by STEVE HAN
Oftentimes, any public figure wearing the symbol of the infamous Rising Sun flag will infuriate Koreans as they have argued for decades that the symbol, which represents the imperial Japanese army during its colonization of East Asia, should be banned for the same reason Nazi Germany’s swastika is banned in many parts of the world.
Pritz, a relatively unknown K-pop girl group, certainly didn’t help Korea’s cause when the quartet performed while wearing red armbands with a symbol inside a white circle that looked strikingly similar to the swastika.
Pictures of Pritz’s performance, many of which soon became available on the Internet, drew negative comments on social media with many netizens calling the group’s wardrobe offensive and insensitive. Although the group’s name Pritz is a bizarre acronym for Pretty Rangers In Terrible Zone, some have gone so far as to say that the name may be associated to Fritz X, a glide bomb used by Nazi Germany during World War II.
Pandagram, the band’s agency, dismissed the symbol’s link to the swastika on Thursday, saying that the was inspired by traffic signs for speed limits. An official said that “the thought never occurred” to the agency before the controversy and that the shape of the symbol’s arrows simply refer to Pritz’s ambitions “to expand without a limit in four directions,” according to Korea Realtime.
As the negative comments have made way to Pandagram’s official website, the agency has since reportedly made its message board viewable only for registered users and is now considering changing the said logo.
Photo courtesy of Kotaku
