A member of the far-right National Party of Japan waves the Rising Sun Flag outside the Olympic athletes’ village in Tokyo on July 16, 2021, in protest to a message hung outside South Korean athletes’ rooms that some Japanese accuse of being overly political and anti-Japanese. (Yonhap)
SEOUL, May 12 (Korea Bizwire) — A video advertisement that talks about Japan’s “swastika” flag will air on YouTube, a project spearheaded by Seo Kyoung-duk, a South Korean professor at Sungshin Women’s University in Seoul.
Seo spent personal funds to respond to the Japanese Foreign Ministry’s recent video that claims Japan’s Rising Sun Flag doesn’t allude to any imperialistic or militaristic connotations.
Last year, the ministry posted a video on YouTube titled “Rising Sun Flag as Japanese Longstanding Culture” offered in Korean, English and Chinese.
Seo’s two-minute video was first released in 2018 in Korean and English during the 2018 FIFA World Cup.
Now, a Japanese version of the video has been released, along with Japanese subtitles.
The video explains how Japan’s Rising Sun Flag has symbolic connotations equivalent to the Nazi “Hakenkreuz,” the use of which has been banned in Germany.
The video also mentions that, when the Rising Sun Flag appeared during the 2017 Asian Football Confederation (AFC) Champions League, the AFC ordered the Japanese soccer team to pay a fine of US$15,000.
“The Rising Sun Flag video produced by the Japanese Foreign Ministry leaves out the core of the problem that the flag was used in World War II,” Seo noted.
“The Japanese government is basically trying to deny its war crimes.”
H. M. Kang (hmkang@koreabizwire.com)
