Sushi and Seduction.com

For everyone that reads this site, I assume three things about you automatically.

1. You are fluent in English.
2. You are interested in Asian (culture, language, food, girls, et al.)
3. You have quality problems, like not having enough dates, or being iffy on whether to move to Japan or not.

I know this because I see my searches mostly come from google (in English), use the words “Asian” or “Japanese” in half the searches, as well as “attraction” or “pua” in the other half. I’m not judging you, because I’m the same way.

So let’s talk about something important - why why why why why why WHY do people keep asking me about my interest in Asian culture!?

I’ve covered it before in posts about why liking Asian girls is perfectly normal,  how to own your desire no matter what,  eliminating the social totem pole, and how liking Asian girls helps you learn Japanese. But no matter how much I’ve talk about it before, I’ve never gotten to what it actually is.

What’s the difference between living in London and living in Tokyo really? Why can’t people seem to believe that you’d want to learn what a Chinese character actually means than just seeing it as cool decor in a restaurant? Most of all, why does it even matter to people?

Simply, to many people, it’s their entire world.

“Why would you want to move to Toe-key-oh?”

If you’re like me, you’re faced with an ongoing problem, or an ongoing annoyance of being asked how you could bear eating sushi, why you are studying Japanese, and why you only date Asian girls. “Isn’t that racist?” the jealous white girls inquires, “And like, doesn’t that mean you have a fetish or something?”

I rebut, “But isn’t dating outside my race make me less racist? It’s bringing the world together, right?”

“No no. It’s just creepy. My friend Janet hates it white guys hit on her because she’s Asian.”

What she doesn’t tell you is that her Asian friend Janet is dating a white guy who hit on her for that very reason. He’s in the same boat as you are, but might not be as committed to learning a new culture, nor as interested as you are.

That’s cool too, I’m sure Janet and him make a great couple! But what if you don’t want to settle down and just dabble in a culture, or in a couple of whitewashed Asian chicks? What if your passion runs deeper, that maybe, just maybe, you might want to see what it’s like to live there?

“That’s crazy. You can’t do that!” is the knee-jerk response. Your peers can’t imagine a world without American Football or new episodes of “Lost.” Your family throws their arms up in shock, starts talking about how it’s “impossible to learn Japanese” and that “it’s dangerous being out there!” as if the safest country in the world is out to get just you. Your friends don’t understand you either, and don’t see why’d you want to leave everything you have here behind?

Why does it seem like you’re dying everything you mention following your dream and living in another country?

It’s actually the same reason that you’ve never heard of Natsume Soseki.

“It’s too complicated.”

Growing up, I had the amazing opportunity to travel internationally everyday in my small New England hometown. With awesome parents that taught be to appreciate people based on their character, not their color, my two best friends were an Indian kid and a half-Korean, half-Puerto Rican kid I met in Kindergarten and 1st grade. Without knowing it, I cut myself off from prejudice before it could settle in the stagnant mind caught in a homogeneous community.

Nearly every weekday, I would go to my Indian friend’s house and play video games, eat fresh puri, and talk about what we’d do if we had a plane that could take us around the world. Nearly every weekend, I would go to my Korean-Puerto Rican friend’s house and play soccer, wrestle, and watch the Simpsons while eating grilled cheese Jalapeño sandwiches. Once in a great while, there would be a question about skin, religion, or food, but it could be answered in a sentence or less without little question.

What was weird was that going to school forced me to think far far far more limited than I was used to. We only learned about Britain, France, and Germany in history class. We only saw white faces in the educational movies about inertia, geometry, and gases (begging for trouble). We only read works made in America or Britain, and never read about places elsewhere besides those two places. Worst of all, when one of us would ask about India, Korea, or Puerto Rico, our questions were shrugged off as “too complicated for the rest of the class.”

Everything was kept to focused on Europe, learning a bunch of facts about dead white guys.

After a while, and some cruel harassment by anonymous people towards my friends and I, we started to notice that there was a difference between us. We knew we didn’t look alike, and only I looked the people in the textbooks, on the money, and on TV. Why was that?

