Kirk W. Fuoss's essay "Lynching Performances, Theatres of Violence" (1999) demonstrates how nineteenth-century technology helped to coordinate lynching mobs in the U.S. as a form of popular entertainment. In relation to American history, Fuoss points out how entire peoples and places were set aside as living stages for these "lynching dramas," mainly thanks to frontier newspapers and postcards that regularly promoted a hyperbolic, self-inoculating injection of neighborly scorn and hatred.

Among history's relentless variety of racially tinged platforms of demonization and rivalry, one of whose abiding demeanors is "blackface," little has changed in the modern mass media. Of greatest concern here is the Internet, now having created a virtual lunar playground for generating racist stereotypes and fantasies about the nationalist other. "There is no before-racism in U.S. history. Nor, unfortunately, is there an after-racism," says Fuoss. No country today is immune from this onslaught, nor is any broadband or pop art form. This includes Japanese mangaka Sharin Yamano's hugely popular Kenkanryu (variously translated as "The Anti-Korean Wave," "Hating the Korean Wave," or even "Hate Korea Wave") series of comic books, except that here the technology involved only repeats in cyberspace what is its most ancient, sublunary form.

First released in 2005, Kenkanryu started life in Japan as an underground webcomic whose meteoric rise to manga status triggered an unprecedented Internet phenomenon in response to the "Korean Wave" pop culture boom. Racism as an aesthetic object of contemplation in Asia is nothing new, nor is the image of fear and loathing generated among rival nations like Japan, North and South Korea, China, and Taiwan. But what has changed is the increasing technical sophistication of the different regional "silicon majorities," which allow ethnic prejudices to circulate as geographically attuned anecdotes, jokes, and popular imaging, all geared toward prioritizing the homegrown self over the distant other.

Since it first appeared on Yamano's website in 2003, Kenkanryu has stirred up a lot of controversy throughout the Asian region, largely preoccupating such Internet forums as Japan's 2channel and Korea's Joins and Naver URLs. Korean daily newspapers have also turned their attention to the continuing popularity of these comic books. Kenkanryu, with its in-your-face Korea-bashing, originally arose in response to the heated rivalry between Japanese and Korean soccer fans when both countries co-hosted the 2002 FIFA World Cup. The narrative kicks off with the Korean players being accused of getting away with murder when they became the first Asian team ever to reach the World Cup semifinals. Targeted at a specific age group, teenagers have been chosen to relate these petty grievances, redirecting the action to a Japanese high school.

The comic advances Japan's traditional enmity with Korea in a present-day setting, revealing their mutual antagonism in sports, economics, and technology. Available through the Japanese version of Amazon.com, there are three Kenkanryu books to date, a manual on how to read them systematically, another racist comic about China called Introduction to China (2005), and two Korean responses that address the "Hate Japan Wave" (including Korean cartoonist...