Swastikas and Flowers

BNK48, the Thai sister group of the Japanese idol factory AKB48, showed up to rehearsal in swastika T-shirts. Arms raised. Someone filmed it. It went everywhere.

The strange part isn’t that they wore them. It’s that they didn’t understand what they’d done. Pichayapa Natha, the group’s lead, posted an apology in halting English: Everything that happened is completely my fault. I should know much more about the world. There’s something genuinely sad about that sentence. She’s asking the internet how to become a better girl because someone in the system made a choice without thinking it through.

Her manager took her to the Israeli embassy in Bangkok the next day. They brought flowers. An apology was accepted. The story ended.

This keeps happening in Asia. A Thai restaurant got caught last year with a Hitler portrait hanging in a guest room. The swastika in the East is ancient—Buddhist, Hindu—it exists in a completely different context. But the internet has made context irrelevant. You can’t have symbols local to your culture anymore. Everything gets swallowed into one global meaning the moment someone films it.

What stays with me is how young Pichayapa looked in the apology, and how confused. Like she’d been told she’d done something terrible but not why, and she was doing her best to apologize for it anyway.