In January, Harry Harris replied that his grooming was a matter of personal choice.
Seoul, South Korea:
South Korea’s most controversial mustache has fallen victim to the razor blade, with US Ambassador Harry Harris visiting a traditional barber shop months after his facial hair came under unusual criticism.
Seoul and Washington are security allies, and the United States has 28,500 troops stationed in the country.
But their relationship has been strained in recent years by differences in their approaches to North Korea and by cost-sharing responsibilities.
Harris has been the subject of controversy in the South on several occasions and accused of authority. Even his facial hair has become a subject of debate.
The envoy’s mother was Japanese, and with Koreans still deeply angered at the 1910-45 colonization of the peninsula by Tokyo in 1910-45, commentators have claimed that the mustache hinted at the fashions of the imperial governors general of the time.
In January, Harris replied that his grooming was a matter of personal choice and that his critics were “cherry picking.”
But over the weekend, he uploaded a video to social media of himself having his mustache shaved at a traditional Korean barbershop, claiming he did it to keep cool for a while. Seoul summer, while wearing a mask to fight the coronavirus pandemic.
“Glad I did that,” the envoy said in a tweet.
“For me, it was either keeping the stain or losing the mask. Summer in Seoul is way too hot and humid for both. The #COVID guidelines matter and I’m a masked man!”
Seoul and Tokyo are both major allies of the United States, democracies and market economies in the face of a dominant China and a nuclear-weaponized North Korea, but are locked in bitter disputes over historical issues. .
Earlier this year, Harris said, “I understand the historic animosity that exists between the two countries, but I am not the Japanese American Ambassador to Korea, I am the American Ambassador to Korea.
“And to take that story and put it on me just because a birth accident, I think, is a mistake.”
(Except for the title, this story was not edited by GalacticGaming staff and is posted from a syndicated feed.)
