Mizzou Students Complain to Administration About ‘Offensive’ Sushi Restaurant Logo

According to emails obtained by Heat Street, University of Missouri students met with administrators to complain about a campus sushi restaurant with a logo they considered offensive.

In an email last fall with the subject line “Racism at Mizzou,” a student complained that the logo of Sunshine Sushi resembled the Imperial Japanese flag used during World War II. The logo, he argued, “has the same meaning as the Nazi’s Hakenkreuz [swastika], which was the symbol of the Nazi.”

The use of the rising sun flag to represent Japan is controversial, especially among the Koreans and Chinese who were victimized by the Empire. But modified forms of the flag are still in use by the Japan Self-Defense Force, and used in Japanese commercial products.

Email records show that afterwards the administration took the complaint seriously enough to set up a meeting with 12 students from campus Asian organizations. Those students then met with the restaurant and worked out a compromise: the owner would change the logo if they came up with a better one that still incorporated the idea of sunshine.

Sunshine Sushi owner Oo Min Aung told Heat Street that he still didn’t really see the big deal. The Myanmarese immigrant said he picked a shining sun because he “wanted something that would symbolize the meaning of freedom, liberation.”

[Image via screengrab]
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