Japanese anime graphics that were produced 10 years ago insulted the late Chairman Mao Zedong and humiliated China by depicting him as a zombie asking for a toilet, nationalist Chinese internet users said.

Netizens known as “China’s Little Pink” called for a boycott as they took umbrage at the work, which was created by Fullmetal Alchemist author Arakawa Hiroshi and published in 2011.

The offending images were created in the third episode of Arakawa’s “Raiden-18” series. Mao, a former leader of the Communist Party, came across as a corpse that had a spell stuck to his forehead saying “where are the toilets,” comic illustrations circulating on the web showed.

It appeared that Arakawa, who had visited China before, had created a satire to bemoan the lack of public toilets in the country.

A new version of Raiden-18 was published on June 9 this year, sparking anger from Chinese netizens who said that Arakawa’s work disparaged their country.

Arakawa then granted Japanese magazine Sunday GX an interview which was posted on Thursday, in which she said “that country” had a large number of pirated manga books copying Fullmetal Alchemist during the time the third episode was released in 2011.

The rampant piracy made her original work almost impossible to sell, so she decided to draw a comic which “that country” could not plagiarize at all.

Hong Kong artist Elphonso Lam told Apple Daily that the “humiliation of China” was just a chat topic in Chinese cyberspace. The understanding of an artist’s work would tend to vary among different viewers, and might not be what the creator had intended.

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