it never fails to amuse me that every orient has its own orient. i stumble onto chinese or japanese media that treats india & the middle east the way the US and europe treat china and japan and i just think of edward said and smile
It's probably not a coincidence that these regions also function as religious centers of the world for the culture doing the Orientalizing: the Levant as the Promised Land of Abrahamic religions, India as the birthplace of Buddhism for China and Japan. It's almost like the act of assigning these places an intense spiritual importance had the side effect of marking them as somehow Other, defining them through whatever past accomplishments the revering culture valued rather than through its present day activity.
said actually digs deep into this phenomenon as it plays out with christian europe and the levant in Orientalism but i think it's really sharp to observe that japan and china are applying the same techniques to buddhism (and buddhism coming to japan through china probably explains some of the chinese orientalism you see in japanese media as well.) once a place is Orientalized people start ignoring its present-day life as a matter of course, and it becomes that much easier to forget the reality of