Recently, HYBE girl group ILLIT released a brand film for their upcoming comeback. In this video, the members discussed their respective dreams.
As the girl group consists of both Korean and Japanese members, the video uses both Korean and Japanese narration, alongside matching subtitles directly hard-subbed into it.
This, however, irked a lot of Korean netizens, who complained that the use of Japanese for a K-pop girl group is too much, especially when Korea and Japan have a complicated history. Some also pointed out that there are many other groups with Japanese members, but would only use narrations and subtitles in Korean and at most, English.
Below are some comments from netizens:
- Our nation was once invaded by Japan and was forced to conform to the Japanese, so tension between Japan and Korea is still high, and yet they pulled a move like this?
- Many other groups have Japanese members, but I never see them put Japanese openly into group videos. Seems like this is a HYBE thing
- They could have put the Japanese subtitles in the CC captions, but decided to hard-subbed it into the video instead, what the hell?
- Why must it be Japanese… This just won’t fair well in Korea
- It’s always HYBE… Do they want to appeal to Japan so badly?
On the other hand, another HYBE girl group, LE SSERAFIM, was also previously criticized for integrating Japanese elements into one of their videos.
Source: theqoo
