Twenty years after the last British skinhead tired of the joke, it's still not
unusual to see a Hong Kong teen in an Adolph Hitler European Tour t-shirt.
And whether it be a karaoke den with photos of Germans executing prisoners (a
strange choice of decoration, admittedly), a fashion store decorated with
swastikas, a TV station describing its ad breaks as "the final solution" or a
coffee shop picking Hitler for its daily quote, German wartime symbolism is
never far from the editor's outrage button.
Yet somehow, Akasi's efforts have slipped below the radar. It's hard to imagine
how this could be, since Hong Kong 7-11's are apparently full of penniless
gweilos looking for love these days, and from our experience, at least some of
them are likely to be journalists.
More importantly, the magazine pulled out all the stops to ensure someone would
be offended: They've put the girl on the front and back covers, dressed her in
death's heads, seig-heiling on a swastika backdrop. And just in case anybody
missed the connection between the uniform, the tank the swastika and the
jackbooted nipple tweaking love interest, the magazine even has a centrespread
article about Guderian's life and works.
Guderian is often credited as an architect of the Blitzkrieg and a vocal
proponent of the destruction of Warsaw. He rose to become Hitler's army chief
of staff before conveniently falling out with him a few days before the war
ended.
As Guderian has been dead for fifty years, getting him to pose for Akasi would
have proved difficult. But the magazine found a cunning way around that little
difficulty: They popped down to the shops and bought a plastic replica.
And they did the same thing with the tank.
With poses like this, it's hard to imagine Asak's
publishers were not aiming to offend |
But we're digressing. If it was news notoriety Akasi was after, something went
badly awry. The directors of the Calvin Group, which publishes Akasi, must be
kicking themselves over the acres of scandalised newsprint they've failed to
inspire. This cynical attempt at media manipulation should have generated a
maelstrom of outraged Sunday front pages and inside page follow-ups.
But it hasn't. All they've managed to do so far is inspire this one solitary
Web report. How could they have so misjudged the media?
It could be that the strip is simply too silly to horrify anyone. Anyone who
can pose a topless babe alongside an Action Man with a moustache must surely
possess a sense of humour. And you'd have to be either a satirist or a very
disturbed tank nerd to think of Photoshopping topless triplets into a Tamiya
Tiger tank.
Or it could just be that the girl is just too cute to cause offence.
At the time of going to press, Asian Sex Gazette had been unsuccessful
in contacting Akasi, so we have no informed opinion on the publisher's
motives. All we can offer is speculation.
We also noted that the printer's name is Flying Wind. If that's not
significant, we don't know what is.
