rodo's journal

Very interesting post. I can relate to a lot of this, having spent time in both English and Japanese-language fandom. It's really frustrating sometimes trying to bridge the cultural gap, especially when both sides tend to make value judgements about the other (i.e. much of Japanese fandom views foreign fans as rude, intrusive art thieves, whereas it often seems like a large part of English fandom [not my neck of the woods, but slash/Western media fandom, meta-writing fans, acafen, etc] regard Japanese fandom as unsophisticated, juvenile, uncaring about characterization, etc.) which they would realize are patently untrue if they were only able to read each others' languages. I can't count the number of times I've heard "Oh, but Japanese fandom doesn't write fanfic, do they?" from English-speaking fans, gah. It seems like German-language fandom is more off the radar for most English-fandom readers -- or at least it always has been for me, since I sadly don't know any German -- so it's interesting to hear about these sorts of cultural differences.