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Japan's Uniqlo pulls ad after South Korean fury

Oct 22, 2019 | News On Japan

Oct 22, 2019 (Japan Times) - Japanese retail giant Uniqlo has pulled a commercial featuring a 98-year-old U.S. fashion figure from South Korean screens after it was accused of whitewashing colonial history.

South Korea and Japan are both U.S. allies, democracies and market economies faced with an overbearing China and nuclear-armed North Korea, but their relationship is deeply strained by the legacy of Tokyo’s 20th-century expansionism.

The latest example is an ad for Uniqlo fleeces showing elderly fashion celebrity Iris Apfel chatting with designer Kheris Rogers, 85 years her junior.

The last line has the white-haired Apfel, asked how she used to dress as a teenager, innocuously responding: “Oh my God. I can’t remember that far back.”

But Uniqlo’s South Korean arm subtitled its version of the ad slightly differently, reading: “I can’t remember things that happened more than 80 years ago.”

That would put the moment as 1939, towards the end of Japan’s brutal colonial rule over the Korean Peninsula, where the period is still bitterly resented, and some South Koreans reacted furiously.

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