South Korean Starbucks Probe: Arbitrary Power In Justice's Name

The arbitrary use of criminalized memory becomes clearer when one compares another Starbucks Korea marketing misadventure regarding a different historically sacred date. On March 26, 2010, the South Korean naval corvette Cheonan sank, killing 46 sailors. Yet Starbucks Korea on March 26, 2026, launched Dear20, a program for Starbucks Rewards members in their twenties.

If one applies the punitive symbolic logic, a promotion aimed at customers in their twenties on the anniversary of Cheonan might be called offensive because many of the dead sailors were young men. Yet activists did not launch a campaign to punish Starbucks in the name of honoring the victims of March 26, and the police did not start a criminal inquiry.

In South Korea, the enforcement of criminal defamation and insult laws often depends less on consistent principle than on which memory is politically activated, which faction controls the state and media and which target is socially safe to punish.

The pattern is broader than Starbucks and Gwangju. A number of professors have been punished for lectures and scholarship allegedly defaming former comfort women for the Japanese military. After making remarks that some women probably volunteered to become comfort women, a Sunchon National University professor, surnamed Song, was fired and received a six-month prison sentence.

Park Yu-ha, a Sejong University professor and author of Comfort Women of the Empire, was sued, fined 90 million won in civil damages, and criminally prosecuted for defaming former comfort women. Although South Korea's Supreme Court ultimately rejected criminal punishment by treating the disputed passages as academic argument or opinion, Park endured nearly eight years of reputational, financial, and institutional costs, from indictment in 2015 to the Supreme Court ruling in 2023.

Most recently, the American streamer known as Johnny Somali provoked public outrage for repeatedly disrupting public spaces and for kissing and hugging a comfort woman statue. He was sentenced to six months in prison after convictions that included obstruction of business and fabricated sexually explicit content.

A liberal argument against excessive punishment should not minimize real offenses, especially sexual-image crimes. But even contemptible defendants retain rights because rights are not rewards for sympathetic behavior. Criminal law should punish specific proven acts, not satisfy public anger. Deportation, fines, restitution and targeted penalties often serve justice better than symbolic imprisonment designed to reassure the public that the state has defended national honor.