Published on August 16, 2019.
This article introduces Masayuki Takayama’s column in Shukan Shincho, comparing a Norwegian Braathens airline commercial that mocked Japanese people with The Asahi Shimbun’s response to the Dolce & Gabbana commercial controversy involving China.
It criticizes The Asahi Shimbun’s double standard: tolerating contempt toward Japanese people while treating expressions concerning Chinese people as “discrimination,” and questions why the logic of accepting “how foreigners see reality” is applied only to Japan.

August 16, 2019.
Why not turn that warm gaze toward the Japanese once in a while?
I am sure that all of Masayuki Takayama’s readers would agree with my assessment that he is the one and only journalist in the postwar world.
He continues to write the famous column that adorns the closing pages of Shukan Shincho.
As I have already written, I subscribe to Shukan Shincho every week in order to read his column.
The following is his superb essay published in this week’s issue, released today.
Dolce & Gabbana is right.
Braathens, one of Norway’s major airlines, made a television commercial.
The title was “Japanese.”
A stewardess served a Japanese passenger lefse, a dessert popular in Northern Europe.
One may think of it as a thin bread with butter cream inside.
The Japanese passenger mistook it for an oshibori, opened the bread, and wiped his face with it.
Cream was smeared all over his face.
Derisive laughter spread among the surrounding passengers.
The same passenger boarded Braathens again.
When the stewardess offered him an oshibori, he refused with a gesture meaning “I am full.”
It made fun of Japanese people as people who cannot speak proper English and cannot distinguish between sweets and an oshibori.
This commercial was very well received in Norway and was entered in the commercial category of the International Advertising Festival held in Cannes.
Representatives of major advertising agencies around the world, including Mr. Tanaka of Dentsu, judged it, and everyone laughed loudly at the commercial.
By unanimous decision, meaning including Mr. Tanaka, they awarded it the Gold Prize.
Behind the stereotyping, slander, or mockery of an ethnic group, there is always insidious discrimination and prejudice.
The Norwegians who made the commercial also have, somewhere in their hearts, a white sense of superiority and contempt for yellow people.
There was wickedness in the laughter.
Mr. Tanaka should have warned the judges about that point.
He should also have pointed out that the premise that Japanese people are unfamiliar with oshibori was wrong.
That is because oshibori is an excellent Japanese culture.
At a time when Norwegians were still eating things with their hands and wiping their hands and mouths on tablecloths, Japan Airlines, making its debut on international routes, first introduced oshibori into its service.
The world was astonished by that refreshing sensation, and every airline competed to introduce it.
I think it took quite some time before Braathens, flying in the periphery, came to know oshibori.
When they first touched it, they must have been shocked.
That is probably why they came up with such a commercial.
However, there is a deeply rooted racial-discrimination consciousness.
They came up with the premise that “barbaric Japanese people still do not know oshibori.”
The Norwegians were simply far too ignorant, and at the same time, far too contemptuous toward Japanese people.
However, Mr. Tanaka did not point this out.
He is one of those who returned to Japan after living abroad as a child.
He speaks English, and perhaps he has a consciousness that he has surpassed the Japanese and is almost a quasi-white person, and therefore he flattered white people and imitated their behavior.
This story appeared in The Asahi Shimbun.
Under the headline “Are These Japanese an Insult or Reality?” the article briefly reported that there was a scene in which “Japanese people involved angrily said it was strange,” but the rest was entirely occupied by the opposite view.
It had the representative of a certain advertising agency say, “There are many Japanese who act in groups overseas or take photographs without regard for their surroundings.
They should accept it as a fact reflected in the eyes of foreigners.”
Even though it was a pack of lies and went too far in its contempt for Japanese people, it had the ACC, the All Japan Radio & Television Commercial Confederation, say that “commercials that humorously take up other national characteristics are not rare overseas.”
It said that stereotyping other races and making them objects of ridicule is “the trend of the world.”
Asahi concludes that Japanese people should not get angry even if they are mocked.
The Italian ultra-luxury brand Dolce & Gabbana released a commercial in which a Shina woman eats pizza with chopsticks.
Unlike the Braathens commercial, there was nothing unnatural about it.
However, the Shina people became angry.
When they protested to Stefano Gabbana, he responded, “Shina people are ignorant, smelly, filthy mafia.”
This too is understandable.
They make children defecate in the middle of Ginza.
In the Shina apartment complex in Kawaguchi, garbage is thrown out of windows.
If three Shina people enter a restaurant, the inside becomes like the area beneath the JR elevated tracks.
The fact that Dolce & Gabbana depicted quiet Shina people who merely smile can rather be taken as favorable.
I had fully expected Asahi to say, “Shina people should honestly accept it as a fact reflected in the eyes of foreigners.”
But it was completely different.
It even organized a special feature in the culture section, sided with the Shina people by calling it “a discriminatory expression far removed from reality,” and fully supported them, saying they were “naturally furious.”
Why not turn that warm gaze toward the Japanese once in a while?