A bitter dispute between South Korea and former colonist Japan has flared up, wi...
SEOUL - A bitter dispute between South Korea and former colonist Japan has flared up, with Japanese clothing brand Uniqlo facing a consumer backlash after a new ad by the company was criticized as mocking victims of wartime forced labor and brothel workers.
Relations between the two countries have slumped to their lowest in decades after a ruling by South Korea’s top court last year ordering Japanese firms to compensate wartime forced laborers. In the commercial, Iris Apfel, 97-year-old American style icon with more than 1.4 million Instagram followers, is in an animated conversation with 12-year-old fashion designer Kheris Rogers.Instead of a literal translation of that line, the commercial which aired in South Korea carried subtitles saying: “Gosh! How can I remember something that goes back 80 years?”
South Korea and Japan share a bitter history dating to the Japanese colonization of the Korean peninsula from 1910 to 1945, including the use of comfort women, a euphemism for girls and women, many of them Korean, forced to work in its wartime brothels.“There was no intention to touch on the issue of comfort women or South Korea-Japan dispute,” a Uniqlo official in Seoul told Reuters, asking not to be named because of the sensitivity of the situation.
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