I really can't comment on the prom dress example. Not only do I have very little knowledge of Chinese culture, as mentioned above, but I also have very little knowledge of the prom tradition, so my antennae are doubly wonky. Maybe wearing a yukata to a prom would indeed be different from wearing one on the streets of London, but I can't say whether or why.
Not that I've done either: I've only worn my yukata in Japan. I doubt I'd wear it anywhere except at a specifically Japanese festival or cultural event, those being the kinds of occasions it's usual to wear one, and of course those are thin on the ground in Britain.
It's a good point about the diaspora, though. Do Japanese people in Britain, or British people of Japanese descent, get mocked for wearing yukata? I doubt it's a big problem, because of the limited and very Japanese-heavy occasions when it's likely to be worn (as mentioned above), but of course I can't say that never happens. The Japanese people I know don't seem inhibited by any such consideration, but that's a narrow base. Racism certainly exists.
There is also definitely an element of white privilege around language. I get praised for knowing Japanese by both Europeans and Japanese people in a way that I'm pretty sure Japanese people don't get praised for knowing English. (See too the way bilingualism in schools is lauded when the second language is a European one, but often ignored when it's Indian or African.) In Japan the dynamic would be different, but the imbalance would remain. Japanese people often feel they "ought" to know English - not least because of learning it at school - whereas an English person knowing Japanese gets only kudos.
That's an interesting point about writers adopting foreign names in which to write in English. But would it be less problematic if they were in Japan, writing manga in Japanese, and adopting a Japanese pen name - much as Lafcadio Hearn became Koizumi Yakumo (not that he wrote in Japanese, as far as I know)? Or indeed as foreign sumo wrestlers adopt Japanese names professionally?
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Date: 2018-05-04 08:27 pm (UTC)I really can't comment on the prom dress example. Not only do I have very little knowledge of Chinese culture, as mentioned above, but I also have very little knowledge of the prom tradition, so my antennae are doubly wonky. Maybe wearing a yukata to a prom would indeed be different from wearing one on the streets of London, but I can't say whether or why.
Not that I've done either: I've only worn my yukata in Japan. I doubt I'd wear it anywhere except at a specifically Japanese festival or cultural event, those being the kinds of occasions it's usual to wear one, and of course those are thin on the ground in Britain.
It's a good point about the diaspora, though. Do Japanese people in Britain, or British people of Japanese descent, get mocked for wearing yukata? I doubt it's a big problem, because of the limited and very Japanese-heavy occasions when it's likely to be worn (as mentioned above), but of course I can't say that never happens. The Japanese people I know don't seem inhibited by any such consideration, but that's a narrow base. Racism certainly exists.
There is also definitely an element of white privilege around language. I get praised for knowing Japanese by both Europeans and Japanese people in a way that I'm pretty sure Japanese people don't get praised for knowing English. (See too the way bilingualism in schools is lauded when the second language is a European one, but often ignored when it's Indian or African.) In Japan the dynamic would be different, but the imbalance would remain. Japanese people often feel they "ought" to know English - not least because of learning it at school - whereas an English person knowing Japanese gets only kudos.
That's an interesting point about writers adopting foreign names in which to write in English. But would it be less problematic if they were in Japan, writing manga in Japanese, and adopting a Japanese pen name - much as Lafcadio Hearn became Koizumi Yakumo (not that he wrote in Japanese, as far as I know)? Or indeed as foreign sumo wrestlers adopt Japanese names professionally?