Swastikas in Japan
Some foreigners are surprised when they come to Japan and find swastikas all over the place. What’s going on with all the swastikas? Here, swastikas are a common symbol used in Buddhist art and scripture, and used to identify and decorate Shinto shrines, and some temples, too. Maps bear small swastikas to mark their locations. But these are not Nazi swastikas. These are religious symbols called “manji” in Japanese, which literally means “whirlwind.” They represent Dharma (a key religious concept with many translations), universal harmony, and the balance of opposites, prosperity and good luck, divinity and spirituality. Just like how a dragon in Chinese mythology represents good fortune, the swastika as a religious symbol speaks of positive features, not negative ones.
These might be challenging suggestions for some Westerners who imagine a dragon as an evil monster, and who only know the Nazi swastika as a symbol of evil. The Nazis chose the right-facing, clockwise, or Hakenkreuz (double cross) swastika as a symbol of the Aryan race, the reverse image of the Asian religious symbol. Why? I don’t know who decided that. I know one man here who claims that the Hakenkreuz design was a decision by Hitler himself, but he offered no explanation describing why that should be so. (He struck me as a little dodgy.) Who knows?
Recently, Japanese teen girls (especially high school students) started to use this symbol as a slang term for describing their excitement, especially in the form of the phrase “マジ卍” (maji manji). I have personal experience that this is true. It seems that it is usually put at the end of a sentence, like “かわいい!マジ卍”, which means “So cute! Awesome!”, where マジ卍 simply indicates their excitement.
Before the 2020 Tokyo Olympic Games there was a discussion here regarding whether this symbol should be abolished or not due to its association with Nazi Germany, threatening possible embarrassment (a grave condition among Japanese) in the face of an expected influx of foreign tourists. That influx never happened because of the coronavirus pandemic. Eventually, the Japanese government decided to leave use of the symbol unchanged since it has a very long history as a symbol of divinity and spirituality in Buddhism.