quintessentialverbalized:

orchidhorror:

don’t use senpai or kouhai jokingly, don’t use kawaii jokingly, don’t use suffixes or honorifics jokingly, just stop

Don’t turn japanese into a joke when it’s already mocked by racists, when diaspora japanese are already discouraged or ashamed to speak it due to racism

Don’t make fun of languages that are spoken by oppressed ethnicities and cultures, when they’re already systemically discouraged to speak it or even teach it to their children or grandchildren, because of racist pressure from western societies to assimilate

Don’t make fun of languages from cultures outside the western european language hegemony, because you just come off as a racist xenophobe

Things to read:

• ‘On Kawaii and Appropriation’ by sad-queer.tumblr.com
• ‘The name and the Face' by Juliana Qian

• Monolingual ideologies in multilingual states: Language, hegemony and social justice in Western liberal democracies by Adrian Blackledge (google to download a PDF!)

Ironic appropriation of a language in fact does not make you at all better than the people who claim to be “Japanese on the inside” and I die a little inside every time I hear someone I otherwise respect jokingly pepper their speech with honorifics to try to be cute.