Nazi Pokemon?!

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Nazi Pokemon?

This story started with a Zubat card. Someone noticed what looked like a swastika in the background, and immediately said that the show's affiliated with the Nazis.

True? No.

The image on the card, like the images on all the cards, was flipped for release in America. Japanese comics (manga) are done the same way--the images are flipped so that it reads in the American left-to-right fashion. The image in the card's background wasn't a swastika, but the Hebrew symbol of peace. When Hitler adopted the use of the swastika during World War 2, he flopped the image of this peace symbol to represent the opposite of peace--basically, everything the Nazis stood for. The Japanese card had the symbol for peace, but when flipped, it suddenly becomes the symbol of the Nazi party.

This wasn't intentional on either end, Japanese or Amerian. The swastika wasn't there on the Japanese card, and it was merely an oversight to the American producers of the cards. So fear not--watching Pocket Monsters won't turn you into a Nazi.

Pocket Monsters was not created by me. It was created by Satoshi Tajiri and the crew at TV-Tokyo. Pokemon is (c) Game Freak, Nintendo, 4Kids Productions, Hasbro, Bandai, and a ton of other companies. When you have a popular anime like Pokemon, lots of people own it so it's impossible to list every company who owns a piece of Pokemon. No infringement of copyrights is meant by the creation of the web site. All images were gotten from official websites (Nintendo, TV-Tokyo, etc.) unless otherwise noted (I don't steal images from other sites!).