Some people don’t know this, which is why it’s still amusing to those who know to reveal this fact to those who don’t and watch or imagine their reaction as they struggle to adjust their worldview. To us, swastikas are pavlovian symbols of evil. To Asians, they’re symbols used to mark holy places on maps, ubiquitously mundane.

But the BBC, and Stephen Fry, still caved and apologized to the Japanese embassy.

eg. http://i.ytimg.com/vi/lk3Uj1EL5-8/0.jpg

When the BBC or Sony does it and dozens of people are involved with the joke, there is no excuse for being a bunch of insensitive boobs because they ALL thought before letting the joke play out.

I am more offended by how stupid these people are than by what they actually said or did.

–Beryl

http://feministing.com/2010/03/19/redefining-asians-and-the-internet-i-am-not-your-fetish/

Where’s my apology, Sony?

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/4170083.stm (one of the great sun headlines)

It’s easy to misjudge other people’s levels of comfort on stuff like this, and it becomes ever harder the further you are away (physically, culturally, and in time) from the events that cause negative feelings.
And treading the line between shocking and offensive is something that artists all over the world do everyday. Sometimes the make a misstep.

I wonder if the Japanese can see the irony, and if they hope to be forgiven when they withheld forgiveness in a very similarly trivial incident.

The German army still uses the symbol. The American army has it on uniforms and decorations all across the branches.

The Japanese have a different view of this sort of thing. In America kids dress up like this because they are Neo-Nazis or because they hate their parents and want to be aggressively “different”. In Japan the Nazis are just another villain to dress up as, like M. Bison or Umbrella Security guards.

At the end of WW2 McArthur went through the Japanese government and its agencies and rooted out anyone with right wing sympathies. Around 1949 however the US became paranoid about the Red Menace, so a second purge was organised replacing the left wing sympathisers with right wingers. The same ones who had been purged at the end of the war.

On the whole the Japanese politicians come from political dynasties and are not very in touch with the lives of the average citizen, and those on the right of the spectrum play to the gallery by making big gestures and sound bites. You can see a lot of this around the whaling debate where the US, Australia and the UK are painted as being under the thumb of of a gang of crusties called Greenpeace which is trying to tell Japan how to run it’s business. Of course it’s just safe sabre rattling, a chance to look big whilst not needing to worry the situation’ll escalate into a physical war with the US. Thus honouring the dead at Yaskuni temple, is to get political brownie points.

I’m always pleasantly surprised however by how much the majority of Japanese don’t buy into the political, however they aren’t the ones making laws and policy decisions or statements on behalf of the Japanese people. I have however seen Japanese police shutting down a line of blue speaker vans (owned by ultra nationalist groups but manned by off duty Yakuza)

http://farm1.static.flickr.com/33/55505628_4eeb8c151d.jpg

trying to drown out a demonstration by 2nd and 3rd generation Koreans protesting the legal ruling on the comfort women.

Then on the other, you have certain fruits of the Nazi regime, like rocket science, tacitly absorbed and unremarked upon. For a more morally questionable example I’d urge people to look into the origins of the data used by the USAF on the effects of freezing water on the human body for example.

In Japan this latter, it’s there but not talked about, is the prevailing attitude regarding WW2. People are much more aware of what happened in WW2

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/feb/21/japan-excavates-site-human-experiments

than their politicians appear to admit to, but then the post war political direction of Japan was formed by US foreign policy scared that the communists would take over.

There is also a cultural trend of revisiting WW2 as a backdrop to human drama without getting “bogged down” in the “messy” political aspect like Yamato
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0451845/

Oddly enough Ben Aflick said pretty much the same thing when he was in Tokyo for the cinema launch of Pearl Harbour, focus on the human drama more than the events unfolding around the love story.

For every Nazi cosplayer I’ll raise you a WW2 re-enactment group.

Yes the political right is on the rise, all over, but these guys are at the bottom of my worry list.