Cultural appropriation

I set my novels in Japan. I write Japanese characters. I write female characters. All of this, despite my being an American man. So am I guilty of cultural appropriation?

Cultural appropriation, while nothing new, has entered the public consciousness. Like the “Me Too” movement that has shamed so many harassers of women in recent years, we should have been attuned to the inappropriateness of cultural appropriation all along. It has always been a bad thing to do. But as a writer, how do I completely avoid it? We write better when we write what we know, but are we limited to only that? In the extreme, must we write only what we are and tell only we have experienced? (What I have experienced is Japan, for 25 years of my adult life.)

Cultural appropriation is the adoption of cultural elements of one culture by another. It is particularly controversial when it is a dominant culture appropriating from a minority culture. In Wikipedia, a contributor observes, “According to critics of the practice, cultural appropriation differs from acculturation, assimilation, or equal cultural exchange in that this appropriation is a form of colonialism: cultural elements are copied from a minority culture by members of a dominant culture, and these elements are used outside of their original cultural context—sometimes even against the expressly stated wishes of members of the originating culture.”

I do not feel that Western culture is superior or dominant to Japanese culture, although its influence is forceful. I cannot say that Western culture is winning some kind of culture war. The influence seems stable, the two cultural forces close enough to equilibrium that the Japanese are not lamenting that their culture is being swallowed by the West. In fact, some elements of Japanese culture have had profound influences on the West. A great example is the influence of Japanese woodblock prints on Vincent van Gogh. He covered his walls with them. He copied them, even tracing them onto his canvases. That was not cultural appropriation. It was appreciation and a heartfelt desire to emulate the beauty he saw. He wrote to his brother Theo in September 1888, “And we wouldn’t be able to study Japanese art, it seems to me, without becoming much happier and more cheerful, and it makes us return to nature, despite our education and our work in a world of convention.” In a later letter he wrote, “All my work is based to some extent on Japanese art.”

There are plenty of cases of misappropriation of Japanese culture, of course. A recent outrage was Kim Kardashian wanting to name her line of lingerie “Kimono.” Kardashian even tried to trademark the word, something that brought a strong response from the Japanese government. Some, incensed, adopted the hashtag “KimOhNo” on Twitter.

While I don’t think I am guilty of anything so objectionable, my writing about Japan still has a problem. I have not solved the issue from my 5 July 2019 blog post that I need greater native knowledge. I am a foreigner, and I will never know Japan like a native despite having spent so many years here. So I will continue to look for a native Japanese writing colleague. 

On the narrower problem of cultural appropriation in my writing, I raised the issue with my closest Japanese friend, someone who has read some of what I have written. She said not to worry about it, that what I do doesn’t qualify as cultural appropriation. In the end, though, even if some feel that a foreigner writing about Japan involves some degree of cultural appropriation that cannot be eliminated, I will not stop writing novels. How else will the stories get out of my head?

Capturing life in Japan: Language

Life in Japan is as exotic as one may imagine, and every bit as routine as life anywhere.  Which end of the scale one experiences depends very much on what she or he chooses to make of each day.  For me, it is also rooted in how often I am willing to just stop, look, breathe, and allow awe to wash over me.

Giving a novel a sense of life in Japan presents a host of problems.  Include too much about Japan’s uniqueness and it becomes all travelog; the story gets lost.  Focus only on the storyline and the richness of the setting is lost.  

One challenge I have faced trying to capture life in Japan in writing is what to do about language, particularly: 1) how to handle the imperfect language of nonnative speakers, 2) how much Japanese to include, and 3) how to provide translation of the Japanese.  I think I have good answers, but not all of my readers agree.  I am still awaiting a professional edit of my first novel, Under Shōko’s Bed, so my solutions may change as I work with my editor.  Nevertheless, let me propose answers to my three “hows.”

