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Doing my normal blog roaming when I see something very interesting over at Popseoul:

Park Jin-hee was featured in a new CF for Coreana’s Nokdu bean serum where she is wearing a military cap stamped with a swastika-gripping eagle Nazi insignia. According to AP news:

The version shown in previews contained the slogan:”Even Hitler didn’t have the East and West.” Korad, the Seoul-based agency that produced the ad, said it believed a Nazi soldier and Hitler symbolized “revolution” in keeping with the lotion’s “revolutionary” moisturizing and calming effects. It said the reference to the East and West emphasized the product’s dual functions.”

… How can you NOT know that using Hitler and Nazism is NOT a good way to market your products?

Nazism represents revolution? Is this some kind of twisted joke? There is no way that you could research Nazism and Hitler and not get something that tells you that “revolution” is the last thing from people’s minds when they think of either.

This reminds me of an article I read yesterday about “The Bubble Sisters”. In 2003 they dressed up in what was basically ridiculous black-face and sang It’s Raining Men. Once again, how can they NOT know that that is extremely offensive? Apparently, a half-Black, half-Korean singer in the same company told them the horrible history behind black-face and why it was so offensive but they didn’t care because: 1) Black people are not regarded very highly in Korea, 2) There aren’t many Black people in Korea that would complain.

I was really offended by the black-face nonsense and I’m also offended by the use of Hitler and Nazism to try to market your products. I can’t imagine how a Jewish ex-patriate living in Korea would feel watching that commercial come on television.

I know that it’s two completely different worlds, the east and the west, and we may not understand each other completely but this is just a lack of basic research and an insensitivity to people they must have known MIGHT get offended. There is no good reason for either of these instances. Of course, after complaining, The Bubble Sisters act was pulled and they apologized. And the people behind Coreana have apologized to the Israeli Embassy and changed the offensive ads so that they now say, “No one was able to conquer east and west”.

Well, no one has realized that there is not a concrete wall between the east and the west. We can see each other, whether its The Bubble Sisters in black-face or Mickey Rooney pretending to be Japanese, people get offended, people get hurt.