Oriental Occidentalism

[Albicacore]

It's no secret the East loves the West. Chinese parents force their children to learn to play the piano not the guzheng. 

Chinese international students have told me if I go to China I will get pussy over 9000 times and people will want pictures with me because I'm white. 


(Jumpscare warning!!!)

This is what Shanghaiers think. But who cares about China? What do the Japanese think?



They like white men, not surprising. Let's get to the interesting stuff. 



America has had a huge influence on Japan since 1945. This is pretty common knowledge. 


(Japanese Rockabillies. Far cooler than the contemporary American ones (Latina dykes))

America wasn't Japan's first western fascination though. Since the Meiji Restoration Japan has been interested in the west (you could argue earlier with the Dutch and Portuguese traders). France and Germany are two countries Japan especially likes. 

The Japanese tend to prefer feminine French things like dainty pastries, Haute Couture, etc.



The German influence is more apparent with it being a popular setting in Anime, Manga and Vidya. 


(wood, cobblestone and clocks)

When the Japanese make European inspired media it tends to be a mix of Baroque and Gothic styles. This is apparent with Vkei and some Shojo Manga. 






The love of Europe in Asia, specifically in Japan, is a love of fine things and luxury. Beautiful, finely crafted objects. Clocks, porcelain dolls, etc. 


(Honestly, how could I forget?)

To Asians, Europe is the definition of sophistication. European art, craft, literature, music, architecture, fashion, philosophy is all the highest quality. This is why the Japanese like it and the Chinese try to cargo-cult it. These places believe in white supremacy. But when they see Europe now... 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paris_syndrome

Another interesting element of this is Westerners who like Eastern depictions of the West. This is seen most clearly with all the white girls who move to Japan to be a part of Lolita fashion. 



If you stalk this girl it becomes apparent that she actually likes French stuff but France is the way that it is so she settled on Japan. These girls like Japan because it is one of the only pro-white countries on Earth. These girls like white stuff and Japan happens to be the only place where white stuff is treated with respect so they move there and pretend it's Europe. It's not a bad thing but they would never admit its the case.

As a child, my only ability to interact with "white culture" was through buying it as an exotic export from Japan.

This is why we must protect Japan.

[anthony]

A thought that keeps occurring to me is that already to some extent the Japanese are serving the vital role of keeping a memory and tradition of who we are alive for us during dark times. They're like the Irish monks holding onto literacy while civilisation collapses. Of course we aren't collapsing like Rome, but we have fallen apart on several key fronts. Culturally especially. All of the greatest pop-cultural depictions of our own past are Japanese. The only people making pop-art that speaks to the young white soul are Japanese. If we want white popular literature again in the future we'll probably be taking more from Ryukishi07 than... Houellebecq?


["hello I am a sign of cultural vitality. The kids love me... They mentioned my book on Red Scare..."]

Friend of the forum Consul (among other names) on twitter put it to me that the history of the Japanese is a history of looking up to and then being disappointed by what were superior foreign cultures. The Koreans, then the Chinese, then the English/Europeans, and now America. Of course, they've reached the peak of the inspiration-chain now. They're the world cultural superpower, they're in far better economic and industrial and demographic health than the rest of us, where do they go from here?

We could talk a lot about particulars of Occidentalism in Japanese taste and art. And I might do that in future posts. For here I'll just leave with the Italian connection. So much anime music sounds like Italian genre soundtracks.



Gunslinger Girl is probably the only time I'll see Calabria mentioned in world famous successful pop culture.


The girls and their guns are also very European of course. Also their clothes. They're like dolls, and guns are another accessory. I love the Japanese.

Also you probably know about the Bjorn Andresen thing. The Japanese fell in love with him. But that's not the only Italian movie they saw, or time they imported a specimen for close study. If you look into this you'll actually find that by googling an Italian pop figure's name and "japan" you'll often get results like this.



