I was with you up until the last bit. Isn't it the superficiality and lack of concern that makes these "misappropriations"? When someone does their homework and has a thorough understanding of the connotations and associations of a phrase or design from a foreign culture, we simply call that "appropriation"; whether it's harmful or not is a more abstract discussion of power dynamics, Orientalism, and what-not.
In the specific example of the Japanese, they wrote polished Classical Chinese for several centuries before attempting to use characters to record their own language. (Even then, they used them for their phonetic values, so the form of appropriation was much different.) Eventually they did coin many thousands of neologisms--just as English has with Greek and Latin roots--but their novelty has been obscured by the subsequent adoption of many of these by Chinese-speakers. (Cf. the importation of Western technological terms into Modern Greek.)
In other words, there's a completely different dynamic to that relationship. You know what I think should give these young appropriators pause? The Chinese and Japanese themselves don't get character tattoos. Given the highly-developed Japanese tradition of tattooing, that's really saying something!
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momijizukamori
no subject
Date: 2007-07-06 06:42 pm (UTC)In the specific example of the Japanese, they wrote polished Classical Chinese for several centuries before attempting to use characters to record their own language. (Even then, they used them for their phonetic values, so the form of appropriation was much different.) Eventually they did coin many thousands of neologisms--just as English has with Greek and Latin roots--but their novelty has been obscured by the subsequent adoption of many of these by Chinese-speakers. (Cf. the importation of Western technological terms into Modern Greek.)
In other words, there's a completely different dynamic to that relationship. You know what I think should give these young appropriators pause? The Chinese and Japanese themselves don't get character tattoos. Given the highly-developed Japanese tradition of tattooing, that's really saying something!