The Cool Japan policy is responsible for so much of Japan’s reputation it’s unreal. Socialist states should be copying it but doing it even better tbh. It is the single most effective cultural and reputational propaganda to have ever existed.
I know our tendency is to ridicule this stuff but given how effective it has been we should be learning from it.
I think someone here said recently that Japan is culturally Israeli and the parallels between cool Japan and hasbara immediately came to mind (in terms of their success in the west I mean)
Oh yeah I can kinda see that! Japan are far better at that shit though. South Korea is probably the second country successfully implementing it, primarily through kpop and kdrama. Israel might have attempted to but their execution has not been on par with either of those two. Israel doesn’t really have a cultural produce with fandoms, unlike shows or videogames which South Korea and Japan are doing great in compared to their size as countries. What percentage of Japan’s gdp is exported entertainment in the form of shows and games? I don’t know because that’s a very specific niche figure that’s hard to dig into, but it would be an interesting figure to know because that’s your baseline to match if you want to get the same effect in another country. Presumably the tourism industry also greatly relies upon the generated “cool” factor of this export.
South Korea is probably the second country successfully implementing it, primarily through kpop and kdrama.
South Korea also benefits from Korean food being super yummy.
What percentage of Japan’s gdp is exported entertainment in the form of shows and games?
I would guess that stuff like automotive and other industrial things make up a larger share. If I remember right, all of the Subaru Forester SUVs for the North American market were made in Japan until recently.
Yeah what the larger part of the economy is doesn’t really matter to me, what I’m interested in is solely this specific segment of the economy because then you can roughly estimate how big the industry needs to be (in dollars from the export) to have that kind of cultural impact.
With the way some of these Japanese media companies act, it’s like the export market is a pittance to them lol
South Korea is probably the second country successfully implementing it
tbh south Korea doesn’t have the baggage of being super evil ,obv US puppet yada yada but yk what I mean
Yep. To reuse my favorite quote from a user on lemm.ee:
I don’t even see any politics on my instance! listen dude, i actually support china because i play genshin impact
It needs codifying and making official policy. The period of time I can think of where “cool China” was actually a thing was back when Jackie Chan and Jet Li were popular. China should lean in on the kung fu and massively invest in all of its cultural produce.
No offence though they need to make some shit that isn’t just Three Kingdoms rehashed.
Shaolin monks should be doubled down upon as a Chinese equivalent to ninjas in coolness factor.
Videogames, music and animation. Particularly anything targeted at younger audiences. People that build an attachment to something in their youth carry that into their adult years, we’ve seen this with Pokemon.
Incidentally, if Xbox is going to shit the bed and kill itself in the gaming market then a Chinese SOE should enter the console market and that company should produce first-party content, this would massively boost the industry and quality of content in the industry. A Chinese competitor to Nintendo and Sony, both of which are being pushed and supported by the Cool Japan policy btw.
There is so much that can be done.
No offence though they need to make some shit that isn’t just Three Kingdoms rehashed.
That, or Journey to the West.
There’s a perception that the Chinese cultural exports we do get are so “regionalized” that they won’t be accessible to people who didn’t spend years immersed in the culture and history. The local cinema actually ran Ne Zha 2 for a couple weeks but I talked myself out of it figuring I’d lack the references.
Whatever stupid interest you have-- American football, bread, Victotian maids-- Japan has made a shonen battle anime about it that you can enjoy without knowing who the last five emperors were. Is this because we’re importing lighter content from Japan, or is it an engineered plan on their part to produce more marketable media?
There’s a perception that the Chinese cultural exports we do get are so “regionalized” that they won’t be accessible to people who didn’t spend years immersed in the culture and history.
That’s fine! That’s good.
Like, half of anime is exactly that. The audience likes being exposed to the culture and things that don’t easily translate. They like learning specific words and concepts that can’t be translated easily “nakama” being important in One Piece for example. ProZD makes a total joke of this but it’s a good example of what I mean: https://youtu.be/YvNxgHTWIlo
The audience will learn, they will borrow the words that can’t be translated, they will build culture and community around it all, they will gatekeep and get annoyed at people who aren’t hardcore enough, etc etc. It will ALL be positive for China’s overall perception in the longterm. The difference between a normal person and a weeaboo is literally that knowledge and the “haha I know more than you” attitude people get about it. That’s fine. It’s just how it is. All of that shit would wrap itself up in Sinaboo or whatever too, if a commitment to the cultural produce and export was really made.
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
Is this because we’re importing lighter content from Japan, or is it an engineered plan on their part to produce more marketable media?
Probably a bit of both but probably mostly the former. There is a lot of good anime based on Japanese history and traditional arts etc, and anime is well still primarily made for the domestic market, right?