Italian genre movies are a pretty essential element for understanding European pop-influence in Japan. Maybe Gunslinger Girl wouldn't exist if it weren't for the successful export of movies with titles like 'My Beretta is My Conscience' starring guys like Ray Lovelock. Look at how he's dressed here. The impression of the image. They look at Europe and see this. Elegant-cool. You look at this. Apply Japan-vision. Then we get JoJo's Bizarre Adventure Part 2.

Sorry I may have been going somewhere greater with this post but I got distracted. Great subject. I intend to post more.

[Promise-Ring]

"GEEENNNNJIIII I need my Beef Wellington NOW or I won't be able to focus on finalizing this Mcdonalds Japan deal! Without beef and potatoes we Japanese will remain sickly yellow little things until the Sun stops spinning around the Earth! Is that what you want?!?!?!"

[turnip]

Speaking of Umineko, Japanese fascination with Western occultism (magic, witchcraft, alchemy etc.) is something that I've been wanting to think more seriously about. I don't necessarily notice a strong preference for a specific tradition or time period either, between antiquity and more modern figures like Lovecraft or Jung. This is very widespread in e.g. the magical girl genre, so it may be more useful to restrict analysis to clear and specific examples like Urobuchi or the SMT/Persona games. 

You could view this as being included within a more general appreciation for traditional Western aesthetics (White people doing cool and interesting things), but I do wonder whether there's more going on. Perhaps it is also a more spiritually natural area for the Japanese to engage with the West, where the Japanese mind is non-dualistic, and these esoteric practices are often trying to synthesize opposites, or were at least working within the interstices between sectarian institutions with more clear theological doctrines. I intend to look further into this, but I'm just leaving this here now in case anyone has more developed thoughts to add.

[LoIiMerchant]

Finnegan's Wake sells very well in China, a fact I find quite amusing. It lays bare the sort of tasteless love of Western culture (I think Joyce is a fine writer, but no Chinese speaker could ever understand F.W., no matter how well read he is).

[anthony]

Speaking of Umineko, Japanese fascination with Western occultism (magic, witchcraft, alchemy etc.) is something that I've been wanting to think more seriously about. I don't necessarily notice a strong preference for a specific tradition or time period either, between antiquity and more modern figures like Lovecraft or Jung. This is very widespread in e.g. the magical girl genre, so it may be more useful to restrict analysis to clear and specific examples like Urobuchi or the SMT/Persona games. 

You could view this as being included within a more general appreciation for traditional Western aesthetics (White people doing cool and interesting things), but I do wonder whether there's more going on. Perhaps it is also a more spiritually natural area for the Japanese to engage with the West, where the Japanese mind is non-dualistic, and these esoteric practices are often trying to synthesize opposites, or were at least working within the interstices between sectarian institutions with more clear theological doctrines. I intend to look further into this, but I'm just leaving this here now in case anyone has more developed thoughts to add.

[anthony]

Women are probably a major element in keeping this alive. The connection to girl stuff like Utena would be explained there. It's a natural interest for women. Only western women are all wasting their time on ugly plastic garbage recent sideshows. Astrology blog faggotry. If they were all learning latin and hebrew and building Maria Ushiromiya diaries full of magic their retarded interests in the supernatural would be perfectly tolerable.

[This is the response to the above quoted text. I don't know why, but attempted to reply to another post that's being quoted is currently deleting the new original text underneath. Will figure this out soon hopefully.]

[Erika]

Speaking of Umineko,

Agatha Christie, the author of Ten Little Niggers (the favorite murder mystery novel of Oriental Genius Ryukishi07) as a child. She is also as you may know, the most famous Murder Mystery author as well as possibly the best selling author of all time.



Now if you've read Umineko, this portrait should be familiar to you.



