Sure, it’s a month old, but it’s still fun to read Jeff Yang’s take on McDonald’s ad campaign in Japan, which was discussed here.
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{ 31 comments… read them below or add one }
Eh, it takes awhile for news to travel through the pond.
This is one reason I stay away from eating at McD’s or BK in Korea;
because I feel like I am a gazelle or something on a National Geographic special that the local Koreans are viewing:
“And there sits the hungry waegookin in his natural habitat: the fast food restaurant. Notice how he eats his hamburger with one hand, then sets it down between bites; and look how he dips his french fries in ketchup, and how he takes long sips of his cola. The shape of his nose and head help to create a preference for this type of diet. He has
eaten many hamburgers up to this point in is life.”
When you hear voices like that, and you are not Jim Carey on a film set, it’s time for a visit to a doctor. 과대망상증 the Koreans call it. That’s funny though.
exit86 >> That is freakin’ hilarious! So true, eh!
On a serious note, I think that McDonald’s portraying another race in a negative way even if it’s in “fun” is not a positive move…that’s my two cents.
It is only seen as racist because it is shown in Japan, how different is that character to the guys played in the BBC hit “The I.T. Crowd”. Or the awkward characters in any of the office series. Yes it is a sterotype, but not one that I would find insulting if I saw it in my hoime country, so I can’t being particularly offended by it in another country. I would prabably change the channel because I find it hard to watch though.
Ok, it was lazy but I finally read the Yang article. He has some good points, especially as the article ended.
exit86–
For a long time, I’ve liked to stuff a bunch of fries inside my Big Mac. I just know there’s a kid somewhere showing his friends the authentic foreign way to eat a burger.
Per the article:
I wonder what shakuhachi’s thoughts are on this.
JG29A,
Don’t forget to show them the proper way of eating fries with chicken nuggets:
put the fries in the empty half of the nugget’s carton.
exit86,
I only noticed the attention for the first few months that a Mc Donald’s opened in town (not that I got there regularly). I’m guessing people were more curious about the menu and consequently looked at what I was eating for pointers.
I’m still laughing my ass off at Den Fujita (the guy who brought McD’s to Japanin the 70′s) who said:
“Japanese are poorly built because they eat rice. We’ll change that with hamburgers. After eating hamburgers for a thousand years, Japanese will even have blond hair.”
Ha!!!!!
Maybe this nerd dude is actually a Japanese computer dork who metamorphosed into a pale-faced, big-nosed butter stinker.
Could be . . . esp. considering all the chemicals McD’s puts in their “food.”
Not bad for a Yang piece.
Is Yang Korean or Chinese?
Taiwan Chinese.
Thanx
WangKon936,
I already dealt with that on my blog ages ago. Frankly, gaijin = nigger is absolutely ludicrous. Debito does a great disservice to foreigners living in Japan for this kind of rhetoric, especially because he is considered by some Japanese to be representing white foreigners in Japan. Certainly he doesn’t represent most foreigners, just a foolish minority.
http://www.occidentalism.org/?p=955
exit86,
Thanks for the funny piece. I chuckled a while.
And, that is exactly how I feel when I go to “Chopstix”, a California Chinese restaurant chain. Most employees are Mexican and customers are mostly non-Asian; no self-respecting Chinese would eat a fake-Chinese restaurant like Chopstix.
Everybody is looking at me, a KoreanAmerican, thinking that I am a Chinese. They want to know what I order, how I eat and et cetra. I can guess what goes through their minds. Aha, that is how the real Chinese eats. He ordered “Snow peapod with Chicken”. Maybe that is the best Chinese dish!
exit86, just enjoy the attention. Ten years later when there are many foreigners and Seoul becomes international hub, nobody would care any more.
For a while, the hair dye, especially blond hair color, was the fad about 5 -10 years ago.
Many, too many, girls had their hair dye to blond.
When you get on a subway, you could see blond after blond. Their eyebrows were black – and some girls shaved off their eyebrows.
For those girls, with their fake nose, looked almost western.
More blonds in Seoul than in London.
Those were the days.
Shak,
I have never lived in Japan, but I do have a friend who is half Japanese (Okinawan on his mother’s side) and taught English in Japan (Tokyo and Osaka) for nine years. Gaijin may not be the equivalent of nigger, but it isn’t a good word.