Really, this is probably a decently-sized part of why I’ve tended to favor “going off the beaten path” when it comes to anime, because if I am going to be watching cartoons from a distant country, then I want to feel like I’m Not Supposed To Be Here (cue Half Life 2 airboat music) rather than feel like the cartoons have been curated for me to prop up the PR of the Fascist War Criminal Shrines Country.
…Well, I say this, but my first anime was literally funded by the Japanese government, and was on Netflix.
Wasn’t all that stuff made in Hong Kong before the handover?
Yes but I’m not sure if I’d date it to the handover. It must have been many years later things started to decline in this area? The handover was 1997 and China was definitely still “cool” when Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon was released in 2000.
EDIT: At a vague guess I think things were still fine in 2002-2003? Something happened then to sharply affect opinion here in the UK which was generally not negative at all, in 2002 UK opinion was 16% negative and 65% favourable. China was legitimately regarded as cool in people’s minds.
Propaganda machine go brrrr, Ive never seen any big news network talk about china in good light or even neutral in the last 20 years. The BBC filter with forests all greyed out comes to mind. I guess thats when the US saw that economic liberalization in China would not go the way they wanted and the economic balcanization would not happen.
Idk the only way I have learned about China in some objective way has been with raw economic stats that contradict every “The Economist China will fall” news article while in a 5-20% yearly GDP growth for 20 years. And then I joined this place which has helped me getting rid of liberal brainworms I still had in my mind, the day I actually read the USSR and Chinese constitutions I just read every line thinking “Based” in my mind.
Back to topic, last month I just saw some Chinese anime about Chinese god power scaling but it was about some Victorian era detectives, and the production quality was good, so I guess they are building something up although they dont seem to catch as much atention, I just saw it on my stremio in the most seeded section.
EDIT: At a vague guess I think things were still fine in 2002-2003? Something happened then to sharply affect opinion here in the UK which was generally not negative at all, in 2002 UK opinion was 16% negative and 65% favourable. China was legitimately regarded as cool in people’s minds.
It’s the 2008 Summer Olympics. That was around the time when people were finally exposed to what China was actually like instead of thinking Chinese people were still riding bicycles like Chun Li’s stage from SF2. You started getting press about how China’s air pollution was akin to breathing in car exhaust. Add in the Great Recession where the West is no longer secure about its place in the world and Obama’s pivot to Asia, and it’s not difficult to see how people perception of China would deteriorate.
A lot of graphs have the same pattern: a bump in unfavorability around 2008 and a bigger bump in unfavorability around 2020.
I do think you’re on to something.
Shaolin monks should be doubled down upon as a Chinese equivalent to ninjas in coolness factor.
Xiaolin Showdown would go crazy in 2025 I bet if you showed it to some children, Christy Hui vanished when we needed her the most.
Xiaolin Showdown
is BRICS before it was cool.
First Brazilian main character in my life.
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
I actually support china because i play genshin impact
…I play genshin, wuthering waves, PGR, and ZZZ… I might support China a little too much lol
When I see this kind of stuff actually working for AES states today… I miss the USSR all the time, but in these moments, I really miss the USSR. God, to be an actual commie Soviet sympathiser, sitting quietly at the family dinner table, while my little brother insists to our dad he’s not a communist, the USSR just makes good entertainment media… and I don’t immediately seem like a filthy pinko for backing him up, if I’m careful… Oh, that’d be amazing.
They made some wonderful animation in their time,and some amazing movies
Sadly,hard to access if you don’t know the language
True, they did make good stuff. It just never really was all that popular in the West, and people assume you’re a commie if you mention it, as a Western person with no obvious non-political cultural ties to the region. There’s no believable “I’m not a communist! Soviet films are just really good!”
being a capitalist dystopian ethnostate is so sugoi
Agreed, the mainstream “China bad” clearly has a harder time just from the very existence of TikTok, this would definitely work
Mass produce the sinoboos
This is funny bc in college I was weeaboo adjacent, went to go register for japanese so I could learn to watch anime without the subs, but I was too late in the registration window so all the classes were full. So my 18 year old puppy brain says fuck it, kanji is kanji, I signed up for Mandarin and now I’m a Maoist
I signed up for Mandarin and now I’m a Maoist
It’s true, some say that just being exposed to the raw power of the character 𰻞 will cause you to immediately become a Maoist
I know a nutty Maoist who insists that learning the language of a given revolutionary movement makes you more inclined towards it. Then tells me “you really should learn a foreign language, comrade.” (He’s not wrong in that specific statement, I probably should, but the subtext is absolutely “if there is a known way to turn someone into a Maoist, I want to try said method on you”.)
