PSA Because I've Got Some New Followers
Do *NOT* use broken Japanese with me, EVER.
I welcome RPers who play with me in actual Japanese, as long as you're fluent, and not using Google Translate, which is a joke in the polyglot comm for good reason.
I am Japanese American.
I'm actually New First Gen. This is the only reason I speak Japanese.
Speaking Japanese, only if it was your ancestral tongue, was made ILLEGAL in WWII during the Concentration Camps ALL Japanese Americans, even children, were put into. If you were NOT Japanese, it was 100% legal. Not to mention, you'd be wanted and paid handsomely by the military.
This is why most Japanese Americans don't speak a word of Japanese. It was STOLEN from my American-raised community members.
I have faced up to and including PHYSICAL VIOLENCE by everyone from classmates to TEACHERS to PARTNERS for speaking Japanese. The most recent blatant attack on Japanese speaking specifically, a whole coffee house including a group of people whowere holding a group of "how to help immigrants during trump regime" GANGED UP ON AND SCREAMED AT me and a friend of mine for BEING IMMIGRANTS AND SPEAKING OUR NATIVE LANGUAGE in SoCal.
Not to mention xenophobic violence, along with queerphobic violence, happens to me daily where I live, everything from threats, to slurs, to physical, and right now, we're in quarantine,and I am barricaded in my dingy shoebox of an apartment afraid to even go outside for air.
Not to mention co-workers love to do everything from 'joke' about me "speaking Asian" to throw Burmese and Thai speakers at me to help because of their racism.
When you"decorate your boring human default English with weird, exotic Japanese," you SPIT UPON the violence and other racism and xenophobia I face DAILY. You SPIT UPON that our language was stolen from much of my community.
This is much of the argument against cultural appropriation in general. See approptiation of Native American cultures, which are also treated as if "all the same."
It fills me with absolute rage.
So for both of our sakes, at least don't do it when speaking to me, although ideally, you wouldn't do it at all.
Consider this my Golden Rule, to not do this. Any "my fetishisation/appropriation" as well as "stealing from Japanese artists on Pixiv" those are hard, HARD limits for me, and trying to sell them as "love/respect/appreciation" is as overused to Asians by non-Asians as "once upon a time" in fairy tales, and is a red flag the size of a Canadian province.
It's 2020, and you can bet your boots I see the fandom not lighting up to protest Covid violence against Asians. I see absolutely no one concerned about gentrification since the 1940s, long before anyone else experienced it, killing off Asian American communities.
Now we deal with remaining businesses folding as people don't shop but take day trips to Asian neighbourhoods to beat us up for Covid.
I also see every one of you not giving a hoot about the protests being today's excuse to completely trash those communities facing both decades of gentrification and now Covid violence.
I see your behaviour towards us. I see that you really would rip off our skin and wear it if you could. I see that you just want to "capture and own" an Asian, any Asian will do because Asianness is our only trait. I also see you validating this by asking some guy that has never lived anywhere but Nara his entire life and has no idea what's going on, and then use that to silence us.
I see the behaviour of 98% of fandoms that say they "LoVe AnD ReSpEcT uwu" and no you don't. Racism is systemic abuse, and abusers are not welcome here.
