Every nation longs to be an empire. Every culture has tried to force itself on the unwilling at one point or another. What is the statute of limitations on imperialism? Are there varying legally distinct degrees, like with murder versus manslaughter, and murder one versus murder two? Who among us shall pass judgement, when everyone is guilty if you only go back far enough? And who is in a position to carry out the sentence, but another empire in its own right?
And more importantly, who among us can ask rhetorical questions? :)
I think “Japan” as a nation and culture got off lightly; the emperor was retained, as was the flag and other symbolism. Because it’s an island nation, the borders remained unchanged besides the loss of overseas colonies, which European empires also lost shortly afterwards anyway.
But the opposition to cultural appropriation that spawned this thread is mostly coming from young Japanese-Americans, not older Japanese nationals, and is driven by American/Western political concerns in the first place, which leads to an amusing clusterfuck of intersecting memes; for example:
- The idea that only “pure” Japanese people can ever wear a kimono, which sounds awfully like something you would hear in the 1930s.
- The idea that wearing a kimono will offend Japanese people, when in practice it’s more likely to offend Chinese people as a reminder of Japanese imperialism!
- Referring to Japan in the context of decolonisation, when Japan was an actual colonising nation and was never occupied by Western nations until after WWII.
- Many Japanese people teach classes in traditional arts of tea ceremonies, flower arranging, and the rest. I’m sure they would be absolutely thrilled if all their customers stayed away for fear of appropriating their culture.
Anyway, activists gonna act; it could be worse.
As someone with, hm, let’s say historical ties to both Britain and Japan, I, for one, welcome their defense of the Britain of the East.
Just kidding, this is probably going to get me in trouble.
Actually I’d like the kimono industry to stay afloat as its customer base has been shrinking, and that means selling to nerds in America. They want to do it. The Japanese who live in Japan think it’s okay. First-generation immigrants think it’s okay. And if anyone owns the cultural rights to Japanese culture, then surely it must be Japanese people who live in Japan.
I mean heck, look at all the stuff they deliberately export to us! The government WANTS to export Japanese culture in order to gain soft power! (And more shitpostfully, importing exported Japanese culture is a long-standing European cultural tradition going back hundreds of years.)
A number (though not all) of the people criticizing are not only not Japanese born in Japan, not nisei born of first-generation Japanese immigrants in America, they are other kinds of Asians by ancestry, some of them mixed, or else just plain old White People™.
And, like, the Japanese would likely actually object to the idea that the Koreans, the Chinese, and the Vietnamese own the cultural rights to Japanese culture. That is probably like seven different flavors of problematic.
Probably this relates to how Japan became the Default Asian Culture in the eyes of the West, which… in some ways it kinda was before, but also China could have become that in this century if it didn’t go Communist.
Anyhow, these dust-ups are really about racial and ethnic identity in America. It’s true that people still make fun of Asians, because children are cruel and commit status war and looks are easy to attack. Also, having a sanctioned monopoly on some kind of foreign culture is important to have power under identity politics, like the legitimacy of royalty.
However, it’s also possible that if the rate of mixture increased, eventually people would forget their lineages, much like Italians and Irish forgot who they “were” and became “white.” The question is whether the visual difference is an insurmountable barrier. If I were the Republican Party, I’d be asking myself if there were some way I could cause this forgetting of lineage on purpose.