Anti-Japanese Moon Festival

It’s October and most of Asia is gearing up for the Moon Festival. To celebrate the holiday, ultra-nationlists are kicking off the season the only way they can: with Anti-Japanese moon cakes. Stamped across are the phrases: “Kill Japanese,” “Eat Japanese,” “Kick out Japanese,” and “Hate Japanese.” What’s with all the hostility? The two countries have unsettled territorial disputes over rocks–I mean–islands called Senkaku or Diaoyu depending on where you stand on the issue. It’s reopening old wounds from the past from Japan’s colonization of the country. Tensions boiled over when the Japanese Government nationalized their purchase of the islands. Demonstrations, riots, and protests raged across the Middle Kingdom. People driving Japanese cars were yanked from their vehicles and beaten by irate pedestrians. Protestors damaged shops and stores for Japanese brands and went so far as to deface a Samsung store without realizing that the company was South Korean.

That scraps the azuki-filled surface of the backstory behind those cakes.

One question though, is the “Little Japan” Chinese characters up above some sort of derogatory term that I don’t know about?