How to handle nonnative speech

When dealing with non-native speakers’ English, particularly Japanese, my approach is to make it authentic.  Thus, Shōko in Under Shōko’s Bed makes common grammatical errors and uses a limited English vocabulary.  Some have commented that her style of speech makes her seem stupid, but I disagree.  Perhaps because I have lived in Japan for so long and am so used to very imperfect English spoken by people I know to be incredibly bright, English imperfections don’t feed my prejudices.  Besides, some of the greatest authors of our time (e.g., William Faulkner) have used dialects to great effect.  My view of nonnative Japanese speakers such as myself is the same.  It is a difficult language. Almost all of us have some trouble, so when writing the English equivalents of their Japanese conversations, I make the English imperfect.  Imperfection is part of being human.  Not merely accepting but appreciating the imperfection in others is a very worthy trait.  I think it’s a fine thing for a novel to reflect that.

How much Japanese to include

I feel like a reader gets a richer experience, more of a country’s flavor, when its language enters the text.  Some words, of course, simply have no English equivalent.  For example, a genkan is not just an entryway.  It is where a person removes his or her shoes before stepping up into the house.  Thus, it is a hybrid space that is treated in some ways as being both inside and outside.  For example, one does not step out of one’s shoes onto the genkan floor, as the floor of the genkan is “outside” in terms of cleanliness.  Instead, the step is made directly up into the house.  It can lead to some gymnastics for foreigners who are unused to it, but most master it well enough.  (I generally feel childishly unable to make the movement smooth and effortless.)  The inclusion of the word, though, highlights in a small way that Japanese homes are different and reminds the reader that this is a unique culture.

Other words I include are relatively simple ones that can be understood in context, and they often come in through dialogue.  The one way that longer Japanese text may enter is in scenes written from the point of view of a foreigner who does not understand what is being said.  If the Japanese is more than a couple of lines, I simply say that the person does not understand, but I think short dialogue with no immediate translation can be an effective way of putting the reader into the place of the character.

How to provide the reader with translation

My third issue, how to handle translation, depends on the words and where they appear.  At the outset, let me state that I think the reader deserves a translation of non-English words and phrases in an English novel.  I know I feel just a little cheated reading translations of Gabriel García Márquez as I cannot understand untranslated Spanish words or phrases—not cheated enough to go searching for meanings on the Internet, though.  I just read on, likely missing some of the color of the novel.  In Under Shōko’s Bed, I chose to deal with the translation problem in three ways.  First, the basic meaning (obviously not all nuances) of some words, such as “genkan” explained above, can be understood well enough from the context, so I include no translation within the text.  

Second, for words that appear more than once in the novel, and have simple English equivalents and that are not easily understood from the context, I put the English in parentheses after the Japanese the first time the word appears.  For example, “She walked past a kōban (police box) on the way to work.”  This is simple, direct, and if not done too frequently, does not significantly intrude on the reading experience.  The one place I try not to do this is in dialogue, as it breaks the flow and rhythm of speech.  

The third way that Japanese appears, as explained above, is in short bits of conversation as heard and not understood by nonnative speakers.  

Regardless of how a word is dealt with in the text, however, I include all Japanese words and phrases that appear in the text in a glossary at the end of the book.  Anyone interested in a word’s meaning can simply turn to the end and see.

I did not immediately come to the “appendix” solution.  In my first drafts, I put the translations in footnotes.  I am a slow and ponderous reader whose mind constantly wanders.  (Reading anything but the most engrossing fiction can be truly painful.)  So checking footnotes does not bother me at all.  Some readers, though, told me that the footnotes interrupted the flow of their reading.  The obvious solution was to put all the translation into a glossary.  This also serves as an excellent overall indicator of the amount of Japanese in the novel.  If the glossary is too thick, I am overloading the text with Japanese, to the detriment of the reader.  If it is too thin, the experience won’t be authentically Japanese.  Of course, what is too thick or thin is completely subjective.  Under Shōko’s Bed had too much Japanese in the early drafts, so I cut some.  The novel I am writing now is woefully short of Japanese.  As I rework it, I will add more.

I hope my solutions to the problem of language work for most readers.  I know they do for me and for others who have read my drafts.  I would love to hear others’ solutions, though, so please comment!