With Uighur comic, Japanese manga artist aims to highlight everday 'suffering'

A Japanese artist whose manga comics about a Uighur woman went viral wants to use the simple power of her work to raise awareness of the "daily suffering" endured by the Chinese mostly Muslim minority, she told Reuters.

With "What Has Happened to Me", a manga comic that has been translated into 10 languages - including Mandarin, Uighur and English - and viewed more than 330,000 times online, artist Tomomi Shimizu has seized on an issue that many Western countries see as evidence of Beijing's abuse of human rights.

In panels of spare, black-and-white drawings, Shimizu tells the story of Mihrigul Tursun, a real Uighur woman who now lives in the United States and says she was beaten and detained in China for being a Uighur.

"The Uighur issue has been well known among people who are into politics. But little is known among the general public. The gap is staggering," Shimizu, 50, told Reuters in an interview.

"I decided to use manga for this purpose because I believe manga has power to convey things to people in an easy-to-understand way."

Shimizu, who has penned another comic about Uighurs, appears to be no stranger to politics, having voiced support on her Twitter account for issues generally backed by Japan's right wing.

The United Nations and human rights groups estimate that between 1 million and 2 million people, most of them ethnic Uighur Muslims, have been detained in harsh conditions in the Xinjiang region of northwest China, as part of what Beijing calls an antiterrorism campaign.

China has said Xinjiang faces a threat from Islamist militants and separatists.

Beijing rejects accusations of mistreatment and denies mass internment, saying it is simply seeking to end extremism and violence in Xinjiang...

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