When a person walks up to me, sporting a friendly and unassuming grin, to say, “You’re Japanese? I love Japanese culture,” I cringe inside.

At first I thought I was just being selfish, thinking that Japan was my identity and only mine, and I should be glad and grateful that Americans appreciate my culture—as if the approval of the West were a necessary validation. It was only as I began to learn about the social significance of racial and cultural relations, most notably through White appropriation of Black culture, that I realized that I did, indeed, have a right to my feelings, and that my frustration is, in fact, legitimate. Even though the Japan-lover had friendly intentions and wanted to pay me what she perceived as a compliment, the cultural effects of her statement upon Asian-Americans, in the context of a marginalized group of people in American society, is unchanged.

Jacques Derrida promoted the idea of the signifier and the signified, and this is an important distinction when understanding cultural appropriation. Sushi, kimonos, they are simply objects, signifiers. Objects have no inherent meaning; they exist and later are assigned an essence, a signified, a meaning. But the fact that the signified are constructs does not make them any less significant socially. After all, race is a human construct as well, but that hasn’t changed the fact that it has played an immense role in the anthropological dynamic of human history. So I understand that meaning can change, culture is imperfect and culture can change; but when I argue that cultural appropriation is oppressive and offensive, I do so because appropriation indicates a dominant culture taking parts of a minority culture, which it has oppressed, for itself without permission or respect for the feelings of the people of that culture. Some contend that this is just cultural borrowing; that cultural exchange is beneficial to both cultures. The issue with cultural appropriation is that the minority culture is frequently treated as “Other” and pressured to assimilate, while members of a dominant culture may put on aspects of an “exotic” minority culture for fun, to look cool and worldly, and can take it off whenever they please, escaping the marginalization minorities face. Cultural appropriation often has roots in colonialism or other forms of oppression, which established the dominant culture as dominant.

When you demand the right to take from another, marginalized culture for your own expression and identity, you make it all about you.

In the context of appropriation of Asian cultures in the United States, I frequently find that manga enthusiasts seem much less enthusiastic toward discussions of the internment of Japanese-Americans during the Second World War, the lack of representation of Asian-Americans in the media except in tropes of either sterile math genius study drones or, in the case of women, sexualized and subservient. To Westerners, Japanese customs may seem submissive and subservient, but that is simply the traditional, expected way to show respect to others, and how dare the West come in and decide otherwise?

In middle school, some of my peers annoyed me by bragging that they were “ninjas,” but ignoring me, bored, when I took the opportunity to explain the history of ninjas as Japanese peasants pushing back against the power of the samurai.

The problem with Asian appropriation is that many Japan-lovers fetishize the objects of Japan--the kimonos, the ninjas, the manga—while ignoring and never bothering to learn the rich cultural history and symbolism behind them. Japanese enthusiasts tell me about how subservient and polite the people are, how beautiful the kimonos are; they’re far less likely to talk with me about the mistreatment of Japanese and Chinese immigrants on the West Coast during the 19th and 20th centuries, the cruelty of the atomic bombs, Manzanar. I have no problem with people liking Japanese culture; I cringe because, like Pavlov’s dogs, I respond to past experience, which has been a series of well-meaning individuals finding their passion in my culture’s appropriation.

The difference between being truly passionate about Japanese culture and simply appropriating the bits you like is that appropriation gives no concern for the cultural context and history—it simply, in a display of supreme entitlement and privilege, tramples on the proverbial tatami mat with shoes on to reach the kimono. Worse, American corporations, shamelessly seeking a profit in a classic display of capitalism reinforcing racism, also sell appropriated knockoffs such as fake kimonos to please their audience—think of Urban Outfitters’ attitude toward Native American cultures. Appropriation does not respect or empower minority cultures; it exoticizes them, this spreading the idea in the collective subconscious that nonwhite cultures are the “Other.”

My mother came to the United States from the Osaka area in her thirties as a graduate student. Even in Japan, Western hegemony prevailed and Japan was quickly growing Americanized, so she grew up believing the standard of beauty was big, round, white eyes, preferably blue or green, and a tall American nose. Even now she calls herself ugly, and says she thinks all Asians are ugly. This. Is. Coming. From. An. Asian. She was taught to hate her own culture. In her shame, and her desire to protect me from the subtle social discrimination she faced for her broken English, she did not teach me Japanese as most Japanese families taught their children, and attempted to raise me as an all-American girl to the best of her ability. It was only later that I developed my aching love for Japan, for all its flaws, as part of my cultural identity. As a toddler, I’d wanted blonde hair and blue eyes, like most of the Disney princesses. (In continuation of the tradition of marginalization, a little Asian girl was given only one princess onto whom to project her identity, Mulan; she did not appeal to me for defying my budding notions of what I thought it meant to be a girl.)

So when America tells my mother her Asian looks are strange or ugly, and then decides to take only the parts of our culture it likes while mocking the rest, it’s incredibly disrespectful and simply perpetuates the idea that “exotic” cultures are there for the plunder—an idea dating back to 1492.

In a scintillating article which highlights the problem brilliantly, Ruth Tam of the Washington Post describes the experience of her family’s food going from “Chinese grossness” to “America’s hottest food trend.” My mother has had a similar experience. When she first arrived in our rural town, a friend asked her what sushi was, and, upon her explanation, exclaimed something along the lines of, “Raw fish? Seaweed? Eew!”

Then the sushi fad came at last to our little town. “Oh, I love sushi!” the friend gushed, twenty years later. Now there are at least five sushi restaurants in our area, although my mother states that they are not like the Japanese food she ate at home. I’m happy to be able to enjoy somewhat-Japanese food locally, although I am sad that Americans may be misled about Japanese cuisine.Japanese people in Japan are guilty of the same offense. Japan tried to follow in the West’s footsteps into prosperity and power through imperialism (in a supremely double-standard move, the same countries which had scrambled for Africa condemned the yellow-skinned chinky-eyed savages), and took control of the Korean Peninsula in 1910. From that time until the end of the Second World War, Japanese public school teachers officially taught their students that Koreans were second-class citizens, and Japanese children taunted their Korean peers, saying things like, “Eew, you smell like kimchi!” Two generations later, fashionable young Japanese exclaim, “Oh, I love kimchi!” It’s become trendy now. We still haven’t properly apologized for all we did during the war, which makes it all the worse.

What I want to say this: Japan, like all cultures, is not a souvenir or a hip new accessory. Japan is in my blood; I’ve constructed it into my essence. Japan is in the sensation of butterfly wings which are my mother’s lips as she kisses me at night, or in the silken feel of her worn-paper yellow skin which she is so ashamed of but which I love so dearly. Japan is in the sounds my mouth makes as I struggle to learn the language of my ancestry, and it is in my tears of Transcendentalist joy so intense it pains me as I turned away from the evening mountains of Arashiyama and her cherry trees in full bloom like pink predawn clouds to go back to Osaka on the train. It is in that broken English peppered with Japanese syllables that my mother and I speak when we are alone. And human passion and anguish are not things to be worn on a keychain.