Nidome no Jinsei wo Isekai de [New Life+] Anime Cancelled Over Authors Remarks on China & South Korea. Light Novel Distribution to Cease Immediately.

What You Need to Know:

• Originally slated for a Fall debut, the official website for Nidome no Jinsei wo Isekai de [New Life+] posted today that production has ceased on the anime. The entire anime project has been cancelled and will no longer be made. As for the source light novels, per an announcement from the publisher Hobby Japan, shipments of the novels will cease until further notice. As for what will happen in the future, it's unclear at this time.
• This storm comes after a twitter account earlier this week that goes by the handle of @SonmiChina started to talk about tweets from the author MINE as well as context within the book. The user states that they are an ethnically Chinese person who lives in Japan. Per tweets from MINE's twitter account from 2013-2015, there are alleged references of hate speech against both China and South Korea as well as racist & derogatory content. The tweets referred to China as "the country of bugs" and South Korea as "the wicked country". Per their explanation of the novel, the main character who dies and then is sent to another world to live another life, has actually killed more than 3000 people in the Sino-Japanese War (A real war that lasted from 1937-1945 that resulted in over 8 million deaths) with a sword, the one featured below, and that he went on to kill more people during his life before the incident that sent him to another world.
• The backlash on twitter was severe and many Japanese users mentioned that this was inappropriate. The announcement for the cancellation of the anime was made today, but yesterday, all of the seiyuu that had been confirmed for characters one by one all announced that they were withdrawing from the show. In fact now, the anime website has been scrubbed clean other than an announcement stating the anime is cancelled.
• MINE did take to their twitter to apologize deeply and state that they were reflecting on their thoughts and actions. They plan to leave their apology tweets up in order to allow their apology to spread further before closing their twitter account.
• Nidome no Jinsei wo Isekai de had just published the 18th bound volume of the series on May 24th and the novel originally took off on the massively popular "Shousetsuka ni Narou" website. J-Novel Club has licensed the series digitally and has been releasing it. There is no statement available from J-Novel Club in regards to the status of the series at the time of writing this article.

Source: Anime Website

Source: Light Novel Site (Hobby Japan)

So we are going to let MINE be banned but Ruroni Kenshin gets a pass? Oh, okay Japan. This is not cool.

Still though, at least MINE offered to do the right thing and apologize and then go talk to Hobby Japan about taking that material out of the novels.