Ahh, Maoists being sectarian. Always good for a laugh. And hey, he’s slightly less annoying than your average Trot, and he does give good hugs, so dealing with him’s generally worth it. When he’s in a less sectarian than usual mood, anyway. Most of the time if you admit to being an ML around him, he rants at you about the Sino-Soviet Split. Which I’m still mad about too, from the opposite side.
But honestly, what can you expect from a 🐼? It’d be weirder if he wasn’t a Maoist.
“that’s a crazy character I wonder what the simplified version is”
Goes to Google
Mfw
For the record, the simplified version is 𰻝
Yeah, it’s intentionally absurd to the point that if you see a character with this many strokes, there’s a good chance it’s this one — it’s one of the textbook examples of high stroke count 汉字 and I would love to try the noodles someday
The noodles are great. I was going to the mall in my wife’s hometown to get her engagement ring resized, cause apparently she gave me her UK size and that was different from the US size, or something, and in the didi on the way there I saw a biangbiang noodle place, and told her we had to go. Once we dropped off her ring we walked half a mile down the road just to try them, and they were very good. Huge portion at the place I went, too. I ate well beyond comfortably full but I just couldn’t finish it.
tbh most places I’ve been to in China just list the noodles as “biangbiang”
Yeah the place I went to had a sign that just said “Biang Biang 面” outside above the door.
I could cook noodles in the same time it takes to write this character
I’m pretty sure this is the first time I’ve seen unicode biang properly render
THE SAME EXACT THING HAPPENED TO ME LMFAO (except it was the advisor who suggested Chinese as a replacement until I could get into a Japanese class, but then I ended up really liking Mandarin)
Everything I see that’s cool in Japan seems like a creature comfort designed to bandaid the alienation caused by their harsh capitalist work culture. You don’t create restaurants where nobody talks or looks at you because you’re a healthy society.
I completely understand the title! I know it’s super basic stuff but seeing a sentence in the wild and actually understanding it is a big milestone that I just passed(fwiw the title is grammatically incomplete. Ideally it should be ‘哪里有中文的anime(吗), the original title is missing the verb ‘有’ (to have/to be) making the sentence ‘Where [is there] Chinese anime?’. The interrogative is already included in the 哪里 so the ’ 吗’ is optional (can be included for emphasis)
Country that’s like 5k years old with a rich history and culture
or
my anime and bideo games
Honestly I really don’t judge people at all for learning languages because they’re more interested in pop culture than “fine” culture, because God knows that I spend a lot more time listening to Radio Kavkaz Hit for my daily dose of energized dance music than I spend watching documentaries about the like traditional handicrafts of Ivanovo Oblast or whatever. So learning Japanese because you’re a fucking anime weeb is fine, learning Japanese or Chinese because of their long histories and rich cultures is also fine — whatever gets you out the door, right? The important thing is that people are learning languages at all.
No, the thing that frustrates me about this Redditor’s obvious bait is that like… Ne Zha 2? MiHoYo? Anilist’s database of Chinese animation? Is there like any reason at all to say China “doesn’t have anime” aside from that the characters don’t speak Japanese, i.e. simple brand loyalty to a red circle despite no meaningful qualitative differences? I don’t get it.
…Well I guess there is one meaningful qualitative difference between Chinese and Japanese animation, which is that Japan has made 423 animated half-hour TV shows about cute girls doing cute things and China has only made one.
Oh yeah, it’s actually very funny that if you say you’re a Chinese learner, people will assume you’re doing something very sophisticated like reading Maoist literature or classical Chinese poems or something and not just like watching 动画 but if you say you’re a Japanese learner, people will assume it’s definitely for anime
I mean, some Maoists (usually the real cranks, which tend to be ~95% of Maoism in the West) like to insist you absolutely have to learn Chinese to understand Maoism, so it’s probably a self perpetuating assumption in communist spaces specifically. (I’m not a Maoist. I just deal with their nonsense more often than I’d like to.)
I think I heard once that anime weebs comprise actually the majority of Japanese learners, and I will never not feel just a twinge of embarassment knowing that that is me as well.
But hey, at least I can take comfort knowing that my boomer mom also decided to start studying Japanese because of the cartoons, so it’s evidently not just a socially awkward young person thing.
Also an unfortunately not insignificant share of the people in my life can’t distinguish Chinese from Japanese to begin with, so.
Synthesis: Use your mad
感じ漢字 skills to learn 中文 fasterYou kid, but that was literally something I told myself to justify learning Japanese: “It’ll help me learn Chinese… later on.”
Turns out that having reasons for learning languages is overrated, anyways. I still have “justifications” for learning languages but over time you just grow fond of the languages themselves to the point where learning feels self-sustaining. I think I have a decent theoretical knowledge of Chinese by this point but just haven’t built up enough momentum to say I’m actually learning it yet, and who knows when that will be.
