The week is off to a great start for corporations, between this and the Korean Starbucks problem.
The activewear brand Lululemon has apologised after a promotional event held on the Great Wall of China appeared to mistakenly feature a Japanese drum, prompting an uproar.
The Canadian-headquartered company, known for its upmarket yoga leggings, has been growing rapidly in China and arranged for a yoga festival to take place in late May on a section of the wall near Beijing.
More than 2,000 people were invited to take part in the event, which was advertised as promoting Chinese culture and wellness, according to the Chinese state-run tabloid Global Times, with the well-known Chinese actor Zhu Yilong was booked to perform. Starbucks Korea to temporarily shut all stores for history lesson after bungled coffee promotion Read more
Zhu joined a drum group on the Great Wall for what was described as a traditional Chinese drum performance and posted a picture of himself in front of one of the instruments, which had the Lululemon logo on it, on his account on Weibo, one of China’s largest social media platforms.
Weibo users accused the group of using a Japanese taiko instrument rather than a Chinese dagu drum. Many described this as inappropriate and insulting, according to the Global Times. Drum discussions had gathered more than 50m views on Weibo by Monday, and Zhu’s studio called on Lululemon to respond to the controversy.
The name Lululemon was literally chosen because the founder wanted to laugh at Japanese people trying to pronounce it, so this is not surprising in the slightest.
Should have thrown an “r” in there too to really confuse them, as it’s literally impossible to differentiate between L and R in Japanese writing.
Isn’t the issue more that Hiragana and Katakana just don’t have kana for the letter L? So Lululemon would be something like ルルレモン (ru-ru-re-mo-n)? I don’t know Kanji, so that might be wrong, but at least as far as hiragana and katakana go its less ‘can’t differentiate’ between the two, and more ‘theres literally no L’.
They have Ra Ri Ru Re Ro landing somewhere between the western L and R, basically being both (and neither) at once. So lululemon and rururemon would both be written, and pronounced, exactly the same in Japanese, though different people would say it differently as which one you sound more like is regional.
Kinda like in Swedish, you have öäå and the famous sentence I åa ä e ö, å i öa ä e å :“In the river there is an island, and on the island there is a river.” You can’t write that using the English alphabet, because a, å and ä would all just be “a”, just like in Japanese, La and Ra are both ラ.