Last week Japanese officials said they’d file a compliant to the French embassy after a French newspaper ran a couple of cartoons (see one of them above) poking fun of Japan winning the 2020 Olympics depicting sumo wrestlers with four arms due to the nuclear disasters experienced after the devastating earthquakes in 2011.
Now that French newspaper is telling Japan to lighten up that humor and tragedy can co-exist.
For a socially sensitive Japan, the comic strip was nowhere close to being funny. In defense of the newspaper, Le Canard Enchaine Chief Editor Louis-Marie Horeau said that they were only “being humorous,” and did not mean to insult the victims of the disaster. It claimed to have taken “responsibility for the cartoons without the slightest soul-searching,” but it encouraged Japan to lighten up. “Here in France, we can tackle tragedy with humor and apparently that’s not the case in Japan,” Horeau said. He added that the weekly publication was “absolutely stupefied” for the reaction the comic strip received.