I'm a way too old otaku who's always been into a lot of underground Japanese subculture shit thanks to learning the language but even I have to be amazed at the sort of shallow orientalism that's going on on imageboards, like cumming at sakura trees, larping as an imperialist or making Japan seem as the last trad ethnostate (it really isn't), or more recently and what prompted me to make this thread, someone posting a picture of their room with a huge ass poster of Tokyo's subway map. Like really? What's the appeal of that? Sure, he might have been a train otaku, but nothing else in the picture indicated that.
To sum it up, fuck orientalism.
Well, Japan is extremely conservative and you could argue it's a sort ethnostate.
>>7764Otaku culture is basically just simping for bishoujos and otakus are anti-feminist right wingers most of the time.
>>7771Japan? Not the oppressed workers of the world? Not imperialism? Not the endless wars fueled by the military-industrial complex?
Alright.
>>7785This, but unironically.
>>7781I think it's funny because Japan's values are the exact opposite of American's ones.
>One of the strictiest gun laws in the world>Nanny state>Not individualist at all>Merit doesn't really matter>Religion is a private matter instead of being shoved down your throat>Public shaming keeps freedom of speech in check>No freedom to criticize the governmentAnd so on, but looks like burgers are willing to trade their "values" in exchange of having less dark skinned individuals around them.
>>7788Oh I can definitely see them saying something like this.
>>7789I'm not a native English speaker so our definition of nanny state might be different. What I meant to say is that life in Japan is very…regulated. You need to put garbage out at a certain hour in a certain place or you might get fined. Metro stations are filled with panels that tell you to turn off your phone near seats for disabled and elderly people, to pay attention to your rucksacks and bags because they might inconvenience others (I've seen one with a tragic drawing of a mother and a kid separated by a man wearing a rucksack) and so on. There are all kinds of bullshit rules and regulations, but of course japanese people don't always follow them despite what right-wingers might tell you about this mythical race of creatures incapable of thinking for themselves.
>>7763Yeah, the Orientalism does suck.
Why do so many youth these days prefer the East though, it must be asked? It's not a bad thing obviously, but it's something to wonder about, is it because the cultural products there are "better", or is it just because of this sort of exoticization of "over there"? Or is this exaggerated all out of proportion because otaku are yet to exit niche subculture even now?>>7786Isn't
DPRK, obviously, Korean easier though? For the most part the written Korean language currently used doesn't have the requirement to memorize a thousand characters like Chinese and Japanese do.
>>7778Call this perhaps Nazbol, but there is something tragic about how Japanese culture has been majorly cucked by modernity and imperialism, sort of like how the Korean used in the DPRK and the southern entity have become at times unintelligible to each other, so some say. That's probably for the better though, that traditional Japanese culture has been demystified to an extent. Anime and similar is cool, nevertheless.
>>7792>>7793You aren't wrong but Japanese do want change, they just don't think things will get better so they opt for stability, in other words, their ideology could be simply summed up as "better the devil you know".
Outside of electoralist bullshit there's absolutely nothing thanks to the failures of badass but retarded past revolutionary movements.
>>7796>but there is something tragic about how Japanese culture has been majorly cucked by modernity and imperialismI mean they wholesale rejected their culture in a feverish drive to modernize themselves as fast as possible during meiji era.
<Nevertheless, after the Meiji Restoration of 1868, governmental policies of modernization and westernization dictated a wholesale rejection of the preceding feudal era. Even the best elements of Edo-period culture were deemed outdated and vulgar and were thought to require prompt and thorough extirpation.<When, for example, a school of fine arts was founded in Tokyo’s Ueno Park during the Meiji period, the Japanese government established a department of Western music but made no provisions for the study of traditional Japanese music. Today hardly anyone would agree with this policy,but it took many years before Japanese traditional music began to be regarded as equal in value to Western music. And it was not until after World War II that Japanese music was made part of the official public school curriculum.