Dead White Guys

My teachers never told me (until college) that what I was living in was an English speaking, Anglo-Saxon, Euro-centric culture. My whole world, besides the the glimpses I saw through my friends and Kung Fu action films, was flooded with images of white people, white values, and white beliefs, and white ideals.

Then my professor snatched those rose tinted glasses from my face and smashed them near my feet.

For better or worse, Western education, media, and culture was based on the tradition of the conquering Brits. Puritan values were taught through bland “classics based” education, television constantly remade the epics of the Greeks and Romans, and Christmas, a transformed pagan winter solstice festival, was the main holiday.

Even today, as I live in a predominantly black city in America, these images still flood every person the same way they did in New England. Every advertisement has a jacked white male or a tall blond as the aesthetic ideal. Every history book covered American / European history from the vantage point of the colonialist victors or exoticizes the East in an oriental mist. And with the exception of Hip Hop and a handful of actors, the radio and television is exclusively of white people talking about white problems through white genres.

Furthermore, up until very very very recently, the modern image of America, in the form of a president, was restricted to that of dead and very old white men. Thankfully, change has come to America.

Binary Opposition

But enough of the heavy criticism of the America I love in spite of its flaws. More importantly, why do people care if you want to move to Japan?

To many people, you’re rejecting everything they value in one sweeping gesture.

Our minds seek to label and simplify everything as much as possible. It’s not that another choice is wrong, is just that the common path is takes less energy and evolutionarily sound. Imagine how much time it would take to in a day if you had to process whether you like your coffee with cream, sugar, both, or neither. Or for your ancestors, to hunt in the  way that works or in a new way. Simply, it’s a waste.

Culture, usually in the form of religion or “popular opinion” in the form of strong beliefs, provides us with these options. For my early human ancestors, those not marked with the tribes’ symbols were dangerous and were fought against.; not us = enemy. For my European ancestors, all those who were not Christian, nor “white” were savages that must be remedied through massacre or converted; not white= heathen. For my modern peers, all that is not “on their radar”  is mocked and questioned; not known = weird.

In fact, these all follow a simple pattern. Since quickest way to cut down time is to give only two options - a pair of opposites - society forms to make those pairs and face them against each other. In other words, make them intrinsically contradictory. Based on the ideas of Claude Levi-Strauss, the survival and well-being of a society is based on it’s ability to discern a complicated world into simple concepts. The easiest of these are divided into two parts, binary opposites- such as the sacred vs. the profane, male vs. female, married vs. unmarried, and us vs. them.

So, to many people, the idea of an unknown, foreign culture must mean that you are rejecting your own culture. In other words, if you like Samurai films, you must not like Top Gun. If you like eating with chopsticks, you must not like eating with forks and knives. If you like Asian girls, you must not like white girls, and therefore must hate your own race.

ありがとうございます！

But this is すばらしい！　This is awesome!

In fact, you should thank everyone who questions your interest in Asian culture/language/food/girls/et al. from now on. It’s a gift you’ve been given to break the pattern that colonialist orientialism has left behind, and a chance for your to become a cultural ambassador. You have the chance to share with people another world, another way of thinking, or at least share some fun facts about panty vending machines.

Think about it like this. The next time someone asks you about Japan, or why you like, or for what purpose on “God’s green earth you would do over there?” remind them that it’s a first world country that has given us such great and wild things as Nintendo, MXC, or Takeru Kobayashi. If they’re still scared, let them know that they have had baseball since the late 1800s, watch American movies, and love their beer.

You have the chance to share your passion, which is the coolest thing of all. If anything, your enthusiasm will override any doubts they have about Japan, about becoming a foreigner, or anything else. You have a chance to change the world in a little way, so you should absolutely do it!

If you’re like me, and not a victim of “My Japan Syndrome,” you know that America has things that are awesome about it, and lots of stuff that you will miss. For me, I will surely miss my family and my friends, as well as large portions of food, an abundance of gyms, a literal diversity of people, action movies, and probably a hundred other things.

Finally, understand that you just like Japan a little bit more. There’s nothing wrong in that either. In fact, you’re the guy to talk about Japan. Don’t try to be an expert, nor condescending, nor a geek in any way, but just let people know that it’s not so different, that you can go there and live perfectly fine, and, most of all, Japan and the US are friends now.