Cultural Sensitivity: US, Japan, and Korea
Neither Japan nor Korea is particularly well known for its cultural sensitivity. While Americans have been growing increasingly neurotic in their attempts to be appropriately sensitive, Japan and Korea haven’t shown nearly as much concern. I’m not accusing the Japanese or Koreans of being any more racist than we are; I’m just saying they haven’t experienced as much anxiety about it as a society.
Consider the recently closed Yokohama Curry Museum, a museum/restaurant where the staff served up steaming bowls of curry while dressed in turbans and saris. You could even get your picture taken as an Indian couple:
(Pictures originally nabbed from Gaijin Tonic.) Can you imagine a place like this operating in the US? It would make most Americans (including me) very uncomfortable. Why? It can’t be just because it’s ethnically themed. We haven't dismissed ethnic themes from the US entirely. St. Patrick’s Day, Oktoberfest, and Highland Games are celebrated widely and without anxiety. What’s the difference? Why is it OK to dress up as a Scot but not an Indian? It seems that in the US the only cultures that can be treated as costumes are those which aren’t currently discriminated against and those which have completely assimilated into white American culture. The Irish dancers, kilt-wearers, and bagpipe players are celebrating certain aspects of a culture that they most likely never really identified with, at least not enough to ever really feel like an outsider. They’re not hyphenated Americans anymore and they haven’t been for a long-ass time. No one is ever targeted because they’re Irish, Scottish, or German. No one can tell who’s Irish, Scottish, or German.
Much of our anxiety obviously comes from our deeply racist past. Blackface, born in the USA, has been socially unacceptable here for more than half a century. Not so in Japan and Korea. You’ve probably heard of the ganguro trend of the late 90s in Japan. The most defining characteristic of a ganguro girl was her super deep fake tan. Ganguro apparently translates as “blackface†but the girls were supposedly emulating (white and blonde) California girls. Check out the photographic evidence for yourself.
They say that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery but something tells me most Americans don't quite see blackface that way. Take the Gospe*Rats for example:
Or the Bubble Sisters from Korea. The band consists of four girls who (for a popular 2003 album) painted themselves black, wore afro wigs, and called themselves Nanda, Bluesy, Spicy, and Sleepy.
Of course, blackface is not the same in Japan and Korea as it was here. They have had very different relationships with people of African descent than we have. They seem to be both mocking and idolizing black culture, but they don't have much actual experience with real live black people. Everything is interpreted through media. American pop culture has exported the notion that black people are really frickin' cool. Combine that adoration with images like these from a middle school textbook used in Korea in the 1990s:
Is it all that surprising that we see some completely bizarre interpretations? (See more textbook images at Scribblings of a Metropolitician.)
2007-07-03 12:27:24 UTC