Interesting how the Erika portrait most closely resembles what I theorize to be the inspiration for the Portraits as a whole. And now that we're the topic of Erika herself, I believe I've cracked open the mystery of her origin: She seems to be a young Agatha Christie with the personality of how Agatha Christie came to see Agatha Christie's most famous character, wearing the clothes of an even younger Agatha Christie with a Gothic Lolita spin.



The most famous character would be Hercule Poirot, of course:



Both are eccentric detectives in the vein of Sherlock Holmes, and then exaggerated from there. Both refer to themselves in the first person "This level of reasoning is possible for Furudo Erika", both even habitually tilt their heads to the side. Something the Ps3 sprites seemed to have missed:



Personally, I don't find Poirot to be obnoxious (Even accounting for his non possession of Erika's Anime Girl beauty). Though Agatha Christie seemed to have thought differently as the years went on. Whether intentional or not, her thoughts on Poirot are far more applicable to a certain other character we should all be well acquainted with.

"Insufferable ... detestable, bombastic, tiresome, ego-centric little creep."

I can see how this text for example, could have simply resulted from filtering the Agatha Christie dress portrait through her words about Poirot:



I'm sure it goes without saying, but Furudo Erika is obviously the most perfect, wonderfully inspired girl in all the world and it is highly unlikely she will ever be outdone, as a detective or otherwise.

[MisterHerrSenor0]

Just a few things I thought would be interesting to add:

America has had a huge influence on Japan since 1945. This is pretty common knowledge. 

There is also a peculiar manifestation of this where the Japanese are obsessed with Douglas MacArthur in particular. During the actual occupation, he was pretty much beloved. This is a quote from a paper on that very topic (https://scholarworks.uno.edu/cgi/viewcon...ors_theses):

During this occupation, something very interesting happened; the Japanese became enthralled and obsessed with General MacArthur. They treated him with the same respect as they would their emperor. Why would they do this? MacArthur was a foreigner who had almost complete control of the country. He was not there as a tourist, but as the commander of the occupation. MacArthur only spoke to high-ranking Japanese people and never traveled around Japan.5 Also, he rarely addressed the Japanese people. Nevertheless, they treated him like a celebrity. Perhaps MacArthur was right in thinking that the Japanese people thought of him as a savior. The Japanese sent MacArthur many different gifts and invitations, some extremely expensive and others humble and heartfelt. The most interesting way the Japanese people expressed themselves to MacArthur was through fan mail. MacArthur received a almost 500,000 letters from the Japanese people. Some of them thanked him and America for their generosity or policies; others asked him for favors or gave suggestions. Few were criticisms of the occupation. The idea of sending letters started shortly before the occupation when the first postwar prime minister asked the Japanese people to send in letters to help him govern. His office collapsed soon after, but the idea of sending letters had already taken off. The Japanese started sending letters to SCAP. Sodei Rinjiro is the Japanese biographer and expert on General MacArthur, and he also published a book entitled Dear General MacArthur: Letters from the Japanese during the American Occupation. He read over ten thousand letters and picked interesting and important letters to be in his book. I have had access to over one hundred of the letters that Sodei has collected in his book. Sodei thinks that the Japanese people liked MacArthur because of a cultural tradition of respecting authority. I do not think that the intimacy presented in these letters is the result of a cultural tradition. However, I still use the letters Sodei has collected because they are a diverse sample of the hundreds of thousands of letters sent to MacArthur. Also, Sodei provides many useful notes and background information as editor of the letters. Others have tried to explain why the Japanese liked General MacArthur. MacArthur himself thinks that it is because he is Japan’s savior. Most historians say that the Japanese liked MacArthur because of the Japanese culture of defeat that arose during the occupation or because of the policies that SCAP enacted during the occupation. I will look in the letters to discover why the Japanese liked their foreign overlord, General MacArthur, and why they thought him to be a liberator.6

This appears to be something that survives in Japan in some form today. There's a surprising amount of anime art of the guy. For example, this was drawn by Hirohiko Araki (creator of Jojo's Bizarre Adventure):


And this is apparently a character from Punchline dressing up as him:

The German influence is more apparent with it being a popular setting in Anime, Manga and Vidya. 

