At Wuhan University’s graduate opening ceremony this weekend, thousands of students were arranged into patriotic shapes: a giant ❤️, the proud letters “WHU”, and by accident the rising sun of 🇯🇵.
The “Japan problem” came from seat markers: 🔴 circles pasted onto ⚪ chairs to tell students where to sit. Internet sleuths were quick to notice that this bore an uncanny resemblance to the Japanese flag, a design with a 150-year head start on Wuhan’s student logistics committee.
Within hours, the university was forced into damage control. In a statement that could have been generated by 🤖 circa 2023, administrators said they were simply using “basic shapes and colours” to coordinate seating. They added that next time they would “pay more attention to details,” which is exactly what one hopes to hear from an institution claiming to educate China’s best and brightest.
Critics were not convinced. “How do you run one of China’s top universities but forget what Japan’s flag looks like?” one Weibo user asked. “What’s next, swastikas because triangles are easy to cut out?”
This isn’t Wuhan University’s first run-in with unintentional Japan-adjacency. The school’s famous 🌸 cherry blossom avenue, a magnet for tourists every spring, has long drawn tongue-in-cheek remarks about its “foreign” symbolism. But even so, few expected that the university would literally print out 🇯🇵’s national emblem and paste it on 10,000 chairs during Victory Day week.
Observers say the incident is a perfect example of the ivory-tower bubble 🏰 in action. While ordinary citizens see history, war trauma, and geopolitics, administrators apparently see nothing more than circles and rectangles abstract forms floating in a Platonic realm of shapes.
The episode raises an age-old question: 🤔 if university leaders can’t distinguish patriotism from parody at their own ceremonies, should we really trust them to run the next five-year plan for scientific innovation?
For now, Wuhan University has promised greater vigilance. Rumour has it the next ceremony will rely solely on 🔲 squares. After all, what could possibly go wrong with squares?
