Japanese social media users quickly spotted the error.
The 2018 Winter Olympic Games are due to be held in PyeongChang, South Korea, early next year. Understandably, they are already somewhat controversial, because of the increasing tensions with North Korea, which lies not far above where the Games will be held.
But this week, the Games have become the subject of a different controversy after the event’s organizers published a map on their website that inconveniently didn’t feature neighboring Japan.
This error caught the attention of Japanese social media users, many of whom questioned whether it was a deliberate snub.
The map has since been corrected, but only after the Japan Sports Agency demanded a correction from the Korean Embassy in Tokyo, agency official Masahide Katsumata told the Associated Press. The PyeongChang organizing committee told the news agency that the omission of Japan was a “simple mistake” caused by changes in image files for the website.
Innocent mistake or not, the timing was awkward. Earlier this month, North Korea had warned that Japan “should be sunken into the sea” with a nuclear bomb — an increasingly ominous threat, as Pyongyang has fired two missiles over Japan in the past two months.
