Yoshinori Kobayashi

Yoshinori Kobayashi (小林 よしのり or 小林 善範) is a Japanese manga artist known for his controversial political commentary manga Gōmanism Sengen.

He compared it to the Peace Preservation Act of 1925, underscoring that it was ultimately used against ordinary people in Japan’s prewar years and during World War II.

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Kobayashi was a denier of both the Nanjing Massacre and of the comfort women system during World War II.

A student of French literature from Fukuoka University, Kobayashi published his first manga, Tōdai Itchokusen (東大一直線, Beeline to Tokyo U), in 1976 in Weekly Shōnen Jump while still in school.

Another of his early series, Obocchama-kun (おぼっちゃまくん), a satire about a naughty Rich Boy in the heyday of Japan's bubble economy, won the 1989 Shogakukan Manga Award for children's manga.

Kobayashi was included on Aum Shinrikyo's assassination list after he began satirising the cult.

Yoshinori Kobayashi has become one of the most prominent conservative authors and commentators of Japan's younger generations, both at home and abroad, especially in the wake of his long-running Gōmanism Sengen manga series, first published in 1992.

In Gomanism, Kobayashi portrays himself as an intentionally arrogant, controversial, and extreme character, somewhat akin to Stephen Colbert.

The intent of the manga is to provoke discussion in Japan's apolitical society.

In actual dialogues, though, Kobayashi is much more nuanced.

For example, while he takes up the Japanese history textbook controversies with the position that Japan should be allowed to write its own textbook, when talking with Susumu Nishibe, he acknowledged that the actual textbook produced by right-wing groups whitewashes history in pursuit of ideology.

An assassination attempt was made on him by the members of the cult in 1993.