I don't really want to get into the whole cultural appropriation or reverse racism thing, but I just want to express my view on this particular argument. For context, I'm a Chinese-born Canadian.SexyTrashCan wrote:Not trying to go off on yo guys but really this makes my blood boil. Any person I've met who is from a different culture (China. Japan, etc) LOVES sharing their culture with people who are white like myself. The only people I see mad about this bs is white people. What exactly are you trying to achieve, I live in Wales and I see people who are English wearing the Welsh flag or using Welsh phrases or calling Welsh a beautiful language, should I yell at them for cultural appropriation and turn them bitter?
All this is is two guys who happen to be white. Sorry, can't fucking help that, who love Japanese culture and I know Japanese people themselves love people loving their culture. You achieve nothing by doing this as an in a way ignorant white person but cause drama. You are not exactly single handedly preserving the culture of Japan.
It's true that lots of people are happy to be sharing their culture, but that's very different than people who aren't of that culture profiting from said culture, especially in a way that can have bad connotations. For myself, I love to talk to people who are interested in Chinese traditions and the country itself. My workplace has a mini-celebration every Chinese New Year, and a lot of us will bring in snacks for everyone or dress up a bit and show off our traditional garb.
If someone who isn't Chinese is interested, I'd gladly show or tell them all about our cities or sights or political atmosphere. If someone tells me they find China really fascinating or they'd love to visit one day, then that's wonderful! However, if that someone decides to make and sell badly-done knock-off qipao or something, I'd be a bit miffed. Just because "Japanese people themselves love people loving their culture", it doesn't mean that it's automatically not possible for cultural appropriation to exist.
Of course, it's a hard line to draw in the sand, because just having a flag or some writing isn't offensive in and of itself (btw, the writing on the dnp stuff is mostly katakana, not kanji). In this case, as jaej said, there's a prevalent weeaboo thing that makes the usage especially iffy.
Personally, if they used Chinese (just for giggles, here's a translation of 'Dan and Phil' that phonically sounds right but means something strange: 蛋和肥鹿. Katakana doesn't really assign meaning to the sounds, but Chinese does--that thing there means 'egg and fat deer') on their shirts and used a background of the Great Wall or something, I wouldn't get up in arms about it, but I wouldn't like it much either.
As I said though, it's a hard line in the sand to draw and I don't really want to get into it, I just find this particular argument very grating.