Nazis and cosmetics go well together.

Ads pulled off youtube on April 7, but you can still find them here and here here and here.

Scroll down for updates (latest April 23, 8:00 pm).

Found a couple of commercials for Coreana, a cosmetics company over here. According to some of the scholars on Dave's ESL Cafe, the text in the commercials says something about Hitler's inability to fight a war on both fronts, and relates that to the make-up's strength. Okay, there are no blood flags flying, but nevertheless I'm not sure why Nazi imagery and Hitler references are considered appropriate in 21st-century Korea. Anyway, I finally figured out how to capture and embed them, (update: but they got pulled).

You can watch them where I found them, here and here. They got pulled from Naver on the afternoon of April 7, but for the time being they're available on Daum here and here. And if that doesn't work, you can find them by navering 코리아나히틀러, which is how they're labeled on the Naver blogs I found.

And, welcome visitors from Planet Dave's. You might also be interested in the Nazi mural I found in downtown Gyeongju.

* Update 1: One Free Korea has an excerpt of a letter from the Simon Wissenthal Center to Coreana. I don't recall previous campaigns against Hitler Bars or anti-Semetic comic books having any impact, so we'll see if anything comes of this. Hitler Bars or best-selling comic books were much more prominent targets, and have survived in spite of a little negative publicity in the English-language world, whereas I've never even seen these month-old commercials run on TV, and am not sure a company like Coreana will feel any pinch from Western protests. All about raising awareness, though, and collecting evidence on Korea's bizarre race ideology, which was the whole point of this post anyway.

I'm sure this will all be explained away with a half-hearted apology, and no action will come of it. If the ad executives even understand why what they did was wrong, I'd be very surprised. This is a part of the world very ignorant of world history, and a part of the world that likes Nazis for, among other reasons, their sense of style.

* Update 2: In the German news now, on Netzeitung.de. An excerpt from an article on the protest by the Simon Wiesenthal Center:

Zudem habe man deutlich machen wollen, dass die Creme sowohl im Osten als auch im Westen Erfolg haben werde — was Hitler nicht geschafft habe.

There's also mention on the Simon Wiesenthal Center site here.

* Update 3 (April 4, 22:24): On the front page of CNN.com.

* Update 4 (April 5, 14:30): Coreana wants the ads taken down because they have decided to change the wording from "Hitler . . . " to "Nobody . . . "

* Update 5 (April 5, 19:15): In Belgium.

* Update 6 (April 6, 18:30): Still no mention in the Korean press yet. Not surprising.

Unrelated, but I came across an interesting write-up of one of the Nazi bars from six years ago. An excerpt:

The symbols outside bothered me, though. In a city where businesses adopt seemingly random English words for their businesses (such as CIA bar, CNN bar or Goopy Fried Chicken restaurant) was it inevitable and harmless that a Hitler bar should appear?

I asked my advanced English students what they thought. Many seemed surprised I even thought the bar worth discussing. Its name wasn't for lack of knowledge: according to my student Mey Shin, Koreans were aware that Hitler and his Nazi followers had killed millions of people, Jews in particular. Many Koreans also have seen big Hollywood movies like Schindler's List that might familiarize them with Hitler and his cronies.

An older businessman named Mr. Park, who was registered in my class, explained it to me: Hitler has about as much relevance to modern-day Koreans as the Mongolian warlord Ghengis Khan, or even one of the more recent Korean dictators (Gen. Kim Young Sam has a bar dedicated to him in the same Pusan downtown neighborhood, I later discovered). The images are intended simply as a unique and innovative, if offensive to some, method of attracting customers. In short, there's no such thing as bad publicity.

This conclusion struck me as odd, since many Koreans are still very bitter about their own disastrous colonization experience at the hands of the Japanese Empire from the 1920s to the mid-1940s. The Japanese occupiers attempted to assimilate the Koreans into the empire, used conscripted Korean labor on a mass scale, tortured nationalist leaders, bloodily put down insurrections and turned thousands of Korean women into sex slaves. Some of my students seethed when I mentioned Japan even in passing. At the time the Hitler bar opened, Korean president Kim Dae Jung was leading his country in denunciations of revisionist Japanese history textbooks.

Therefore, the complacency of my students toward the Hitler bar was strange. A suggestion by me that one of them might open an Emperor Hirohito bar was seen as beyond the pale by all of them, who almost universally claimed that there was not a direct parallel.

No direct parallel betweeen Hirohito and Hitler. Shouldn't surprise me that such an opinion is held. I'll find out for myself at the next teachers' workshops. Where's the rolly-eye smiley?

* Update 7 (April 7, 18:00): Ads were pulled from Youtube and Naver today. They're still available on Daum for the time being, and other foreigners in Korea are working on getting them on other sites.

Anyway, please go here and read the excellent summary of what happened a few years ago when a Korean company did an ad campaign with an actress made up to be a comfort woman. The difference in apologies then and now. Actually, there really wasn't an apology in this case. A few years ago, though, the series of apologies involved burning prints, shaving heads, and groveling on the floor in front of former comfort women and the media.

* Update 8 (April 23, 20:00): The Simon Wiesenthal Center said last week that they were "gratified" by Coreana's response in pulling the ads. For those who hadn't seen it, here's an image from the revised commercial that had run for a couple of weeks. Everything was the same, but "Hitler" was replaced with "Nobody":