WEGO pulls My Hero Academia collection ahead of Shanghai store opening

The cancelled collection had been scheduled to launch on 18 September, a date that falls on the anniversary of Japan's 1931 invasion of northeastern China. The decision to drop the tie-up came after Chinese consumers objected to the collaboration, according to the report, leaving the brand without the anime release it had planned just before its Shanghai retail debut.

The franchise itself has drawn criticism in China before. In 2020, My Hero Academia was criticised over a fictional doctor who carried out lethal experiments on human patients, which readers perceived as a reference to Unit 731, the Japanese military unit that conducted the same experiments on largely Chinese prisoners and which killed thousands. The character's name, Maruta — meaning "log", a term Unit 731 used for its victims — was changed after the series' creator apologised, denied any intentional historical reference and renamed the figure.

WEGO's China history runs back more than a decade. The company opened a physical store in Shanghai in 2010 but later withdrew from mainland China's bricks-and-mortar market. It re-entered through major online platforms from 2023, and a string of Shanghai pop-ups have been used to prepare the ground for the offline return.

The 29 September opening of the new Shanghai store was set to mark the next step in that comeback. The scrapped collection and the timing of its launch date precede that opening by roughly a week and a half.