Absolutely well-said. And I think it's also worth pointing out that while "otaku" has the relatively positive connotations you mention here, it's probably significant to Jenn that "otaku" is NOT a positive term in Japanese. If anything it has negative connotations. It's like any minority part of culture--if someone in America says "Oh, that person plays D&D," the reality is that in the majority of cases, they're saying this in a somewhat derisive way. "Someone who plays D&D" is not the standard kind of a person to be. Now if someone who did play D&D were saying this, they might think it was rather cool. Or if I said it, as someone who didn't play D&D but was sane and rational about it, it would merely be fact. But we are not the actual majority. So American "otaku" culture is taking something that's not only just one piece of Japanese culture and extolling it as the be-all-end-all, we're taking something that would kind of be like if a huge chunk of the nation of China started forming D&D conventions and thinking American culture was really cool for the sole reason that we invented D&D, completely ignoring things we might like them to respect us for like democracy and labor laws.
That said, I think that the lack of context is what's eating Jenn but that she's assigning that lack of context to everyone without truly allowing for the small percentage of exceptions. I think to Jenn, everyone is the kind of Asiaphile that tatoos random kanji on his body because kanji is "cool" without even knowing what the kanji means. Nobody is someone who just rather enjoys manga, thinks Japanese food tastes good, doesn't particularly think that makes Japanese culture cool as a whole, and knows full well about Japanese internment camps (like me). It's true that people like me are a VERY small percentage of the group she's talking about, but even if she said "these are a tiny tiny TINY exception that doesn't really mollify my feelings about the rest of those bastards," her acknowledgment of our existence would have materially strengthened her argument, which is flawed for its lack of recognition of exceptions.
It's easy to make us the bad guys because, as you say far more eloquently than I, in a general sense we are the bad guys because we have all the power. But the thing is, a white person living in Japan would experience almost the same things she's experiencing. Japanese people perform the same actions--wearing T-shirts with horrendous English on them just because English is "cool," feeling extreme curiosity about other cultures without properly knowing the bad parts of their own history (Japanese textbooks lack many facts about the atrocities committed by Japan during WWII), enjoying American movies because Angelina Jolie is hot, etc. So while I think it's partly about the general supremacy of whites all over the globe, it's a more nuanced issue than that--in the context of specific countries sometimes it's more about the "host race," the race that got there first. More Americans should know about Japanese internment. More Japanese people should know about what Japan was doing around the same time. I think we have responsibility as "host cultures"--as members of any culture--to know as much about ourselves as possible when members of a culture non-dominant in our area come along.
It's like how, living in Texas, I should learn more about Mexican culture and America's history with Mexico than I really feel like doing on the average day. That's my responsibility. But if I cross the border and run into someone who thinks hamburgers are cool because they're American, it's not really that different than me thinking a taco is cool because I bastardized it from Mexican culture. It's just when there's a difference in the extent to which each of us can get away with this that things get ugly. Which is a way of saying I agree with your conclusions and think they are quite good.
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branchandroot
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Date: 2006-05-05 02:59 pm (UTC)That said, I think that the lack of context is what's eating Jenn but that she's assigning that lack of context to everyone without truly allowing for the small percentage of exceptions. I think to Jenn, everyone is the kind of Asiaphile that tatoos random kanji on his body because kanji is "cool" without even knowing what the kanji means. Nobody is someone who just rather enjoys manga, thinks Japanese food tastes good, doesn't particularly think that makes Japanese culture cool as a whole, and knows full well about Japanese internment camps (like me). It's true that people like me are a VERY small percentage of the group she's talking about, but even if she said "these are a tiny tiny TINY exception that doesn't really mollify my feelings about the rest of those bastards," her acknowledgment of our existence would have materially strengthened her argument, which is flawed for its lack of recognition of exceptions.
It's easy to make us the bad guys because, as you say far more eloquently than I, in a general sense we are the bad guys because we have all the power. But the thing is, a white person living in Japan would experience almost the same things she's experiencing. Japanese people perform the same actions--wearing T-shirts with horrendous English on them just because English is "cool," feeling extreme curiosity about other cultures without properly knowing the bad parts of their own history (Japanese textbooks lack many facts about the atrocities committed by Japan during WWII), enjoying American movies because Angelina Jolie is hot, etc. So while I think it's partly about the general supremacy of whites all over the globe, it's a more nuanced issue than that--in the context of specific countries sometimes it's more about the "host race," the race that got there first. More Americans should know about Japanese internment. More Japanese people should know about what Japan was doing around the same time. I think we have responsibility as "host cultures"--as members of any culture--to know as much about ourselves as possible when members of a culture non-dominant in our area come along.
It's like how, living in Texas, I should learn more about Mexican culture and America's history with Mexico than I really feel like doing on the average day. That's my responsibility. But if I cross the border and run into someone who thinks hamburgers are cool because they're American, it's not really that different than me thinking a taco is cool because I bastardized it from Mexican culture. It's just when there's a difference in the extent to which each of us can get away with this that things get ugly. Which is a way of saying I agree with your conclusions and think they are quite good.