>For the most part the written Korean language currently used doesn't have the requirement to memorize a thousand characters like Chinese and Japanese do.When nips decided to modernize themselves, they faced with the problem of how to standardise and develop their language to better accommodate western concepts and words. They had to create a shitton of words to facilitate translation of western knowledge. But the issue was whether to coin these new words in their native language or Chinese language. Without much debate with the proponents of wago(native vocab), the meiji state basically decided to create new words in kango(chinese words). Their justification was that the native Japanese language is pretty inferior and inefficient to create words. They were also posed with the problem of examining and codifying native word coining procedures, which they didn't wanna bother with. I think this was probably because meiji government was dominated by aristocratic warrior elites from edo who basically had a penchant for Chinese vocab due to their specific kind of education.
In the end, kango wasn't just used to officially coin words, but they replaced a lot of equivalent wago in the process. Obscure kango like "kansha" that not many people used before suddenly became commonly used words thanks to compulsory education. It was basically the era of kangofication of Japanese. Just to be sure, I am not saying kango wasn't used before meiji and I'm not claiming there weren't high class elites or buddhist scholars who were obsessed with kango even before this.
Now the debate surrounding kanji removal is intrinsically tied to how prominent kango vocab is in modern Japanese. Without kanji they can't create new words. Without kanji most of technical vocabulary will become extremely hard to remember even if you exclude commonly used kango.
There were a lot of attempts to create new writing system in Japan but none succeeded(for example,
http://dl.ndl.go.jp/info:ndljp/pid/942751)
Some group translated a western chemistry textbook in pure hiragana as a way to test the word coining power of wago. The book's called monowari no hashigo(ものわりのはしご). But this was like the only instance from meiji era where someone tried to do something with wago.
>>7796>Isn't DPRK, obviously, Korean easier though? For the most part the written Korean language currently used doesn't have the requirement to memorize a thousand characters like Chinese and Japanese do.Obviously it's easier to learn the korean sillabary than chinese characters, but I think Korean is one of the most awful sounding languages in the world.
>>7797They took to extreme the maxim "the road to hell is paved with good intentions" and worship the status quo, no matter how bad it is. Sometimes I wonder if they realize they have the potential to make big changes: after all, they went from feudal to capitalist in a few years.
>>7799>I mean they wholesale rejected their culture in a feverish drive to modernize themselves as fast as possible during meiji era.Another big example of this is the creation of state shinto. Before that shinto and buddhism were so intertwined it was to distinguish what was shinto and what was buddhist, given how many shinto sanctuaries and buddhist temples were built near each other and were supposed to "help" each other. For example, the monks prayed to make the kami residing in the sanctuary attached to their temple to convert it to buddhism.
Then the meiji government made up state shinto, forced the separation of buddhism and shinto and uniformed shinto practices throughout the country, this way countless of actually traditional shinto practises got lost forever.
>>7797>>7800> their ideology could be simply summed up as "better the devil you know".> They took to extreme the maxim "the road to hell is paved with good intentions" and worship the status quo, no matter how bad it is.lol this is literally the Russian attitude that keeps Putin at place
Russians even have the same performative traditionalism
>>7804And how do you think Abe kept winning despite the fact that no one liked the idea of reforming the constitution and the army?
Same thing, they saw no alternatives to Abe and LDP because the opposition is crap and JCP is too scary. Despite his landslide victories, Abe couldn't rewrite the constitution because he didn't want to upset the status quo: people, even his voters, didn't want it.
You can also see this in manga and anime (mostly modern): whenever a character has a conflict with society or with authority, either they end up embracing the status quo and the fact that authorities are often right or they become a villain or suffer from a tragic end.
>>7764I'm the opposite.
God help me.
I didn't know weebs cared about cherry blossoms. They are planted all over the place in my state so I never thought about it.
>>7796Memorizing kanji isn't that bad. Both Japanese and Korean are a pain in the ass to learn because of the grammar more than anything. Chinese is actually considered the easiest of the three because their grammar is fairly straightforward for English speakers.
