Wearing a mask in South Korea’s summer heat prompted the American ambassador to South Korea to get rid of a signature part of his look, his mustache, The New York Times reports.
The facial hair had survived about two years of pushback from South Koreans, who viewed the mustache as a painful reminder of the style worn by colonial Japanese governors who ruled Korea from 1910 to 1945.
Harry B. Harris Jr. said he grew the mustache for his retirement as a Navy admiral and never meant any disrespect by the style of it.
But it wasn’t the pushback he received that led to its disappearance. He said he opted for a clean shave amid the rising summer temperatures.
“For some people, they can wear a mask and have a mustache or a beard. But for me, it’s just uncomfortable in this heat, and I have to wear a mask,” Harris said in a video posted on Saturday by the U.S. Embassy.
The video shows Harris bumping elbows with a barber before he sat down for his new look.
Draped in pink towels, Harris rolled his eyes to comic effect as the barber reclined his black leather seat backward and brought the razor to his face.
“Glad I did this. For me, it was either keep the ‘stache or lose the mask,” Harris tweeted on Saturday. "Summer in Seoul is way too hot & humid for both. #COVID guidelines matter & I'm a masked man!"
Harris, who was born in Japan to a Japanese mother and an American Navy officer, became ambassador to South Korea in 2018.
Once he got to South Korea, he was questioned about his mustache. Some South Koreans thought the look was meant as an insult.
In 2019, a group of people protesting the cost of hosting U.S. troops in South Korea held placards with Photoshopped cat whiskers on his face.
In an interview with The Korea Times in December, Harris said his look was not intended to be political. He said after serving in the Navy for nearly four decades, which required him to be mostly clean-shaven, he could finally change his look in his role as a diplomat.
“I’m American ambassador to Korea, not the Japanese-American ambassador to Korea,” he said at the time, adding he wouldn’t remove the facial hair in order to improve his relationship with South Koreans.
“You would have to convince me that somehow the mustache is viewed in a way that hurts our relationship,” he said.
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