The Orientalism thread and what's happened to Renko in response has been really discouraging to see, and has also crystallized and made me reflect on some of my own feelings as a mixed white/Korean trans woman.
I have my own complicated relationship with and feelings about Japanese otaku media. I've had to reckon with the uncritical weeaboo I was in my teens through my early 20s as I've matured and more fully grappled with my own racial/cultural identity. I've had to sort through my feelings in the wake of my family history, wherein my Grandma (who I love and miss dearly) had her cultural identity ripped from her by the japanese occupation, and a closer knowledge of the deep-seated national trauma of Korea and many other nations perpetrated at the hands of imperialist Japan. I've had to grapple with my discomfort with otaku culture, which is shot through with a misogyny that harms women in Japan and outside of it, and the fact that I was raised by asian women especially harmed by this kind of misogyny. And I've had to grapple with my discomfort about Japan's own culture of racism, and how this can rear its ugly head in anime/manga embraced by the white mainstream.
And it's frustrating and alienating to see so many white people, including white queer people and white trans women, have an obsessive and uncritical relationship with Japan and Otaku media, holding it up as empowering when I often view it as the opposite. It's frustrating to see progressive white people (American and not) with no investment in this not bring any kind of critical lens to their engagement. It's frustrating to see white people act as if Japan is a sort of fantasy land in a way that's unrealistic and fetishistic towards people in Japan and the surrounding region.
I'm not trying to call anybody out here or say "don't engage with Japanese media" (because yes, I do engage with and enjoy Japanese media myself). And I often just don't talk about this because I don't want to accidentally make anybody feel bad. But goddamn this feels bad sometimes
This post covers a lot of my own feelings as well. I grew up with horror stories from my grandparents about the Japanese occupation of Taiwan and how kids were beaten and had their tongues stabbed with scissors if they spoke local dialects of Taiwanese and Hakka instead of Japanese. They told stories about how they couldn't fight back because they didn't have guns, only dynamite, so they would strap bombs to themselves and wait in the marshes for Japanese vehicles.
My grandmother, before she passed, showed me multiple scars and the mutilation done to her body by the Japanese teachers.
I do not know where to begin regarding the destruction and enslavement of my country and the lasting damage I still see today. There are museums everywhere in our countryside that depict the history of the exploitation of our resources. My hometown is named by the Japanese.
Taiwan's culture is, and has always been, a mixture of Hong Kong, Japan, and Korea (along with SEA). You can see the generational shift as time goes on--Hong Kong falls and we run from it, the kids are becoming more and more Korean-like whereas my parents and my generation held Japan up as the paragon of cultural achievement.
Times change. It's best we don't forget our history.
putting aside the fact that the original conversation was pointedly not about people engaging with japanese media but about non-japanese independent video game developers arbitrarility setting their games in japan/using japanese in their game titles, its wild (and honestly evil) that ive had someone on here literally try to whitesplain me about japanese imperialism as an excuse to justify their uncritical desire to appropriate japanese culture lol...

