This was the article chosen: http://thisisnotjapan.tumblr.com/post/67341539294/it-doesnt-make-sense-to-me-we-have-people-come-over. It's not actually an article, but it's still closely related to the topic.
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To the administrators of thisisnotjapan,
I just recently read this, and with all honesty I have to say that it hurt like a kick in the stomach. The last few years of my life I've been into anime and the Japanese language has been something that has always come along with it, so sometimes between friends we would sometimes use random Japanese words. Since I've never actually had the opportunity to make friends with a Japanese person, I had never actually thought about how the use of the language like that could have been offensive. It's so stuck in my head that for a moment I was about to write "sorry" in Japanese.
It's true that we often use the language the language because we think it's cool, or simply different and we want to identify ourselves with it, but it's not like we ever meant it in a bad way. You probably get this a lot, but we have absolutely nothing against your culture, and if anything we admire Japanese culture and kinda wish that we were more immersed in it. Said in that way, it sounds like we hate our own culture. But that's not the case. In this globalized world we live in it's become way too easy to get to know things about other cultures, and when something looks or sounds interesting we sometimes decide to try to incorporate it into our daily lives, that's just the truth of it.
I'm not going to say that everyone who tries to incorporate other cultures into their lives are the same, but at least I tend to always strive to reference other cultures or languages in the appropriate way. Even though right now I do not have the opportunity to do so, I would like to learn Japanese in the future, so I think that using a few random words in my normal speech might actually help me get used to the language so that when I actually learn it it becomes easier. I am aware that even though the Japanese phonemes might be similar to Spanish there are certain aspects regarding the pitch of the voice that make it more complicated than it seems.
I won't go into too many details because I'd probably make a lot of mistakes; but as I said before, I always strive to truly understand the significance of things in other cultures before I incorporate them in my daily life, so that I make sure that I'm not misusing anything. So to close up I'd like to leave you with a question: Do you think that if we try to fully understand another culture and then "appropriate" it (while respecting it), then it would still be considered a "negative" cultural appropriation?
Sincerely,
Carlos Páez
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