>>7929I like otaku culture, but more as something to find friends and talk about. If it weren't otaku shit I'm sure I'd be into sports or some kind of western nerd subculture.
Yeah, certainly, the grammar is somewhat difficult at first if it isn't a familiar style, but it can be said with a grammar rule, unlike with kanji, one only has to learn it and few more to use in a fairly large variety of situations, whereas kanji is not as "difficult" to pick up, especially if one has studied similar languages, but requires the quantity learned to be more for it to be of practical use. Otherwise, it's probably correct to say the difficulty of kanji is often overstated.
This post probably came out somewhat incoherently, but basically the grammar is quite fun to learn sometimes, more than kanji, which involves more tedious work.
>>11427Use the existing thread, stop necrobumping.
>>10547 Literally everything in this thread deserving a damn is either posted in the
>>4715 or
>>10489 There is no need for 3 threads discussing the same meta /jp/ topic.
>>11454 I agreed, i won't explain myself further than this comment (because i'm doing algebra homework), but my opinion of this thread is that much of the perspectives people have regarding japan are rooted in hate, ignorance or out of context info (also propaganda), or directly treating the country as a cartoonish stereotype (which is in part, pretty discriminatory), like for example, japanese people hating everyone who is not japanese, as such they don't hate the concept of a foreign people, they in fact appreciate anyone who love japan enough to go to the country, what they don't like, is mostly the attiudes of western people (becaus such attitudes tend to be kinda rude or disgusting from their cultural point of view) and yeah, japan has a lot of social issues, is a flawed nation as any other, but also, it's a nation with positive things, much that most of us doesn't comprehend completely, it's like sinophobia, or ignorance regarding latin americans (i'm a guatemalan indigenous, so i can talk from experience), it is harder when even the media you consume tends to have an incorrect idea of the situation of many nations, because they tend to be really "superficial" and much of the context is just ignored for the sake of keep it simple to the common spectator.
Also, there is a real problem with the west and their weird ideas of eastern nation, europeans and americans want to impose a supremacy over the rest of the world, even the so called "leftist movements" have a biased pro western agenda, in which they want to impose a cultural imperialism "you are not like us, then you are bad", for me, the best way to have an idea of how society works is going to say country and learn more about it, even if it is just for vacations, ask locals, interact with people, read more about different perspectives from people, and if you can't afford it, you should check and do an analysis to the country social medias and see what the locals have to say, don't stick with experience or what others tell you, create your own criteria, because imperialism and white supremacism can also disguise as "socialism" (From my personal experience, I know some Korean, and i'm thinkin about taking japanese classes just to have a full perspective, and who knows, move out to one of those nations)
PS: Sorry if i made some spelling mistakes, i'm also still taking english courses, respect to everyone.
>>14015That was pretty much at the bottom of the paragraph you retard. How much deep content do think I missed?
>Like really? nothing
What's the appeal of that?
nothing
>Sure, he might have been a train otaku, but nothing else in the picture indicated that.Who cares if he's into trains or not.
It's exactly what I said.
>Getting London, Paris, NYC decor for your houseBASED AND TRADITIONAL>Getting Tokyo decorOH MY GOD YOU RICE FEVER MANIAC! Based thread
Listen to this podcast
https://open.spotify.com/episode/4hlZQFuIOX0LJpuScPIEdb?si=NVBF_HahTvyoDzfSnGHHhwA marxist japanese dude debunking orientalist fetishisation of japan and the right
>>14041Some shameful stories, the ones that aren't about creepy or racist fetishization that is, of anime enthusiasts and their antics come off as though they are more silly and sometimes even cute mistakes than indecent crimes against decorum and peace.
Hasn't everyone, at least at one time or another, gotten excessively excited over an interest of theirs? But obviously this practiced forbearance should go in both directions, and otaku should also not get so butthurt over a little criticism of their consoomerism and the hobby's problematic, unsocialistic parts.
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