Japanese Celebrity tries her luck in Korea, is driven away by anti-Japanese sentiment

Former Miss Japan Kanto, Megumi Kanto, traveled to South Korea in 2004 in an attempt to become a big celebrity there. She has since returned to Japan, and her experience can be summed up by the title of her new book, “I was hated by Korea”. Apparently a few things she wrote really angered Korean fans:

Her problems, she says, all started with a “misunderstanding” over something she wrote about kimchi, the Korean national dish of pickled cabbage and other vegetables. The offending comment was printed in her own column, titled “Kankoku Tsushin (Korean Correspondence),” which was carried in a Japanese tabloid.

“I wrote, ‘Japanese people refrain from eating kimchi from three days before they return home because the smell easily remains in their bodies.’ That seems to have been interpreted as a slight, that kimchi smells bad,” Kaneko says.

Another perceived insult was her printed comment that “there are many ‘plastic-surgery beauties’ in South Korea.”

Both comments were picked up by a Web site of a major South Korean newspaper, and reaction from readers was fast and extremely furious.

In a single day, more than 20,000 angry comments flooded the site.

Kaneko was the subject of all manner of barbs, from being accused of being a porn actress to a prime example herself of the wonders of plastic surgery. Some of the readers even threatened to attack her physically should they ever spot her in the street.

While the popularity of plastic surgery in South Korea and the effect kimchi has on body odor are well-established facts, when a Japanese person says them it is clearly an insult to Korea. It didn’t help that her “insults” came at a time when South Korea was in the midst of a ridiculous anti-Japanese frenzy over the Dokdo / Takeshima issue.

The porn actress accusation is an interesting one. When looking for additional information on this topic, I googled Megumi Kaneko’s name in Japanese. Sure enough, one of the results was an adult video (not work safe). But is the Megumi Kaneko in the adult movie the same person?

Here we have the 2 Megumi’s side-by-side. Maybe it’s just me, but they don’t appear to be the same person. I also find it highly questionable that somebody who won the Miss Nippon Kanto tournament would be making low budget amateur porn films. I’m guessing that a few over zealous Korean netizens ran a google search, and upon seeing that somebody with the same name had starred in a porn film, declared an innocent celebrity to be an adult film actress. (Because no two people in Japan have the same name, obviously.)

Anyway, read the full story over at Occidentalism.