Speaking of homophobia and sexism and imperial Japanese legacies and only criticizing from a western framework, you all have to be more aware of like, how a ton of homophobia/transphobia in a lot of Northeast Asian countries, especially on the Korean Peninsula, is a result of Japan’s colonialism of Korea and the aftermath of this colonialism. Like, when it comes to analyzing media about and from Japan and its former colonies, I see a ton of folks simply take homophobia/transphobia as granted, but like, homophobia/transphobia is not a natural thing. It’s very much so learned. To talk about what I mean, we have to start with Japan, but I’ll tie it to the earlier discussion afterwards so bear with me here:
To provide some context, Japan and Korea both (also China, to some degree, but that’s outside of my field of expertise) had a more fluid idea about gender and sexuality as recently as late 19th century. It wasn’t until the end of Edo period and Meiji Restoration had Americans and British people swarming to Japan to “educate” the locals (read: also loot cultural artifacts and swindle), and one of the bullshit that was sold was that binary gender and heterosexuality was “modern” and noncis gender and nonheterosexuality was “barbaric.” Pressured with threat of colonialism, Japanese public ended up adopting this stance.
Where does colonialism and its legacies come in? Well, it’s a twofold problem. As for colonialism, as many talked about above, this also got exported when Japan colonized vast amount of lands and people all over Asia. Many noncis/nonohetero expression of gender and sexuality were stamped out when Japan tried to Japanize Korean culture, for instance. Another big thing, and a thing that also bleeds into colonial legacies, is the aftermath of colonialism. America, having wrestled control over Korea from Japan (and the Korean people), allowed western Christian missionaries (who also looted cultural artifacts and even people to send back to America) to swarm Korea, further allowing homophobia and transphobia to really take roots.
When talking about not just anime, but like, this serious issue of homophobia and transphobia in these countries, people (both chuds and well-meaning “progressives”) simply look at it through very western and honestly orientalist racist lenses and assume this was the way it always was, but if you want to fight the legacies of colonialism in media, especially Japanese colonialism, you have to be aware of where homophobia and transphobia came from in these places, because gender as being binary isn’t pre-discursve, transphobia on basis of binary gender isn’t natural, and homophobia is not natural, either. In places like Korea, it certainly is a struggle against Japan’s colonial legacies, one that gets buried because Christians co-opted the nationalist, liberatory narrative almost as soon as Japanese control over Korea was surrendered to USAmerica. Also, as talked about before, even looking at anime critically about these bigotries, yes, this is also a result of attempted western colonialism as well, something that westerners should be aware of rather than criticizing things in a way that reeks of white supremacist world view of Progressive West looking down at the Barbaric Orient with no rights for marginalized when all of this comes from USAmerica and Britain primarily, filtered through Japan to the rest of Northeast Asia.
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