this post was submitted on 19 Dec 2023
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chapotraphouse
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I didn’t divest myself of my weeb side until I was an adult and I can say from personal experience that weebs don’t know shit about Japan or Japanese history. I remember learning about imperial Japan, Japanese warcrimes, and the current issues Japan has with xenophobia/racism and bringing up some of this to a weeb who studied abroad for a year and they were so resistant to it. I wasn’t even that harsh, I just assumed if you spent a year there a lot of the japanophile shine of Japan would fade.
It’s more sad because even a cursory glance of reading people’s experiences in Japan, especially migrants from non-western countries, makes it crystal clear.
Its not as if those issues are not portrayed in media either. The disgruntled salary men, the bored/hopeless teenagers, the anxiety about confessing/starting a love relationship, how every foreigner is reduced to a stereotype often as a gag for plausible deniability and of course the dozens(?) of times we've seen JP otakus in anime being portrayed either negatively or as creepy, also the whole NEET issue where the victim blames society and they're mocked for it for being a loser etc.
My point is you have to be a certain type of weeb, that consumes only the most mainstream and samey genres like action/adventure etc to not have noticed at least some of these.
I picked up that Japan was a horrible place to live when I got older and realized wait a second this whole taking the last train home trope is a bit too common for my liking. That and a dozen other things but yeah.
To be fair I absolutely love the burger gun country blow everything up and scream stereotype they give to americans.
Insult america more please.
I read this line in a southern twang
”I love Japanese culture” is a super common thing to say on , but there's no way they know anything about ”Japanese culture” beyond cartoons and video games. Even funnier are the people who want to move there and don't know the whole system is extremely xenophobic.
I always feel "I love Japan they're so efficient and clean" is some type of coded phrase for peeps that just want to live in a monoculture/monoethnic dystopia, as it has the same fash vibes as saying Mussolini made the trains run on time. Like we could have bullet trains and cleaner cities too, just take the police budgets and give them to sanitation workers and set up incentivized recycle bins like in Germany that give out coins for putting in bottles and such
It's extra hilarious because outside of "I like your cartoons and video games" there's a sense of them looking down on Japanese culture. Sure, maybe some of the smarter ones will recognize them as their fellow global north bourgeoisie. But it seems like a lot of them, even the biggest weebs see them as still "inferior brown people", but can be second in command because they amuse the WASPs. Some older CHUDs seem to have this dynamic with Israel. They're bad because they're not Christian, but they have the honor of being second bananas to the white man because Israel's Islamophobia amuses them.
Exactly. It's not an appreciation for a culture or a country. It's fetishisation they can project their own weird values onto.
This was my experience as well. It was an awkward moment when I studied Japanese in college and everyone else was there for anime reasons. The exchange students were kinda weirded out by the weebs.