I have many Okinawan friends, and none consider themselves “Japanese”. My sense is that Okinawa as a whole still retains a strong sense of its identity as a separate Ryuyukan culture, as it was before the invasion and takeover (1609?) by the Satsuma Clan in a kind of reprise (and consolation prize for Satsuma from the new Tokukawa shogunate) following the failure of Hideyoshi’s invasion of Joseon.
Indeed. On one of my Okinawa deployments back in the day, the elderly
JapaneseOkinawan owner of the small hotel I was billeting in asked me to sit down for tea and talk about things. Since I was stationed in Korea, I was asked what it was like in Korea. When I described the Independence Hall in Chonan as the We-Hate-Japan Museum, she chirped “We have one of those too!”And that’s how I visited the We-Hate-Japan Museum in Japan.
Sperwer, Brendon,
Japan is actually quite diverse, with different cultures in different regions, along with different dialects. Okinawa is probably the most obvious case of that. Of the Okinawa people that I met (admittedly a handful), all of them considered themselves Japanese. When visiting a friend in Tokyo, I met her best friend and suggested that Okinawans were not Japanese. I was told that some people think that, and it is discriminatory.
WK#,
All this time they have been calling me ni99er and I had no idea. Thank god I have your half Japanese English teacher (9 years!) friend to set me straight. I need to buy a gun or something to wipe out all those Japanese “friends” that were slurring me all this time.
thru out the 70s and 80s, simple look around at Japanese comics produced during the time PROVES that the Japanese suffered with Michale Jackson syndrome. They wanted to be seen as white Europeans, blonde hair, blue eyes, and black eyes, black hair was subhuman and ugly and less desirable. This has shifted some time in the 1990s. Now all the protagonists have black hair black eyes. Black is beautiful? Not quite, but they had a shift. This may have had to do with discrimination they faced abroad, because the Japanese were well traveled abroad.
Nothing Matt of Occidentalism says should be taken as even a partial truth. He still denies and refuses to address rape porn culture and its univeral presence in Japan. In real life, he is a machine who draws Hentai comics 24/7, and provides a dog’s jaji to feed into Korean dwaenjang girls in Austrailia. If I could only book a trip to New South Wales, I would hire a private PD, just to get a real photo of him and plaster it all over the world. He self described himself as blonde and beautiful. Racist fuck.
Shak: What you say about the diversity of Japan is true, as is your observation that Okinawans are a special case (as I suppose also are the Ainu). But I don’t find anything contradictory about an Okinawan complaining of discrimination when identified as non-Japanese (by a Japanese, especially), since that is usually, but not always, tied to a position that wants to deny equal protection of the laws to someone who is a citizen of Japan but not Japanese.
You know who else has a Janus-faced attitude about Japanese nationality? Ethnic Koreans in Japan. I find it amusing that Shakuhachi thinks we don’t know that there may be variations among people in a country as large as Japan.
We may live here in the well, but we ain’t frogs.
Shak,
Reread my comment. I just told you that I think that it’s not the equivalent of nigger.
Matt (aka Shak) does have a tendency to read things that aren’t there, WangKon.
WK#,
I was being sarcastic. If it is not a good word, then tell me what kind of word it is. Think of an equivalent slur and let me know.
Actually, I don’t know specifically. I don’t have such detailed conversations on such matters because the expat community in Japan isn’t all that interesting to me. My buddy just made the remark that it wasn’t a word that a Japanese person would use in the company of foreigners they knew, rather it was a term used for foreigners they didn’t know and you wanted to speak about when no foreigners who were fluent in Japanese were within earshot. In other words it wasn’t used to convey polite or positve discussions regarding foreigners like, “… those gaijin this…” and “… those gaijin that…” etc.
Listen, that’s what he told me but I’m far from an expert in it. So if you think the truth is something else than feel free to believe/share it. However, I would believe my buddy over you on this matter as you don’t have enough intellectual credibility with me to convince me otherwise.
WK#,
You just spent two paragraphs telling me that you don’t know what you are talking about. As for this “intellectual credibility” you speak of, well, all I can say is wow, I am impressed at your nerve. I don’t recall you getting the better of me ever. As long as it is something bad, you are prepared to believe anything about Japanese people. I am done with you.
Shak,
1) No one needs to get the better of anyone to recognize that an argument and the evidence is weak. That goes for any type of conversation where a point is trying to be made.
2) You seem to transfer a lot of misconceptions onto me. I like many things about Japan and the Japanese. They have a lot more strengths than they do have flaws. Their flaws, although fewer- are quite deep. I guess my point is to not say that the Japanese are bad but to say that they are not as good as you think…
3) I am done with you. Excellent!
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