I saw a video on Japanese Germanophilia a couple years ago, and according to said video, it actually dates back to WW1, when the Japanese took a bunch of German POWs. The Japanese were surprisingly tolerant at the Bando POW camp and let the Germans effectively run a cultural exhibition.



The Japanese also seem to think that just adding German words is enough to make something sound cool. Nearly everything in Attack on Titan or the Saga of Tanya the Evil makes that obvious. But you also have it pop up in some less obvious places. For example, Guts from Berserk got his name because Miura thought it sounded German and therefore cool. There's also the fact that the organizations in Evangelion have semi-subtle German names like SEELE ("soul"), GEHIRN ("brain"), and NERV ("nerve"). And Asuka, don't forget her.

A thought that keeps occurring to me is that already to some extent the Japanese are serving the vital role of keeping a memory and tradition of who we are alive for us during dark times. They're like the Irish monks holding onto literacy while civilisation collapses. Of course we aren't collapsing like Rome, but we have fallen apart on several key fronts. Culturally especially. All of the greatest pop-cultural depictions of our own past are Japanese. The only people making pop-art that speaks to the young white soul are Japanese.

If this is true, then it's rather unfortunate that our race's culture might survive only in another race's arms. Sure, it's good that our culture would be carried on at all, but ideally, it should be our race that keeps our culture alive. Then again, beggars can't be choosers, and it's good that we have some appreciators.

[Erika]

There is also a peculiar manifestation of this where the Japanese are obsessed with Douglas MacArthur in particular. During the actual occupation, he was pretty much beloved.

A similar thing happened with the naval officer Matthew Perry. He came into Japan as essentially the face of an invasion by America for the purpose of overturning the mindset of the nation at the time. And how is he remembered...?



A Matthew Perry statue (there are actually several), a Matthew Perry Park with a Matthew Perry Museum called Perry Memorial Hall. To the Japanese he wasn't an evil Western Imperialist whitey, he was a man who was prominent in the Navy, a prestigious institution! He gave Japan a generous, if harsh, awakening and warning that they must acknowledge the existence of other nations if they wish to prosper!



Matthew Perry meme videos:



You can even take your friends to the Kurihama Perry Festival (which includes fireworks!):



This phenomenon of them adoring Western invaders who altered their country (for better or worse) is Occidentalism, sure. But their willingness to continue their Occidentalism even during Western occupation is yet more proof that the Japanese are incapable of being resentful faggots. Should any Japanese have loved MacArthur? Maybe not, Japan is the greatest country and there is no real excuse for attacking it. But MacArthur was cool, or at least the Japanese are able to make something cool out of him. I can admire their admiration for him simply because it is an outright refusal to entertain an Anti-Western current in their sentiments. To entertain that would mean turning away from Civilization, and from fine, cool, appealing things in general. (Just look at how they continue to view the west!)

A thought that keeps occurring to me is that already to some extent the Japanese are serving the vital role of keeping a memory and tradition of who we are alive for us during dark times. They're like the Irish monks holding onto literacy while civilisation collapses. Of course we aren't collapsing like Rome, but we have fallen apart on several key fronts. Culturally especially. All of the greatest pop-cultural depictions of our own past are Japanese. The only people making pop-art that speaks to the young white soul are Japanese.

If this is true, then it's rather unfortunate that our race's culture might survive only in another race's arms. Sure, it's good that our culture would be carried on at all, but ideally, it should be our race that keeps our culture alive. Then again, beggars can't be choosers, and it's good that we have some appreciators.

"If this is true"? Not only has this been proven time and time again, but it probably never even required proving in the first place. Simply observe the reality. White Culture is now a Japanese import, and the true remaining occidentalists of the occident favor Japan above all.