HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA
no
Printable View
I would not consider myself a Japanophile. :/
I like anime, though I recently just came out of a one month hiatus. I also like manga and am in love with CLAMP (though I need to read more of their stuff). I like J-music, most of my favourite singers are part Japanese (e.g. Angela Aki, Stephanie and Utada Hikaru). The culture is very interesting.
As a student my area of studies is religions, though my interest lies more in Japanese religious practises/beliefs. I both studying the language and have taken many classes on Japanese and East Asian culture, I find it interesting. I want to go to Japan some day too.
I really like the Heian Period. It is like <3.
This thread makes me want to go watch Lost in Translation.
I don't mind people being enthusiastic about a culture or a country, so long as they don't go from mere enthusiasm into irrational mania. After all, I'm a big fan of medieval China, though you'd never know it to look at me and I don't spend hours gushing about it.
The wee>aboos who really annoy me aren't the ones who insist that Japan is teh best countray EVAR - though they're bad enough. No, the really irksome ones are the kind who insist that everywhere else, especially the west, is teh total sux0r in comparison.
A pet peeve example would be "knight versus samurai" threads that crop up now and then. I've studied and trained western martial arts, and have a reasonable understanding of feudal martial culture in all its forms. So it really bugs me when a clueless Japanophile starts frothing about how knights were stupid filthy Christians who had no training and no skill and just wore armour and bashed at their enemies widly until they died - while Samurai were all unsurpassed warriors who trained for decades and had unbeatable sword skills and KATANAS THAT CAN CUT STEEL. Ugh.
Being ignorant is one thing.
Condemning something because you're ignorant of it is something else entirely.
Two, and I've visited 3, and I agree 100%, despite not living in USA
My family was planning a 4 day trip to Tokyo, Japan, and I constantly attempted to veto the idea from the start. Eventually they figured it wouldn't be cost effective. I was elated and told everybody.
Guess what the average EoFFer had to say about a person saying 'Yay I don't need to go to Japan!!!!111one' ? Yep, what you're thinking of right now even if you've heard me say it before.
I don't like Japan as a country. It is openly Jingoistic, racist, xenophobic, and it completely messed up my sexual preferences thanks to a total lack of .. well let's just move on. The point is that I don't find anything extremely amazing from Japan. If I honestly thought about it, these are my conclusions/opinions; they are backed by and agreed upon several of my more artistic friends who have various levels of {azneeabooism | azn != japanese } --
- Anime is terrible when it comes to actual animation. If you disagree, actually WATCH a typical, new anime and compare it to say, Wall-E. And even if you aren't bothering to do that and are about type, seethingly, something like 'baka PG watashi wa sugoi weeaboo no otaku', I'll just elucidate my point:
Anime doesn't have good animation, despite seemingly based on that term. I think the word Anime just sounds cool and hip/trendy, so people start telling each other it's amazing like how everybody tells Keanu Reeves he can act. If you actually sat down and watched an anime you'll find some 90% of it, no exaggeration is a static panel or a scrolling panel and people animated -- poorly floundering about in the front. Actual combat / action sequences insult the audience by just scrolling the background around (for car animes) furiously while nothing happens on the foreground, or (for the ubiquitous ninja/pirate/karate anime) you see people punching the cameraman if they are attacking, and people blocking ghost arms if they are defending. Really, watch Naruto/One Piece/Dragonball Z/Trigun/Pokemon/Digimon/Ninjaman/Another Shonen anime man and tell me I'm wrong.
So anime isn't very animated. You read volumes and volumes of manga then, right?
- The art style is wholly subjective and not in the 'PG is a nihilist so anything including killing him is only subjectively meaningful' type of way. I mean it seriously when I say that I find French storytelling to be fascinating and I can find just as much entertainment from virtually every country on the planet that isn't Canada, since Canadian media sucks.
- Even if I did manage to pick up enough Japanese to communicate about as well as I would in say, Chinese (a laugh in itself), I would still be shunned by most Japanese people because I'm not Japanese.
I don't particularly feel impressed when Americans (ie Occidental people) are able to speak Japanese or can talk to me in quasi Japanese (watashi wa pg no baka desu; hai; honto? honto -_-') since people from Japan would not be equally impressed as your other Occidental wapanese friends might be.
Sorry, but it's the same as going to France and trying to speak French, and realizing they pretend to be nice only to mess with you, or my half-German friend who visited Germany and realized quickly that they're all meanyfaces there if you aren't from the country.
If there's one reason to go to Japan it's to actually see the high amount of technology there. I also marvel at the slowly obvious fact that eventually Japan will be the technology capital of the world, and perhaps may defeat USA as say, the discoverer of the cure for Cancer or what-have-you. But why spend thousands of dollars to go there when I can see all that in Youtube?
So that's why I'm actually happy that I don't have to visit that country. If you want to go, have at it.
I've never been all, "omfgJAPAN!!" Partly cause I grew up listening to my Grandpa tell me about the brutal and horrific Japanese occupation of Korea.
I'd love to visit Japan one day, but I probably wouldn't want to live there. Japanese food is wonderful though. I could totally go for some shrimp tempura and udon right now.
If I had to live in Japan I'd probably eat nothing but miso soup and just waste away. Or, you know, eat something that isn't Japanese.
The culture is, uhm, pretty. I like it. The language is also pretty and fun to speak, though I certainly don't have the patience to learn it.