Ontology:Q3338
Core characteristics[edit]
- label (en)
- alias (en)
- it's not Japanese, it's just a video game
- Pokémon, which is not Japanese
- Animal Crossing, which is not Japanese
- Undertale, which is not United-States
- alias (en)
- that's not Japanese, that's just a furry comic
- Beastars, which is not Japanese
- alias (en)
- that's not United-States, that's just a cartoon
- Steven Universe, which is not United-States
- Avatar: The Last Airbender (ATLA), which is not American
- alias (en)
- that's not Japanese, that's just an online service
- TikTok, which is not Chinese
- YouTube, which is not United-States
- Twitter, which is not United-States
- QID references [Item] 1-1-1
- --
- color swatch references [Item]
- Japanese console role-playing game
- case of
- --
- appears in work
- --
Wavebuilder combinations[edit]
- pronounced [P] pronounced Wavebuilder: forms result [Item]
- [S] queercoding introduced in dub
- forming from [Item]
- that's not Japanese, that's just a video game 1-1-1
- United States gender roles
- [S] queercoding introduced in dub
- pronounced [P] pronounced Wavebuilder: forms result [Item]
- [S] removing Japanese holidays from video games
- forming from [Item]
- that's not Japanese, that's just a video game 1-1-1
- video game localization
- [S] removing Japanese holidays from video games
- pronounced [P] pronounced Wavebuilder: forms result [Item]
- [S] Brock's jelly donuts
- forming from [Item]
- that's not Japanese, that's just a video game 1-1-1
- Pokémon (TV show)
- [S] Brock's jelly donuts
Usage notes[edit]
This is the motif of people treating fictional media or certain other products as if they did not originate from any particular country. In practice, it is almost always implied rather than explicitly stated. It is most prominent in journalism-type works around online media, although there is also an argument to be made that this attitude sometimes exists within localization teams actually translating and editing video games and TV shows from other countries. The Pokémon TV show became infamous for a scene where the dub team decided to "dub" Japanese rice balls "jelly donuts"; ultimately this happened because there was a conflict between the footage on screen and what the localization team believed "a show from the United States" would generally look like.
The presence of this motif can have varying consequences. Sometimes it is more or less entirely harmless, and a few lines of dialogue changed to "chess" from "shogi" only makes the work more understandable and makes its descriptions less unnecessarily-specific. At other times this motif can become correlated with a number of problems. If people's expectations of what media "normally" look like are at the level of removing rice balls or local holidays or folktales because no one knows what they are, this can amount to people wanting to prescribe that fictional media are an escape from the real world in terms of the existence of diversity and that they do not educate people about other countries. Through this process, works written in Japan and for Japan can become translated into English and become a means for teaching people to not respect the population of Japan and to consistently make fun of tropes and experiences which are "too Japanese" to be circulated in the United States. This in turn also hurts writers born in the United States who want to make anything which resembles the "forbidden" subset of Japanese tropes and experiences purely because contrary to what people think these people do find them to be suitable United-States tropes and experiences. The act of treating an internationally-circulated media series as coming from no particular country should theoretically be harmless, but in practice, it can amount to people treating the understandings and cultural practices of their own specific country as universal to all human beings and standard to the whole world while rejecting that the culture of other countries could ever be the standard.
At this point, one might be tempted to ask whether this kind of prejudice actually matters. If United States people have a xenophobic approach toward media from other countries, but the countries in question are typically well-established Liberal republics or historical global empires once guilty of great violence, is that something that actually hurts anyone? Xenophobia only really "upgrades" into racism when it applies to indigenous populations or tiny subpopulations inside countries which could end up crushed under the pressure of everyone else merely existing around them without accommodating them. It is hard for a bunch of United States people having prejudices far across the ocean to easily crush Japan. However, there is something worth thinking about: the processes by which people accept or reject anime dubs and localized video games are similar to the processes by which people reject any media in general. If someone can reject a Japanese show for being too Japanese, the same person can just as easily reject a TV show written by Black people for being too Alabaman or Michiganian. If someone can reject Kimba the White Lion because "we already have a show or movie about lions", they can just as easily reject a TV show or video game containing Media Representation because "White people already have one of those" and they don't want it unless it's better by that particular group of White people's standards. The dark side of localization is that any particular work will be consumed or analyzed in some particular socially-linked group of people. If that group of people is a crusty, insular group of White people, they will want every work to be designed around their specific population without making reference to the history or traditions or philosophies of other populations that in their mind have nothing to do with them. Of course, this only gets much worse when one realizes that insular groups of White people have the ability to self-select which people the group of people collectively believes is part of its same group and which ones aren't "White enough". A group of people can dynamically edit its internal culture to whatever it wants if it only dumps enough people that don't fit that designated culture. Meanwhile, depending on the people, trying to reintegrate any of these people back into any other group of people can end up in nothing but pain for any of the people who are supposed to educate and change them. So, in the end, people showing any kind of xenophobia can be a warning sign for the possibility that people more or less possess no actual empathy and absolutely no form of intersubjectivity theory will ever work on them.
The inverted form of this concept, that works from one's own country came from no particular country, is not very common to see in the form of this particular motif. Many people may feel like works from the United States are the only kind of works there could ever be, but few people actually go to the particular place of acknowledging the world has many countries and the United States has a particular array of fictional works, but insisting that only a few works from the United States aren't really United-States because those particular works are universal. However, this kind of framing does sometimes come up with online platforms such as YouTube and Twitter — although the platform is owned by an individual belonging to a particular country, people treat the platform as if just because it contains people from other countries it is actually a universal product coming from no particular country.
In regard to such things as animated TV shows, one of the most common framings you hear in the United States is something like that United States cartoons do come from the United States and it is good to have more of them so that works that accomplish particular things contrast all the other things in the United States. In very situational cases people may elevate certain classic works in particular genres like Dragonriders of Pern or Frankenstein to universal because of their genre-defining position, becoming unable to see how any other person, and hence any other country, could have invented them. It could be argued that this is exactly what has happened with Pokémon, that one work under one director has simply become so conflated with such a tall tower of signifiers connected to it around the world that nobody is able to imagine a world where it was invented by any other person or any other person achieved such levels of fame with something similar to it. Perhaps in a few years, people may feel the same way about Undertale and Deltarune, with everyone unable to conceptualize that these games originally came from the United States, but only if they live in Japan.