Why do nerds love East Asia so much?

[MGibster]

We had to read that book when I was a history student. People should read it for themselves and judge and read the critical responses to it. But the one thing I will say is it isn't an uncontested thesis and it is the kind of thing that often gets dropped in these conversations like a rhetorical hammer.

I have an academic background, and it's very easy to find a theory you like, whether it's a Marxist interpretation of history, the Sapir Whorf hypothesis, world systems theory, or the Annales school of history, and interpret things through that particular lens even when it's not necessarily appropriate. We were discussing a story in my Gender & Science Fiction course, and some of the class saw the story through the lens of various gender theories while I saw it as a story about miscegenation. Who was right? Me of course, but that's not important now.

Perhaps someone who is familiar with Indian pop culture could speak to this but I do not know that Hindus are as happily sacrilegious as Westerners and East Asians. Like, I am not sure that it is nearly as accepted to exploit Hindu mythology the was you can exploit Christian, Shinto, and Buddhist mythology. And if you cannot work Hindu mythology into your Indian fantasy, well, what elements do you have to draw on?

That never stopped us before! Okay, I kid. I kid. Obviously we should be considerate of the beliefs of others. I recall an episode of Xena where she rubbed shoulders with various Indian gods. There weren't riots in the streets or anything, but there were some Hindu groups in the United States who voiced their displeasure that the writers treated their gods as fictional characters.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

And if you cannot work Hindu mythology into your Indian fantasy, well, what elements do you have to draw on?

Thousands of years of history? The first planned cities on earth? The massive number of cultures and languages, living in one of the most fertile regions of Earth, with spectacular natural surroundings and animals, all of which is bordered by a beautiful ocean -- and a rich history of piracy, notably for gaming -- and the world's largest mountains?

 

[S'mon]

Orientalism (book) - Wikipedia

Nothing to do with east-Asia really. Said was complaining about European depictions of the Near East & Middle East. The Orientalist tropes he complained about don't really figure in pop-culture depictions of east-Asia (although there were separate negative depictions of China in the 19th & early 20th century, mostly in the USA). Which is arguably a bit odd since east Asia has or had just as many harems and concubines as the Middle East. I guess there's "The Brides of Fu Manchu", but east-Asian lust/degeneracy isn't really a major trope. I guess there were never east-Asian pirates and raiders taking Europeans into slavery en masse, that may be part of it.

In any case this has no relation to geek obsession with ninjas & samurai that I can see. Ninjas and Samurai are 'cool', the same way Vikings and Spartans are 'cool'.

 

[Bedrockgames]

I have an academic background, and it's very easy to find a theory you like, whether it's a Marxist interpretation of history, the Sapir Whorf hypothesis, world systems theory, or the Annales school of history, and interpret things through that particular lens even when it's not necessarily appropriate.

Definitely not an academic. Just have a BA. I don’t know much about literary lenses but I was very into the annales school as a student (I gravitated towards annales and microhistory). But another issue I could see is these are often very Porous schools of thought and something like annales spanned a number of decades, meaning something very different from one era to another (when I was a student the focus in historiography was more on people like Braudel). I would also imagine these lenses can change when moving from one discipline to another (in my history courses for example Said was largely relevant to just Middle East courses). In my courses on China it never came up (our instructor in those courses was Chinese, so not sure if that was a factor). I graduated nearly twenty years ago though, I am sure lot has changed

 

[Bedrockgames]

I was just watching King Boxer again last night and thought of this thread. For those who aren’t familiar it wasn’t the first, but it is usually pointed to as the movie that started the American Kung fu craze. I think the way geeks and nerds approach this stuff is relevant. When I first saw this movie I found myself watching every kung fu craze film I could find, starting with the Chinese Boxer. I have plenty of non-nerdy friends who love king boxer but they wouldn’t likely feel that need to watch everything and try to get a better sense of the movies context. The same thing happened to me with wuxia. I am just a fan, no expert so don’t take my overview of the craze as gospel. But I think the point is geeks have this tendency to hear a piece of music and dive into all the music that helped influence that piece, or see a movie and try to find all the movies it was influenced. So I think when you meet a geek or nerd who got into anime, they will often have consumed it at a level that seems obsessive (because when we get into something, we really get into it).

 

[Senior_WotC_Janitor]

Your premise seems racist.

 

[MGibster]

Thousands of years of history? The first planned cities on earth? The massive number of cultures and languages, living in one of the most fertile regions of Earth, with spectacular natural surroundings and animals, all of which is bordered by a beautiful ocean -- and a rich history of piracy, notably for gaming -- and the world's largest mountains?

In the current social climate, because I'm not of an Asian persuasion, I wouldn't touch the Indus Valley civilization with a 10 foot pole for the purpose of creating a game setting. Unless I had several members of my team either from the area or descended from immigrants who came from the area. To do otherwise would mean I'd be excoriated online for cultural appropriation, orientalism, or or having the temerity to mix up different groups and time periods even though it's a fantasy game. That's an awful lot of trouble for a game that probably wouldn't sell too many units.

