Tom Galvin <tom### [at] impnospamorg> wrote:
> Context is everything.  The Irish who spoke Gaelic were ghetto for 
> generations.  The American Indians and Australian Aborigines were 
> repeatedly pressured to assimilate and renounce their ancestors ways. 
> Now they are the lauded as guardians of their cultural heritage.

  Some hundreds of years ago European colonialists had this utopistic
(and rather arrogant) concept that the cultures they were colonizing were
primitive (technically true), undeveloped and in many case even barbaric,
and that they were there to "bring light" to these backwards cultures,
educate them and bring them the joys of modern civilizations and high
culture. Generally speaking the primitive barbaric cultures had no value
and should be left behind.

  The results were not purely bad, though. Many of said civilizations did
benefit from the education and technology brought by the Europeans, raising
their standard of living significantly (just look at the recent history of
Zimbabwe to see what happens when this is undone). Of course sabotaging
local cultures wasn't always all that good either.

  Nowadays the trend has reversed itself, sometimes even to the point of
detriment. In many European countries the local culture is despised and
even considered "primitive and backwards", while cultures of distant lands
are utopized (to the point of actually ignoring and refusing to acknowledge
any negative sides of those cultures). The preservation of distant cultures,
even when those people immigrate to Europe, is so idolized that it actually
causes more problems than it's worth.

  One would think that the ideology of getting rid of cultures of distant
lands and replacing them with the country's own culture would be a thing
of the distant past, not being practiced for a century or so. However, in
some forms this ideology has persisted to surprisingly recently.

  A curious example of this is the importing of anime from Japan to the US.
Even as recently as the mid (and even late) 90's, there was an odd principle
among these importers that the Americans would not understand the Japanese
culture, they would want to see everything assimilated to their own culture,
and hence localization of the anime went often far beyond simply dubbing it.
In some cases anime series and movies were severely modified, re-edited,
merged and even partially redone in order to remove all possible cultural
references to Japan, replacing them with American equivalents. In some cases
this went even so far as to actually changing the script itself (by changing
dialogue, the order of events, cutting things out, adding original material...)

  It wasn't until the 2000's that the pressure from anime fans finally sunk
in and the importers have started preserving the anime series as well as
possible (many even going so far as to offering completely unmodified
versions, just with English subtitles, something almost unthinkable in
the US of the 80's and early 90's.)

  Censorship in imported anime still exists, though, due to some forms of
cultural dissonance.

-- 
                                                          - Warp

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