“Happy Nothing Special Day!,” proclaimed Disney Japan’s social media guy on August 9.
Wait, August 9th? Isn’t that the – (*checks calendar*) – oh, right! The 70th anniversary of the atomic bombing of Nagasaki, which apparently Disney thinks is, you know, NBD, you guys.
Here’s another seemingly innocent, relentlessly upbeat tweet that reads, “Come on, Spring!” On, uh… let’s see here… March 11. Better known as the fourth anniversary of the East Japan earthquake and nuclear disaster of 2011.
This one, from August 6 and featuring a happily prancing Olaf from Frozen, is captioned (roughly translated), “Our sympathies for those suffering in today’s summer heat.” August 6 also happens to be the anniversary of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. A clever and obviously pretty miffed user replied, “The epicenter of the bomb was around 6,000 degrees, you idiots” – only a few thousand degrees hotter than the sick burn said user administered unto Disney Japan’s social media manager.
A lot of Japanese users seem to think this points to some kind of conspiracy or purposeful attempt to piss off the Japanese public, pointing out that Disney Japan’s twitter feed is mostly filled with promotional stuff and the only time these chirpy, feel-good tweets seem to come out is on the anniversaries of various tragedies. Some go so far as to proclaim Disney Japan’s social media manager must be a Japanese fluent foreigner with a chip on his/her shoulder. This scenario seems unlikely, since the tweets are in native Japanese and, knowing Japanese companies (even Japanese branches of foreign ones), there’s almost certainly an approval process for anything the company releases to the public, even something as mundane as a tweet.
More likely a combination of laziness, combined with the dreary existence of the typical Japanese office worker resulting in a lot of people being generally unaware of what year it is, let alone what day, is to blame for these foul-ups; although, it must be noted, Disney has only officially removed and apologized for one of the offending tweets.
