Kansai-ben: On TV Kimura Kaela's Xylish CM

Recently, I've been seeing this CM (commercial) by Kimura Kaela advertising some chewing gum. Not only was I confused by the sculpture she seem wrapped up with, I was surprised to hear her blurting out a pretty bad impression of a kansai-been speaker (or what I would assume is an impression of someone who speaks Kansai-ben).

I didn't think much of it, and even thought the end of the 15 sec version was cute (where she says "Kaela-chan, naku dee" which means "I'll cry.." in reference to you, the viewer, not buying the product), but when I looked up the video on youtube, I was completely surprised by the number of complaints by kansai-ben speakers.

First, you should take a look at the video yourself:

The biggest complaint I read in the comments was the mysterious phallic structure (at some point referred to as an alien) wrapped around her body. People also seemed to think that the way she was speaking was to make fun of people from Kansai.

I have to admit that it's pretty strange to see a commercial using Kansai-ben since Kansai-ben is usually reserved for local programs, but I never felt like she was making fun of kansai-ben speakers until I read the comments from other Kansai people. Then, when I read comments from people from Kanto, I could understand some of the frustration since Kanto people called the offended Kansai people narrow-minded.

As for me, I'm still not sure, what do you guys think? If this case occurred in the USA, I don't think anyone would be offended (if it were a gent from the deep South speaking with a heavy country accent). Though if he were being embraced by from phallic statue, we might have a problem with that.