WEGO Scraps My Hero Academia Clothing Line After Chinese Backlash

Japanese fashion retailer WEGO has abandoned a planned clothing range built around the anime and manga franchise My Hero Academia, after the collaboration drew an angry response from Chinese consumers on social media.

The Tokyo-based company had announced an exclusive line of themed apparel, but its Chinese subsidiary issued an apology on Friday and the Japanese parent posted a one-sentence cancellation notice citing unspecified “circumstances” on Saturday.

The franchise was widely condemned in China over a 2020 controversy about a character that conducted lethal human experiments — a plot detail that evoked memories of the wartime Unit 731, held responsible for the deaths of thousands of mostly Chinese prisoners. The character’s name, Maruta Shiga, deepened the anger, as maruta, meaning log, was a derisive term used for the unit’s experiment subjects.

The proposed launch date added further fuel. The line was set to debut on September 18, the 95th anniversary of the 1931 Mukden Incident, which Japan used as a pretext for its invasion of China.

WEGO’s Chinese subsidiary said it “respected [Chinese] public sensibilities,” adding that the collaboration “was planned and launched in Japan by our Japanese parent company, WEGO, solely for the Japanese market” and apologising for failing to “exercise adequate due diligence in the content.”

The episode is the latest in which Japanese brands have felt the weight of consumer sentiment tied to historical grievances in a market they cannot easily ignore. WEGO plans to open its first Chinese flagship store in Shanghai later this month and has grown quickly in the country. A 2024 pop-up in Shanghai generated 4 million yuan (US$560,000) in sales over six days, and its store on Taobao sells more than 300,000 items a year.

Diplomatic relations between Tokyo and Beijing are at their lowest point in a decade. Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi said in November that an attack on Taiwan could constitute a “survival-threatening situation” justifying military intervention. Beijing responded by freezing high-level ministerial dialogue, suspending Japanese seafood imports and tightening export controls on dual-use goods and rare earths. Nearly a third of scheduled passenger flights from mainland China to Japan were cancelled over the past two months.

On Sunday, an eight-member cross-party parliamentary delegation from the Japan-China Friendship Parliamentarians’ Union, led by Liberal Democrat Masahiro Komura, began a three-day visit to Beijing, scheduled to meet officials from the Chinese People’s Association for Friendship with Foreign Countries.

My Hero Academia has not commented on the current dispute. In 2020, creator Kohei Horikoshi promised to change the character’s name, saying he took the issue “very seriously,” and both he and publisher Shonen Jump said no historical allusion was intended.

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