Asian Junkie Asian pop. Without discretion.
A couple days ago I highlighted Sulli posting support for the comfort woman day and the ridiculously misguided backlash she got for it from Japanese netizens. So you can already gather how I feel about that issue, and thus it was disappointing when ‘Produce 48‘ contestant Shiroma Miru was accused of unfollowing Sulli as a result of that post.
Basically, the evidence cited is that Miru follows many Korean celebrities, and Sulli was among them.
However, when they checked after Sulli’s comfort woman post, they noticed that Miru unfollowed.
So basically netizens are saying that Sulli’s post about comfort women upset Miru enough that she unfollowed her. If true, that would be a horrendous look and would deserve her trying to explain it or just apologizing. Either way, it would dog her in Korea, understandably.
Of course, like many of these issues with ‘PD48’ contestants, it’s not quite that simple. As you’ll note in the picture evidence provided, Sulli has 312 posts on Instagram at the time it was shown that Miru definitely followed her, but her comfort woman post was post 391. Miru has definitely unfollowed her at some point, but when Sulli had 312 posts it was approximately around July 2. Fans of Miru are using this gap of almost a couple months to say the unfollowing could’ve happened at any point. Sorta makes sense.
That wasn’t nearly the end of the saga, though. Netizens supposedly found evidence that Miru was following Sulli as recently as August 13 in Korea, which would certainly be damning evidence that Miru unfollowed Sulli because of the comfort woman support.
Of course, the problem is the picture of who Miru is following doesn’t provide us with any context about when that was from exactly. While not conclusive, it still certainly wasn’t looking good for Miru.
It was at this point that things kicked into overdrive, with Miru fans going into crazy detective mode. One fan recently laid out a defense on the issue, using posts by others to show that Miru stopped following Sulli before the comfort woman post. They cite a post on August 7 that documented Miru’s follow list and make note of the fact that Sulli was not included in it as far back as a week prior. They also cite another post on August 10, which does the same thing as the other post and also does not show her following Sulli. Additionally, they say that it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense that Miru has loved Korea all this time, but she just figured that now would be the ideal moment to expose her right-wing sympathies. While I don’t buy the logic on its own, in conjunction with everything else it seems like the most convincing case made thus far.
Given that neither side has 100% proof of when exactly Miru unfollowed Sulli, unless anybody can provide a retort against the latest defense of Miru, it seems hasty to cancel her, much less label her a comfort woman denier and right-winger.
