The Marmot’s Hole

By all means, check out Jeff in Pusan post concerning the “comfort women nudes” fiasco and some of the social contradictions that have been made apparent by it. Just a snippet:

What I am talking about is all the flap surrounding Lee Seung-yeon’s incredibly stupid and utterly shameful decision to do seductively posed nude shots of simulated rape and abuse at the hands of Japanese soldiers in order to make money. She claims this was done to honor and commemorate the suffering of the comfort women who were forced to serve as sex slaves for the Japanese army during WWII. Koreans went ballistic over this, and rightfully so. It was a horrible publicity stunt designed to go set her apart from the other actresses, singers, and celebrity women that are all rushing to remove their clothes for a few bucks. She wanted to be a bit edgier, to stand out, to get more attention than the others. It blew up in her face and has essentially cost her a career. She is done.

At that same time, every year or two, someone with absolutely no sense of decency will make a music video, produce a commercial, or open a bar with some sort of Nazi or Hitler theme. There was a clothing commercial that featured Vanessa Mae playing violin on top of a bomber superimposed over Nazi soldiers goose-stepping in formation. There was a snack commercial showing how Hitler liked the chocolate cakes so much he spoke Korean. There was a gum commercial that showed a maniacally screaming Hitler break into a computer-generated smile to show that the gum was so good it even made Hitler smile. There has been the Hitler bar in Seoul, the Third Reich bar in Seoul, the Nazi cafe in Masan, the Hitler hoff in Pusan, and others. But these moneymaking ideas have been perfectly acceptable to the Koreans. The only reasons these were stopped was because of the outcry from foreigners.

Was there any head-shaving going on? Was there any bowing in apology to Jewish organizations? No. Just a lot of defensive comments and attempts to explain that they were just kidding, they were just having fun, they were just this and that.

It’s a long post, and definitely one worth reading on your own. When my wife and I first started dating, I used to meet her quite often at Jonggak Subway Station. Anyway, they used to run this ad for one of the local sports papers on the big TV screens at the station that featured this clever little cartoon of some Arab trying to hijack a plane into the World Trade Centers, only to be foiled as his attention is caught by all the interesting stuff in the paper. Despite the ad being rather offensive on several levels, I didn’t get too upset by it, being rather laid back about these sort of things. I was taken back, however, that in a nation rather notorious for flying off the handle any time foreign media personalities say anything that can be construed as demeaning to Korea, such an advertisement would be allowed to pass.

But then again, perhaps that’s just me.