s not difficult to see, then, why a game like Attack the Devils (“devils” here is a derogatory term associated with Japanese people) might strike a chord for some Chinese internet users.

But it’s also important to point out that even in China, the game is pretty controversial, and it hasn’t exactly been a smash hit. It was posted to the People’s Daily microblog service—if you haven’t heard of that before, it’s because virtually no one uses it—and while the game has attracted the kind of alarmingly-nationalist comments you’d expect such a game to attract (and the Western press has seized on that fact), the rest of China’s gaming community has been more restrained.

For example, on Chinese gaming site 17173, gamers have responded to a story about the game mostly by calling it “disgusting”. As of this writing, the top comment (the comment voted most popular by other commenters and readers) is this:

Do they [the government] dare not to teach hatred to young people? I don’t know who made this boring game, but it is truly disgusting.

Admittedly, there are also a lot of nationalist, anti-Japan comments on mainstream news sites, but the public is definitely not all in agreement about this game and many commenters take a more nuanced view.

In the top comments on a Sohu news story about the game, for example, one commenter calls the game a reflection of “the Ah-Q spirit“, a sentiment that is also echoed in the top comment of a Phoenix News story about Attack the Devils.