All our base are belong to Japanese!

[transemacabre]

WTF. Is everyone on lj apart from me taking Japanese language classes? Go browsing through random profiles, I'll guarantee you every second ljer is posting about their Japanese midterm, or the funny thing Mandy-chan said in Japanese class, or learning to say "Make love to me, Sephiroth" in Japanese.

My boyfriend was one of those unfortunate people who thinks that because he's watched a couple of (dubbed) anime, then he "already knows" some Japanese, and wouldn't it be fun if we took a class together? I gave him a very pointed look and told him that he was welcome to take Japanese if he wanted to, but I couldn't be bribed into studying kanji twenty hours a day, trapped in a room with anime freaks. Not that all people who watch anime are freaks, mind you. Just that all anime fans who take Japanese classes are freaks. (The preceding was in jest. No offense is meant to anime freaks, you scary scary bastards).

Besides, Turkish is a WAY cooler language, anyway. Tamam?

Comments

[kali921.livejournal.com]

No way I'm taking Japanese. It's low on the list of languages I want to learn. I already have Russian and French, so I want to learn:

Italian (easy)
Georgian (HARD - SO NOT AN INDO-EUROPEAN LANGUAGE, OKAY?)
Spanish (easy, and why not just go for the Romance Language Trifecta?)
Serbo-Croatian
Hawaiian
Greek
Latin (again)
Finnish (TWENTY SEVEN CASES)
Actually, Hungarian
Turkish/some Turkic Language
Gaelic
German

[transemacabre.livejournal.com]

I just never thought Japanese sounded very good at all. In my opinion, the Chinese syllabary is much more aesthetically pleasing than the Japanese, too.

One of my friends is a native Hawaiian (as in, descendant of Kamehameha). Very cool language, just listening to it is relaxing. I'm all about the languages of the Middle East, though -- I want to learn Turkish (fluently), Farsi, Arabic.

One of my cousins was a teenaged vandal, so he got sent for a summer to one of those reform schools. His roommate was a full-blooded Apache who couldn't or wouldn't speak a word of English. My cousin actually learned Apache from this kid, and twenty years later they're still best friends.

Fullproof scheme for kali to learn Turkish!

1. Go to Turkey and meet sexy Turk
2. ???
3. Profit!

[silverwhistle.livejournal.com]

Agreed. I studied Classics and French at school, and subsequently got into other Romance languages and Russian. I have no interest in learning Japanese, and don't understand the anime/manga obsession that seems to have taken hold of the younger generation (possibly even more so in the US than here).

[transemacabre.livejournal.com]

I never really got into anime and manga, although one of my favorite TV shows of all time (Samurai Champloo) is anime, and I really like the Demon Ororon manga. I've had some bad experiences with anime/manga fans, which further turned me off the genre. I know this is being prejudicial of me.

[silverwhistle.livejournal.com]

I don't know... There has to be something in the idiom that makes them like that.
I like classic Japanese film (I love Kurosawa!), but not the cartoon-y side of things.

Re: the fans, what has struck me online in the past few years is their tendency to import manga/anime tropes into entirely unrelated fandoms, regardless of cultural appropriateness. It was, I think, the source of the problems I had with the group I was slung out of last year - yaoi and hentai concepts, & c.

[transemacabre.livejournal.com]

Some of the cultural imports from anime/manga I could definitely have done without. The most disgusting, to my mind, is the lolicon/shotacon -- sexualized childlike images. Yuck!

I also don't like the misogyny in so much of hentai and manga/anime in general. Japan is a much more patriarchal culture than the West, and boy you can tell. Even "strong" female characters are usually all bark but no bite, or are raped or killed or beaten to remind us where a woman's place is. They're there for eye candy, or to be the Girlfriend for the Hero. Female characters often have an incredibly passive role in the story. There are exceptions to this, of course (and misogyny in Western writing as well) but it's just so BLATANT in Japanese works.

Yaoi doesn't bother me, as such (I quite like slash based off Western works, which is sort of the same thing) but the uke/seme thing needs to DIE. It's just a way of making one character the 'man' and the other the 'woman', one dominant and one submissive. Not exactly revolutionary. It's such a narrow view of sexuality that, unfortunately, has become so widespread.

[silverwhistle.livejournal.com]

Yup, you're right about the misogyny and gender stereotyping; oddly, it seems to go hand-in-hand (in the works aimed at female readers) with feminising male characters.

Also, culturally-specific anime/manga models get imposed on fandoms from entirely different traditions, and on ones involving real historical characters.