I NEED THIS ENTIRE SET
Reblogging for VS.
This makes miso happy.
Sooo… am I the only one who finds this racist and kind of disgusting? This is a genuine question. I don’t mean to come across as an angry tumblr-user who won’t listen to anyone. I’m curious and would like to know what other people think about this, and am entirely willing to change my opinion.
While it’s important to have fun, and as much as I like language-related fun, this is mainly the English language appropriating words from another language and making it into a joke. For English-speakers. This reminds me so much of those racist “Me Chinese” jokes, only dressed up in cute.
tl;dr This post makes me really uncomfortable and I’d like to know what other people think about it.
Yeah, thisisnotjapan.tumblr.com has talked before about this. Context is very important, and the context here is that these are stickers intended to be sold. These puns are marketed as “cutsey” broken English. So yeah, it’s pretty gross to profit off of stereotypes that harm Japanese people. I looked up the original artist and she is east Asian—I’m guessing Vietnamese because her last name is “Nguyen”—but I’m staying out of discussions about culture appropriation amongst east Asian people in diaspora. As far as white people are concerned, we don’t have any experience with that harm and trivialization,so it is really racist and disgusting to reduce harm and trivialization to something “cute” to consume. It reminds me of those “too kawaii for you desu” weeaboo bookbags I saw on Tumblr once or twice(I shudder to remember them).
But I’m a white USian so I’m no authority whatsoever. I’m going off of experiences I’ve heard Asian and Asian-American articulate and while I know there will be people in those groups who disagree, if you aren’t Asian, I’d have to ask: why are these stickers cute? Why are they funny? Do you have food-related puns all over your house in general, or just ones with “funny foreign words?”
I hope you don’t mind if I bold that last part. (If you do mind, shoot me an ask, and I’ll unbold it.) Thank you for your response, I’m still thinking a lot about this post.
It actually seems more like food puns then broken English to me. Sort of like “Grape job!” and “Orange you glad to see me?” rather than “Lol funny Asian words” I think the only difference is it’s using Asian foods. I think if they were using American foods no one would bat an eye at bad food puns. Mostly because the little phrases themselves are nothing more than like “I love you so much” except with a food instead of a word or making broken English the point of a joke.
That’s just me though and I might be wrong about it. But I love bad food puns and yes, I do have bad food pun stickers on my fridge and around my kitchen, just of the “grape job” variety.
Thank you for your response, I’m glad people have been ok with talking about this. Yes, they are food puns, but they are food puns that cross languages. The language crossing is the tricky part. The reason no one would bat an eye about an American food pun involving English is because Americans primarily use English. An English-lanuage American-food pun made by an American who speaks English is very different from an American English-speaker making a joke at the expense of another language. And it is literally at the expense of, since the person is making money off of these.
Also, don’t say it’s ok because both the words and the foods are Japanese. That actually makes it even more problematic because these foods have cultural significance. So not only are the words being made into a joke, but the foods are being taken out of their cultural context in order to help out the joke.
To me, English is kind of this big playground bully. And everyone has to be nice to it and even learn how to talk like it. And if they don’t imitate the bully well enough, they might get made fun of, beat up, or even killed. A lot of languages have been killed off by English. English is the current lingua franca of the world. So it’s kind of like having this bully around, who also comes from a long line of bullies (lingua franca-s). So when the bully makes a pun about one of its followers, it’s very different from when a follower makes a joke about the school bully. One is cowardly (picking on smaller languages), and one is clever and even courageous because not only is the smaller language making fun of something that could kill it, but the language/ language-user has mastered the language of the bully so well, that they can actually make jokes using the bully’s own language.
And actually, in the above analogy, American culture can also be substituted for language. It’s the same deal.
I don’t want to come across as “I’m right and everyone else needs to sit down,” but the more I think about these images, the more I’m seeing them as not a good thing.
Well, do we know who the creator is, because I haven’t seen anyone mention that? I mean, would it be more okay if they were Japanese? Would it mean it would it be okay to buy them if it was a Japanese creator making food puns on their own culture’s food as a product? Personally I don’t think it would. It is a bit too uncomfortable and leaves a bad enough taste in my mouth. (Though if they made a cute “Grape Job” one I’d probably buy it).
I apologize if I was somehow saying these are okay, I don’t think they are. I was saying that these don’t seem intentionally racist but that does not absolve them of using another culture’s food as a joke. Even if it is a food and word pun casual racism is an insidious thing. I am not explaining myself very well and I think I’ll stop now because I don’t think I’m adding much to the conversation. I apologize.