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?

Native knowledge

I need a native Japanese speaker. No problem, right? I live in a whole country full of them. Shall I approach a total stranger and ask them to give me a context-dependent answer to a very specific question that will take significant time to explain? I am sure I would do better asking a friend, but how many times can I go to a friend with my writing questions? They pop up on an almost daily basis. Friends wear out faster than that, and I don’t want to take such advantage of their friendship.

Some of my questions are simple. I asked a friend two weeks ago about a prospective title for my fourth novel. Nothing in English seemed to fit it, and I wondered if the Japanese word I was considering would sound too “non-fiction.” She told me it did not sound strange at all in Japanese, so my novel now has a title. (I will reveal it here when I have further revised and edited the novel.) The same day, I imposed on another friend to help with the proper titles of police detectives in Japan. That turned out to be much more complicated, and I opted to just call them “detective” rather than specify a rank or division. In doing so, I might have simplified too much, but a more detailed answer might have required my friend to read large swaths of the novel, and I felt that would be asking too much.

Even more than novel titles or police detectives, though, I need to understand the Japanese phrasing to which I am lending an English (American) voice. That knowledge would make the writing so much more genuine. But for that, the native Japanese speaker must read the English with great care and judge what fits Japanese speech and attitudes and what needs to be changed. That is more than a casual friend might do. What I need is not quite a writing partner, but at least a colleague, and possibly more than one. Yet I cannot afford to pay them for their time. I could make a trade in terms of English help, but I suspect I would come out ahead in any such exchange.

So what is a nonnative writer to do? Shall I approach the strangers pressed against me in the train? In the near term, I will continue to go to friends with specific questions. It may also be time, though, to find someone who wants to improve their English skills. Working with me would be great English training. I have to figure out how to find that person from among the hundreds of thousands in Tokyo who want to improve their English. It should be simple. So why do I feel so overwhelmed?