The Japanese fear the Islamophobic cartoons and DVD’s may start another round of cartoon riots.
In a recent Japanese cartoon the villain vows to kill the main character while he reads pages of the Koran.
The company received “feedback” from a few angry Muslims after the DVD was released.
The Japanese company Shueisha decided it was best to suspend shipments of the offensive cartoon after the company thought things over.
Anime News Network and LGF Quick Links reported:
The Japanese publisher Shueisha and the anime production company A.P.P.P. have halted shipments of the JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure anime and manga after online Islamic protesters objected to imagery in the anime that they deemed offensive. In particular, a scene in the sixth anime episode (“The Mist of Vengeance”) depicts the main villain, Dio, vowing to kill the main character Jōtarō Kujō while looking at pages of the Qur’an, the main religious text of Islam.
The Kyodo News agency cited Sheikh Abdul Hamid Al-Atrash, chairman of the Fatwa Committee at Cairo’s Al-Azhar University, as saying, “The scene depicts Muslims as terrorists.”
Shueisha posted a Japanese statement about the issue and a English letter to the “Muslim audience of JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure” on Thursday. In both documents, Shueisha and A.P.P.P. explained that the anime staffers added Arabic text to the book to indicate the scene’s apparent location in the Arabic world. However, the same staffers were illiterate in Arabic and did not realize that they chose pages from the Qur’an. (Yeah, right!)