Free cultural association

[wombat_socho]

I have a number of Asian blogs in my "Occasionals" subfolder of the blogosphere bookmarks, and this post by Muninn (via Far Outliers)reminded me of an amusing moment from the 2005 Anime Detour planning cycle.

During one of the meetings, one of the staff was going on about the need for cultural programming at the convention and made the mistake of saying "We need to make an effort to make more people aware of Asian culture."

At which point danae, who had been, like the rest of us, glazed like an old-fashioned doughnut up to that point, looked up, growled "Which Asian culture?" and brought down the house.

Yeah, that whole unified Asian culture thing got a bad name during the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere Era, and I think it's going to take a while to smooth that over no matter how popular anime, manga, and Japanese video games are.

Comments

[kawaii-shoujo.livejournal.com]

I think a lot of non-Asian Americans lump all Asians together. I lost count of how many times I was at Little Tokyo at Southdale and someone would stop, say they didn't want Chinese food and walk away. Hello. The name of the fast food place is Little Tokyo, not Little Beijing! Of course, it's not real Japanese food anyway, but it's definitely not Chinese. A friend of mine is married to a Hmong woman. He told me sometimes she gets frustrated and says, "Are we all Chinese?"

[wombat-socho.livejournal.com]

It does seem to work that way, doesn't it? I'm sort of familiar with this from the Hispanic perspective (a dozen or so nations divided by our common language and religion ^^) but it's not so understandable with Asians since there's quite a wide variety in appearance and language if you pay even a slight amount of attention.

[433.livejournal.com]

Heh, like tonight on "Inked", this girl came in and said she wanted to get "the Asian symbol for happiness". Jackass.

[wombat-socho.livejournal.com]

Too many morons and not enough bullets.