09-05-2004, 11:25 AM
morgorath Wrote:I think you are mixing two points... I can see how people who begin watching anime want to learn more about the Japanese culture (i.e. the language) but become lustful after Asian women... I think that comes from the movie, magazine, and TV industry. Face it unlike other races (White, Black, Hispanic, what have you) Asians get put into three types of roles. Above Average Computer Geek who can solve things most people get sick thinking about. A store owner of rare and foreign objects that change the whole story. Finally beautiful women who want to please and are submissive. Honestly tell me the last time you saw an ugly Asian women (between 16 to 30) on TV, in magazines, or TV.
I am not mixing two points. When I say asian fetish, I don't mean lusting after asian women, I'm talking about lusting after anything asian, period. Japanese culture is neither glamorous nor even sane. Their hierarchical institutions, insistence on patriachical society where age governs over intelligence, their racism, their attraction to tradition over change (which bites them in the ass continuously) and their prejudism towards women. Weird shit where they have to have seperate train cars for women, because they get fondled on the way to and from work or their (continual) prominent elitism that just about every surrounding culture hates (especially Korea).
Any normal person I've talked to that I've told them about this found this to be rather sickening. However, my theory is that many anime watchers don't want to believe that the people who make their favorite shows could possibly be fallable. When I hear anime fans talk about Japan, I don't think of this wonderous culture, but a culture with just as many problems as any other, most of which rooted in years and years of tradition that their unyielding patriarchical leaders will not change from.
I really don't understand it at all. It's as if people don't even want to know that these problems exist. As if the traditional American anime loser doesn't want to believe that were he to go to Japan, he would be shunned not only because he's an Otaku to them (worth shunning by the Japanese people), but because he ISN'T Japanese. A lot of people I've spoken with won't believe that could be true.