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Japanese JR Ad: Your opinion please.

Do you find anything inappropriate about this advertisement?

  • I am a NON-Japanese citizen and see nothing wrong with it.

    Votes: 33 66.0%
  • I am a NON-Japanese citizen and see something very wrong with it.

    Votes: 9 18.0%
  • I am a native Japanese citizen and see nothing wrong with it.

    Votes: 6 12.0%
  • I am a native Japanese citizen and see something very wrong with it.

    Votes: 2 4.0%

  • Total voters
    50
I'd like to see the another poster next to the poster you posted here, Welcome to Tohoku or Tono. It is nice if the photo includes both of them.
 
yukio_michael said:
The first thing I thought when I saw that ad, was that plane has no wings...
That is exactly what I thought. My initial reaction was that it was some sort of sick joke. After reading some posts it seems possible that the designers never saw the connection, but I think it's more likely that Frank is right - it is probably an advertising ploy. I will be interested to hear the response to your e-mail Emoni.

btw, I'm not American 😊
 
Email reply

Alright, last night I got an email from JR. I had to think about it a bit before posting on it. I WILL NOT be posting the original email I recieved, as it was a surprisingly candid and honest email. It impressed me to a great deal, and as I know for a fact that this ad was not made on purpose and the response I got, I am going to keep the original email private. You can think whatever you want about this, but I will not be changing my mind. I hope you understand.

I will give a short summary of the reply for the most part. I was quite impressed by the email actually.

After seeing the picture I forwarded in the email and the explaination, they agreed completely that it brought to mind and reminded people of the 9/11 attack, and even admitted that it was clearly a careless mistake and that the main office would be notified. Apparently, it was from the JR office in New York as well.
 
I'm sorry, I'm afraid I don't understand why you have decided not to post the response. Are you saying if the reply had been guarded and dishonest you would have posted it?
Anyway for what it's worth, I saw the connection with 9/11 almost straight away and also felt it was in poor taste. And going back to the original response, I also thought the design team needs a good shake up.
 
Emoni said:
Alright, last night I got an email from JR. I had to think about it a bit before posting on it. I WILL NOT be posting the original email I recieved, as it was a surprisingly candid and honest email. It impressed me to a great deal, and as I know for a fact that this ad was not made on purpose and the response I got, I am going to keep the original email private. You can think whatever you want about this, but I will not be changing my mind. I hope you understand.
I will give a short summary of the reply for the most part. I was quite impressed by the email actually.
After seeing the picture I forwarded in the email and the explaination, they agreed completely that it brought to mind and reminded people of the 9/11 attack, and even admitted that it was clearly a careless mistake and that the main office would be notified. Apparently, it was from the JR office in New York as well.
Thank you for sharing. I guess :?
 
I've read the entire e-mail. It's not much longer than the summary emoni posted, and that's pretty much exactly what it said. Emoni said that due to the impressive candidness of the response, he would not want the message to be traced back to that individual somehow and get them in trouble. I'm not so sure that it would be traceable, or that the person would care (any e-mail sent on the behalf of the company to a customer should be public record). But that's his perogative.

I have to admit, I was also impressed by the "real" response; my friends who sent in e-mails in Japanese received canned responses to the effect of "Thanks for your inquiry, we'll get back to you on that."
 
I actually just got yet another email from JR, this one from the main JR office. This one explained that the ad was a mistake, and said that they would be removing all of the posters this month. They said that they did not have the intention of reminding someone of 9/11 and applogized and thanked me for letting them know about the situation, twice.

Talk about a customer service center... Not only did the NY reply back with a nice email. The main office in Japan took their time to do all of this, then reply personal back again from their own office about the issue all typed by a HUMAN BEING. No auto computer responses.. I've never seen customer service this serious, even in during the time I've been in Japan.

Thought I would post this as well. Yes, the reason Nice Gaijin explained is the reason I did not post the original emails. For a company to have service like this and put so much effort, I want to keep the actual emails private.
 
glad that you are happy, but seems to me that your reason for not posting would be an even better reason to post! Praise them by putting them on display, but...to each his own.
 
I'm a very firm believer in treating even the most innocuous e-mail correspondence with the greatest of confidentiality, unless I have either asked permission to share or have mentioned that I intended to make public any reply I receive.

While I can't imagine any possible negative repercussions to JR or anyone associated with JR from making public the content of the mail, I find it damned refreshing and admirable that Emoni is keeping them (largely) confidential.
 
Misa.j said:
I think the ad is offensive and extremely wrong.

Fortunately, and in all due respect, Japan isnt here to cater to the over-sensitive "insulted" foreigners.

You choose to see 9/11 where there is a flying train flying quite forward of the buildings which dont look like giant huge rectangular blocks in the sky
And you choose to find the harmless image of a flying train with the coincedental Japanese landmark in the background to stir up national pride in the sense "if your true japanese you'll use this train" or "use this train to see famous japanese places" as an unforgivable stab at the victims of 9/11, or even just a stab at your fragile ego, who knows.

The point is that in the long term, an actual image of a plane smashing into two huge american sky-scrapers makes me think of 9/11 more then a train "flying" past a japanese building, in the background, call me wierd.

nice gaijin said:
The images of those planes flying into the WTC have been engrained in the memories of those unfortunate enough to be in front of a TV to witness the events live or in the countless replays thereafter.

I saw the second strike live, I felt the emotion and tension and chaos as a tangible energy through the screen.

It still looks like a flying train infront of a building to me.

I guess I can see how it could look like it with a bit of imagination, but when I return to reality its still just a flying train infront of a background building again.


Its nice to see JR cared enough to respond personally, its all to easy to just disregard random complaints as over-sensitivity, and they say Japanese dislike foreigners, they obviously love you enough to want you to continue spending yen for train tickets. 😊
 
I think it's a funny design but it doesn't offend me and I really don't see why it would be defending unless you just stare at it for hours on end and put that opinion in to be offending.

And I live in NJ and saw the actual damage of the WTC from my town's beach the day it happened, as well as see the WTC site after the whole matter. But...I still didn't find it offensive, I mean sure I thought for a second of how the buildings were similar but I didn't think twice about the train, especially seeing as how it's flying in front of it.
 
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ow dear that could be very sad for many people i don't think they intended to upset ayone with it

I guess it looked great in there head but didn't turn out so well

The design would be bad though without the obvious

I think the design is acsidental but shocking it took me a few secods to work out what they had done

I think to people in Japan they prob wouldn't even think of it

But to people in the west that strikes a chord

and even worse it strikes two chords if your a brit twin towers for the Americans trains for the Brits and the people of Madrid

Very very bad design
 
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