Admiration of a black hat

I've noticed some grumbling that this ad is kind of racist. Can you see why?



Okay, we all know that, for starters, this should not be a minute long. But fine, they shoot ads long at first so they can be chopped into various 30-second installments later; whatever. The meat of the problem, of course, is the cavalcade of Japanese stereotypes, from the horde of cameras to the big yellow font on the TV screen to the slightly fractured English over the New Era logo at the end, which doesn't seem to have been terribly necessary.

Here's what seems to be even more of the problem, to me - does this show how authentic the hat is? The extreme difference of the Japanese culture makes it seem more like they're easily confused; that may not have been the point, but wouldn't it have been a lot more effective to set the ad in Boston and have a group of Red Sox fans in a bar getting confused? It conveys the message a lot better, I think, and has the added advantage of not looking like it's making fun of the Japanese. "Look how stupid the Japanese are - they will mistake literally anyone in a Red Sox cap for David Ortiz! Those silly Asians and their judgment of people based on hats!"

Or here's another way this ad could have been funnier - have David Ortiz and a random guy in a Red Sox hat walking through an airport, and the guy in the hat gets mobbed while Ortiz passes through unnoticed. (You could even potentially repeat the hat-getting-knocked-off gag, with the crowd perhaps having its spell broken and realizing who the real Ortiz is, followed by Ortiz dashing in the other direction to escape the horde.) And then everyone in the crowd could pull out their cameras, take a turn at Dance Dance Revolution, eat some sushi, and finally commit seppuku. Japan! It's so wacky!