I’ve always been sensitive to the precision of language. As I said before, I hate it since I was pretty young when people put gender words in front of a person’s title like “a female programmer” or “a male nurse”, or when they assume everyone in some general terms that don’t refer to anybody are males. That doesn’t mean that I’m a radical feminist so I believe that women can compete with men as 50-50 in all aspects(although I hope so), but I simply think that such descriptions are intellectually confusing. First, if there are no gender prefixes before a word, it describes a collection of all genders in default. For example, the term “person” includes both men and women. Therefore, I feel disturbed whenever I heard something like “people should marry wives, have sons and protect them” — that doesn’t mean that I support women to get liberation from marriages (although I do). I dislike this description just because it may ignore some possible cases and cause some logical fallacies. Then, if you append a gender word before a generic term(like “a female programmer”), it could falsely assume the existence of some relevance between the gender and the context where the word appears. In this case, the gender words are redundant which wastes the reader’s attention. Since we are talking about industries but not parenthood, we should focus on one’s skill level but not his or her fertility. Nevertheless, most people seem to have little interest in grammar and scientific testing, they just let the broken grammar goes viral for centuries.
I would like to explain the controversial Natsumatsuri topics in the same way. Japanese animation was getting more and more popular when I graduated from elementary school. I did a lot of research on the moe culture at that time. I finally decided that the etymology of “moe” is just some otaku men their feelings. “Loli” is also not a decent word. In my opinion, it is just a euphemism for some Japanese pedophiles to talk about the sexual fantasies of little girls legally. However, several years later, “moe” got viral in China. It almost replaced the word “cute” in my peer group. And cute girls proudly claim that they are “little loli”, which makes them feel exotic and fashionable.
Chinese people extremely lack art in their daily life. That’s why they are obsessed to imbibe aesthetic feelings from every exotic word. People call “story” “monogatari“, call “Wednesday” “suiyoubi“, and call “too ashamed to face people” “ningenshikkaku“. Even a boba tea shop could use the word “の” but not the regular “of” to put some exotic feeling on its brand. As sexually hungry male programmers always add a gender word before their female peers’ title when they meet them and fall into an erotic fantasy, Japanese culture fans in China also never translate the Japanese words into proper Chinese words but just use the vocabulary as they are. They build their identity in this way. We never enjoyed the beauty when we were young, we just wore our blue-grey sportswear and wasted our youth. That’s why they commenced wearing Japanese high school girls’ sailor suits and Lolita suits after graduation. We can only fulfill our destiny when we wear such corsets.
Learn some foreign languages, please: Although “祭” only means “ritual” in modern Chinese, the word “matsuri“(祭り) just means “festival” nowadays. I remembered that there was a club called “nijigen“(二次元, “two dimension”) in my high school. At that time, the word “nijigen” had not yet been known and the concept of it had not gotten distorted. This was a super visionary name. A friend who loves Japanese animation once complained to me: “Japanese high school students have their ‘gakuensai‘ , and what do we do?” I just had to tell him, “gakuensai” means “campus fete”. We, the privileged high school students in Beijing, also have this every year. There are a lot of Japanese-based terms which are much more sensitive than “Natsumatsuri“: Bilibili calls their paid subscribers “kanchou” and “teitoku“, which are derived from Kantai Collection, a Japanese strategy game inspired by Imperial Japanese Navy. I believe this one is much more terrible than “the Summer Festival”. A lot of Japanese cultural products in China have changed their name or terms in it. I guess the rest won’t last long.
Of course, I understand that doesn’t matter at all. As men — actually, not only men but rather people who approve of the order — love to assume “a person” is a man by default. They distinguish the Subject and the Other in this way and get on the right track in life. We must create some confrontation intentionally to start the great struggle. The story begins so: Since my rigorous parents and professors never give me a chance to express myself, the kind and gentle Japanese people must be the most lovely ones. Animation saikouda! Since Japanese people like to worship war criminals, so every festival in Japan is the legacy of militarism. We must defeat them! Misunderstanding is just a pretext to create conflicts, which is their real purpose. All phenomena in which desire and anger overwhelm intellect and logic are much the same. Within the most profound longing and repression, I am too cruel for telling them this truth, aren’t I?
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