…Well I guess there is one meaningful qualitative difference between Chinese and Japanese animation, which is that Japan has made 423 animated half-hour TV shows about cute girls doing cute things and China has only made one.
Really, I think this difference in volume is true in general as well. Whether it’s because the studios are focusing on the domestic Chinese market, lack of government support, or something else, I could only name maybe a handful of donghua that blew up (relatively speaking), whereas there’s a never-ending flood of anime and many of them are absolutely massive by comparison. No matter how much I like Link Click and dislike Demon Slayer, the latter is objectively way more well-known.
The games side of things is an even more obvious split. There are a decent number of Chinese gacha games that do well, but the only big “gamer’s game” I’m aware of is Black Myth: Wukong.
Japan has like a 60 year lead in pop culture exports and the government is aware of that and has been actively pushing further growth in the sector for some time. China is playing catch-up and it’d take quite some time for them to be on parity (barring something like a collapse of the anime industry, which certainly seems possible).
All this to say that yeah it makes sense that people would learn Japanese over Chinese explicitly because there’s more content in that language and that content is also more talked about.
All this to say that yeah it makes sense that people would learn Japanese over Chinese explicitly because there’s more content in that language and that content is also more talked about.
This is also why I’m big on subbing and dubbing anime into a wide variety of languages: if utilized effectively, anime can be genuinely great language learning material not just for its original language but for any language you can think of.
Edit: Obligatory mention of my /c/worldbuilding post about the Open Sign Language Animation Project
motherfuckers like me out here just picking up spoken chinese purely because they’ve watched over 700 hours of chinese costume dramas and im not even joking
yall seen the double or blossom? absolute cinema
I found YouTube links in your comment. Here are links to the same videos on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
Link 1:
Link 2:
Okay but have you considered that anime language has this
NSFL
Seriously if you look at this the volcel police are coming
No really please stop
This is your last chance to click away you monster
do I even want to know?It’s just a silly pun about hentaigana having “hentai” in the name. Hentaigana is really just variants of the letters of the Japanese syllabary; the hen part is incidentally the same character as in hentai but the tai part is written with a different character.
I love that Pooh face. That’s me most of the time talking to other commies who actually read theory (or complete cranks who tell me to read it but clearly haven’t read any themselves).
The VOLCEL POLICE are on the scene! PLEASE KEEP YOUR VITAL ESSENCES TO YOURSELVES AT ALL TIMES.
نحن شرطة VolCel.بناءا على تعليمات الهيئة لترويج لألعاب الفيديو و النهي عن الجنس نرجوا الإبتعاد عن أي أفكار جنسية و الحفاظ على حيواناتكم المنويَّة حتى يوم الحساب. اتقوا الله، إنك لا تراه لكنه يراك.
That reads like bait, why would he consider Chinese if he so clearly doesn’t like it
Everything on Reddit is bait, btw
That poorly-animated marx anime
black myth wukong
I rest my case
There’s a Marx anime?
Primo commie bait. I gotta see that.
It’s called The Leader, and it’s free on youtube IIRC, but you really don’t. Unironically the best part of it is that it gave us two emojis.
Ah. Typical terrible media based on a historical revolutionary, libs love it, for commies it’s a few hours we’ll never get back, type thing? In that case, I’ll pass.
Nothing like that, IIRC it was just really, really boring.
No, yeah, that’s what I mean. Post Cold War era commie bait that’s absolutely not worth sitting through.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Leader_(web_series) it focuses on his romance with Jenny a lot
Also don’t love the title
Ah, probably not my thing then. I don’t like straight romance and I don’t like historical figures reduced to their romantic lives.
That’s not all it is, but features more heavily than I would have thought going in, it also has the debates with Bakunin that get into political stuff, but the general consensus(even among leftist I’ve spoken to/read) is that it isn’t great, there are much better ways to learn about the life of Marx
And I’m sure there’s much better animation out of China
there are much better ways to learn about the life of Marx
Well, obviously, I’m not expecting a good biography from an animated TV show. Just some vaguely commie tinted slop. But even then, there’s a limit to how trashy of a show I’ll watch just because there’s communist ideas or a historical revolutionary in it.
China doesn’t have anime, games
laughs in Chinas rapidly growing animation and gaming industries For fucks sake, watch Link Click.
maybe it’s bc i’m not into anime as a genre of tv (but will watch) but the recaps at the start of every episode got really old for me since I typically don’t catch shows until well after they’re released
least embarrassing redditor
中国的动画常常非常好笑
我记得个叫“不是人”或者“不真人”。非非非常好笑。
日本可以滚蛋
小红书宠坏了我。当我试图点击“翻译”时，我感到困惑🙂
汉字太复杂了
China has the best animated show of season (To be Hero X)
