TWICE & Dahyun targeted by Japanese right-wingers over shirt supporting comfort women

After the BTS mess, Japanese right-wingers have apparently found their next target in TWICE, as former Hokkaido prefecture assembly group member from the LDP Onodera Masaru called out Dahyun on Twitter for wearing a Marymond shirt, which is a brand that assists comfort women (sexual slavery victims of Imperial Japan during World War 2).

Uh … okay.

“BTS, who wore a atomic bomb t-shirt, will not be appearing on NHK’s ‘Kōhaku Uta Gassen.’ Though this is good news, there was also a piece of bad news that was conveyed. I found that TWICE member Dahyun was wearing a ‘comfort woman t-shirt.’ The sales from this t-shirt are being used to fund the inappropriate activities of Korean comfort women. NHK is allowing the participation of this anti-Japanese activist in ‘Kōhaku Uta Gassen.’”

Yikes.

To give you an idea of this guy’s beliefs, he questioned whether the Ainu people (from his Hokkaido prefecture) are indigenous to Japan with aim on reversing their status and looking to disenfranchise them.

On 11 November 2014, Hokkaido prefectural legislator Onodera Masaru, the same lawmaker who had ordered a massive financial audit of AAH in 2009, tweeted that the question of whether Ainu can actually be recognized as Indigenous peoples must be revisited, and any funding allocated to Ainu programs or for Ainu welfare likewise must be reevaluated and possibly revoked. During the ensuing months, Onodera elevated his criticism, pulling from archival materials and scholarly records to bolster his case against the AAH. Civil society likewise registered outrage at this denial of Ainu humanity. A broad multiethnic scholar-activist alliance infuriated by this unbridled cyber hate speech and its basis in erroneous historical revisionism coalesced quickly, publishing an anthology rejecting the validity of what they termed the Ainu Minzoku Hitei-ron (“Discourse of Ainu Peoples’ Non-existence”) in February 2015.

Or as one person put it, basically verbal/technical ethnic cleansing and erasure of people who have been in Japan for about 8000 years.

So yeah, guy is a fuckhead.

——

Right now there isn’t much coverage on this outside of select outlets. I’m honestly not sure whether that’s good or bad, because unlike with the atomic bomb shirt, nobody is gonna sympathize with Japanese nationalists on this stuff. Thus, perhaps the story spreading would be a net positive for comfort women as an issue and Marymond as well, which makes what the right-wingers are doing a bit confusing, but I guess if they were logical and reasonable people they wouldn’t be ultra-nationalists to begin with. Either way, hopefully NHK doesn’t feel pressured by this, but would I even be surprised if they caved at this point? No.

Anyway, I know people don’t want TWICE involved in any mess, but even if this issue spreads, I think they’ll have done more good than they’ll get backlash from right-wingers in Japan who would hate them anyway.

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