Quick Take: Why Western People Love Japanese Stuff & Despise Chinese Stuff

If you want to make something Asian prestigious & worth admiring, don't say it's Chinese, say that it's Japanese instead

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I have a theory of why educated people think all sophisticated East Asian stuff is Japanese (or perhaps, sometimes, Korean).

It’s a simple theory: when I lived in Sydney, Australia, in the late 1990s, I sometimes walked the streets with my fellow euro friends and we’d wonder about all the Asians who lived there. My friends had this straightforward method: East Asians who were well-dressed and/or had dyed hair were Japanese; those who looked average were Korean; those who looked a bit disheveled or poor were Chinese.

Sadly, that’s the approach that educated westerners typically have when it comes to East Asian culture and history, all these years later.

I keep noticing this. I’m married to a Chinese woman who, looking neither disheveled nor poor, has been over the years mistakenly identified as Japanese, Korean, Singaporean, Thai and Chinese-American in multiple continents. But this is mere anecdote, nothing very serious.

To me, the systematic underrating of Chinese history and culture by Westerners is much more serious. I love Korean and Japanese history and culture, and I keep studying both with great pleasure, but let’s be honest here: to a great extent, both Korean and Japanese culture are mere appendages, versions of Chinese culture adapted to local tastes; Koreans and Japanese are latecomers to everything, barbarians who arrived in the scene centuries, even millennia later and popularized stuff created by the Chinese by making it sexy for foreigners.

Take this recent article in the British article The Spectator, reviewing with great enthusiasm an exposition of Japanese woodblock printing.

The words “China” or “Chinese” are not mentioned in the story. This is insane. Woodblock printing is a Chinese invention that remained a Chinese specialty for centuries before it jumped to Korea and Japan, where they copied the EXACT SAME TECHNOLOGY to do almost exactly the same kind of prints using CHINESE CHARACTERS.

Woodblock printing was developed in China, inspired by the widespread use of inscribed seals and stone tables and boosted by the Buddhist belief that religious texts hold intrinsic value. With this kind of page-by-page printing, popular since the Seventh Century, religious texts could be copied much faster and circulated much more broadly.

After the invention of woodblock printing, the first printing technology, the Chinese for centuries created all sorts of documents and works of art. You may know that the Chinese also invented paper (a few centuries earlier) but you probably don’t know that they invented toilet paper as well, pretty much about the same time, although for centuries Westerners thought that cleaning up their asses with paper was gross; don’t ask me about the alternatives.

The fact that Westerners prefer to routinely ignore these facts is not surprising to me. I keep hearing from people who are shocked to learn that, in essence, haiku are a Chinese invention that preceded Japanese haiku by millennia. The poem “You gu” (“There are blind drummers”), which is about 2,900 years old, is a great example of this:

“There are blind drummers, there are blind drummers,

In the court of Zhou.

Erecting stands, erecting racks…

Ancestors hear this.

Our guests arrive and stop,

For a long time watch their performance.”

I wrote about this poem and the rise of early Chinese poetry here. Haiku, with their groups of three verses, are incredibly popular among modern Western poets and anyone with a literary inclination; in China, poets ended up preferring quatrains, and Chinese quatrains are completely unknown except among specialists.

The same people who are all about haiku are typically fascinated by Japanese Geishas. And yet few, if any, know that Geishas are an 18th century Japanese version of Chinese upper-class courtesans, much celebrated in the poetry of Tang China.

These courtesans are not unknown because their names and lives are lost to history. The poetress Yu Xuanji (840-868), a former concubine and Taoist nun, was almost certainly one of them, even if she was not (unlike most Chinese “Geishas”) a licensed prostitute. A contemporary poetress/courtesan who was, Yan Lingbin, is said to have requested funeral verses from her admirers when she was close to die, instead of cash for her funeral as was customary; her madame, furious at the artistic gesture, threw those verses away but somebody else collected them, set them to music and arranged for their performance at the funeral. The songs became funeral favorites in the Tang capital of Chang’an for years to come.

I could go on and on with examples, for example regarding military history aficionados who know all about samurai and nothing about their model: early 1st millennium Chinese warlords; and an even more distant model — 7th century BC noble hegemons who ruled the Chinese empire on behalf of the emperor, known in Chinese as “Ba,” an obvious antecedent to the later Japanese status of “Shogun.”

Instead of going on, I will add that I believe that, now that China is no longer poor as it was in the late 1990s, much of the erasure of Chinese history and culture that one can see behind the elevation of Japanese history and culture is driven by politics: Japan is, essentially, a US client state since 1945 (there is a worse word that we historians use for countries subjected to a stronger power in history: vassals), while China is perceived in the West as a rival power.

I will leave you with the pictures of the actresses who starred in the 2005 Hollywood adaptation of the famous novel “Memoirs of a Geisha,” set in pre-World War II Japan, with all the main characters supposedly being Japanese but not needing Japanese-language skills because the movie was shot in English. For clarity, I will add their names and ethnicity:

Gong Li (Chinese)

Zhang Ziyi (Chinese)

Michelle Yeoh (Chinese)