8.31.18 - Some Cat Appropriating Japan

I've meant to post this for over two and a half years. Finally, I can delete this image from my phone.

This image may get deleted from the internet at some point, so if you can't see it, here is a phone screenshot from January 11, 2016, the day after David Bowie died. At that moment, Twitter's list of worldwide trending topics was topped, obviously, by "David Bowie." But the second worldwide trending topic was David Bowie written in Japanese.

This image speaks volumes about the reality of "cultural appropriation." Often, we are told by the woke police that the legacy of colonialism was so rapacious, so damaging, that we legacy colonists are de facto forbidden from doing anything to borrow from the cultures of our former victims. Usually that means "my culture is not your costume" posts around Halloween. Questionable, sometimes. But in extremis, that has been taken to mean that yoga, foreign food, and foreign music / stories / folklore is forbidden to Americans and Europeans. This is where it starts to get ridiculous.

Now, David Bowie existed in a time before a lot of this sensitivity, and certainly before its more manufactured exponents. But in the light of the modern day, it’s fair to ask whether his use of Japanese culture was appropriating.

Like many arty Westerners, he loved Japanese culture. And a lot of his costumes drew from Japanese influences. At first glance, it would seem he’s perpetuating a damaging claim over a colonized culture. (The fact that Japan has been both occupied and occupier tends not to filter into these conversations.)

But it's instructive to look at what set his application of Japanese culture apart, and in the opinion of me and clearly the Japanese, elevated it. The way he infused his style with those influences was to actually commission costumes from Japanese designers; to involve the culture directly in the creation of something that wasn’t just Japanese, but his take on it. In that way, he gave the culture agency and a living, breathing role in his art instead of just a traced-over representation. I think that defines the critical difference between “appropriation” and something closer to valid art. The validity of the art, by the way, has a lot to do with the value of the appropriation.

Anyway, I take the fact that in Japan, Bowie was beloved, as proof of my point. After all, we all like to see our cultures interpreted in different ways. This idea that it’s always necessarily offensive is a joke. What’s interesting, instead, is to have someone use your cultural motifs to create something truly new. In other words, there’s a right way to do cultural appropriation, and it’s equal parts a) giving the culture a living agency in your work, and b) creating work that’s valuable in an artistic sense.