Wednesday, March 21, 2018

Surprisingly Enough, Japan Does More Than Make Anime

The past few days, we've been reading and seeing a lot about Orientalism as it relates to the Middle East and Southern Asia. However, there also exists an Orientalist mindset towards Northeast Asia - China, Korea, and Japan. Of these three countries and their cultures, I consider myself most familiar with Japan. I am in my fourth year of studying the language, recently completed my third exchange program, and have family who are permanent residents there. I am also incredibly familiar with the way Western culture portrays Japan, and its inaccuracy.

If I were to go up to any random person on the street and ask them to think of a word they associate with Japan, at least 7 times out of 10 I would be answered with "anime". The rather recent rise in anime's popularity in the west, and the subsequent development of 'weeaboo' culture, are directly related to the orientalist view of Japan. If you don't know, 'weeaboo' refers to people who consider themselves to be obsessed with anime and Japanese culture despite very often knowing nothing about it. They revere Japanese customs without knowing the true reasoning behind them. While at first it may seem a positive that people are so awed by a foreign culture, the issue arises in the fact that these people tend to pick and choose which parts of culture they want to understand. Japanese culture becomes a drawing hat, from which random aspects of life are snatched and exaggerated to unreal proportions until a totally new, inaccurate, and borderline offensive culture is created. At this point, Japanese culture is no longer being honored but being rewritten by people with no authority to rewrite it.

Another issue, stemming from the popularity of anime, is the fetishization of Japanese women - particularly school girls. There's not much to say about this besides that it is blatant dehumanization and the most base form of Orientalism. It is taking an aspect of Japanese culture and warping it to please a Western audience in a way that blatantly ignores and disrespects its origin. In Japan, the main purpose of school uniforms is to encourage unity and discipline, but in the US I get told that it's "hot" that my exchange student wears a uniform at her home school.

The final aspect I'll be discussing (though certainly not the only other aspect of Japanese Orientalism) is the way the West views Japanese writing. In Japan, there are three scripts that are commonly used for writing. Hiragana - the alphabet for native words, Katakana - the alphabet for foreign words, and Kanji - the ideographic symbols that come to mind for most of us when we think of East Asian writing. They are sometimes seen as mystical and incomprehensible. Though they can be a pain in the butt to learn, the reality is that they are constructed from components with individual meanings to create a sensible image. Other times, they are thought of as outdated and ancient, full of 'Old World Knowledge'. Funny that Westerners point fingers at countries with ideographic writing systems while absorbing a whole dictionary's worth of emoji meanings into their written vocabulary without a second thought. Sometimes, kanji are stripped of their communicative value and simply looked at as pretty and aesthetic (I know you've seen people with foreign language tattoos), which sends the message that Japanese ideas are not meaningful or important in the West - a similar idea to the "squibbly Arabic" mentioned in the article about Homeland. Through disrespect of the written language and perversion of anime and the schoolgirl ideal into Western culture (among many other things), Japan has become a victim of Orientalism.

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