 

[Umbran]

Your premise seems racist.

Mod Note:
If you want to raise a criticism of the premise, it really should be more constructive than a one-sentence spitball drive-by. As it is, this comes off as threadcrap or trolling, which isn't great.

 

[Ralif Redhammer]

Wait, did someone say ninjas?

The Official Ninja Webpage: REAL Ultimate Power!!!!

Holy moly, is that a blast from the past!

 

[Willie the Duck]

I think people have touched on all the big parts. Western audiences have had a fascination with the 'exotic' Orient and Indian subcontinent since colonial days. For the U.S., thousands of ~18 y.o. GIs stationed in Japan post-WWII refocused the specifics to Japan*. Japan's rapid adoption of exporting media and toys made it easy for people looking for genre-material to latch on to specific facets of it. I think the slow diffusion and versioning** of different components of the purchasable media landscape helped by making each generation feel that their iteration of it was different from their parents (and maybe even somehow rebellious/'you-wouldn't-get-it-dad'-ish). I think the slow scope-change of nerd-dom in general from economic niche to demographic to mainstream sub-line to general mainstream category also gave many subsequent iterations of this process renewed life.
*China-centric obsession coming from immigration, taking over the 'Asian restaurant' industry while the Japanese were in camps, and a bunch of other things that will be hard to discuss without veering excessively into politics
**from direct ports (with subtitles or dubbing) to made-for-export products to US-made interpretations to splicing in American protagonists to using existing footage/animation but chopping things up and changing the narrative and back around to direct ports in a merry little loop.

So, in a basic, broad definition, "nerds" (or "geeks") are "people who really like stuff".

Part of the answer of "Why do nerds like this?" is that nerds like things!

Outside of recursive definitions like 'nerds are people who like nerdy things; nerdy things are those that nerds like,' one of the best definitions I've heard someone use for nerds is 'people who like a number of activities (notably entertainment media) that is focused, modular, and easy to obsess about/pore over the intricacies of, and possibly to gain in-group cachet by having a wider knowledge than others in relation to the subject.' It's not a 100% perfect matchup, but useful and explains a lot (in particular how nerds and sports fans traditionally have butted heads, but also behaved in similar ways; also why Greek/Norse/your own favorite mythology is another favorite nerd-topic). You do not need to know the complex interplay of feudal Japanese culture to enjoy tales of samurai or ninja, but once you do enjoy those tales, they are great to pick apart and learn more about and maybe do learn those complex interplays of the culture.

Enthusiasm doesn't necessarily equate to understanding, by any stretch of the imagination.

The easy buy-in I alluded to is both blessing and curse. We've probably each been that person at least some of the time.

From a specifically D&D view, I think Oriental Adventures' creation traces a direct line back to James Clavell's Shogun 1975 and the 1980 TV series adaptation. Six million copies sold, even before the TV show, and the TV show itself garnered the second highest Nielsen ratings to date.

And the Monk class supposedly got into oD&D because of Kung Fu and The Remo Williams/Destroyer novels.

Sure. But most people don't think of Korea at all when talking about tropes (like Shaolin Monks, Samurai, or Ninja). Which is a shame, because many historians argue that the Samurai were based off of the Korean Hwarang, which pre-dated samurai by centuries. If you ask your western nerd to think of a famous Chinese or Japanese trope, and you'll get an answer. Ask about Korean, or Philippine, or other and you won't find many. How many people know who the Hwarang were compared to how many know what samurai are?

I think when people say east asian, they mean Korea, China or Japan. But if we are talking 70s through the 90s, I think you are right most people were thinking Japanese or Chinese (though if you go back a suprising number of those movies involve Tang Soo Do, Hapkido or Taekwondo).

But Korea is pretty popular. If you go on Netflix there are a ton of Korean dramas. I used to watch a lot of Chinese dramas and it was actually hard to find them on certain platforms because they were mixed in with the K dramas (and kind of overwhelmed by them). My wife is very into K Pop and that is a huge global phenomenon (seems to have some traction with geeks and nerds too). Taekwondo has been one of the more popular martial arts (and it is an olympic sport). I started out in taekwondo for that reason when I first got into martial arts.

I agree. The Japan/China focus exists because of specifics of a place and time and the cultural and economic situation of the second half of the 20th century (also, Japan and China are two of the top three economies in the world). It's unsurprising that this dynamic is shifting (although Japan in particular has a lot of first-to-market advantages that will keep it in prominence for a long while). That Korean is making such great strides in the past 2-3 decades kinda points out that they have some really interesting stuff (culture and media-wise) going for them. I would really like it if Vietnamese, Cambodian, Laotian, and Hmong cultures had similar moments in the sun, with regard to international cultural prominence.