Tattoo You
I've always wondered about those Chinese- or Japanese-character tattoos worn by lots of (white) people nowadays. Inevitably, there's now a blog, Hanzi Smatter, which is dedicated to deciphering such tattoos. Some good representative posts: "Exile Husband Retrievable Arrow with a String Attached to It" and "Abusive Husband Pimps Me Out" (neither is safe for work). In the absence of any actual commentary on how these tattoos reflect the contingency of cross-cultural exchange, the spread of memes, the postmodern use of the displayed body, &tc &tc, I'll just say that sometimes white people can be really really stupid.
posted by Christopher Tassava at Monday, January 17, 2005
2 Comments:
All of that's very true. I should have made it clearer that I don't think everyone who gets a tattoo like these (Japanese, Chinese, Hebrew, Russian, whatever) is stupid. As you say, Elise, the stupidity arises when the tattooed don't find out what they're having inscribed on their bodies, and end up with something insipid or moronic or just painfully ironic. The visual quality of the characters is, I think, a separate issue: I don't think that many people getting tattooed with kanji characters are doing it for the aesthetics of these particular characters, versus others they might choose. (Probably some are.) Rather, I think many such choices - especially those highlighted on this site - stem from a desire to seem hip by coopting something from the inscrutable East. Orientalism via body art, maybe. That makes the ludicrous tattoos even more so, if not condescending and borderline racist. But again, someone who researches their choice and figures out that, yeah, it means "wind" and not "fart" is in another category, one much more akin to getting a tattoo - or, hell, a necklace - with, say, a Celtic cross or an ankh.
MEMO: It ain't just white folks wearing tatoos with Chinese/Japanese characters. This is actually pretty popular among different ethnic groups as well.
And have you noticed how many Chinese people from Mongolia (with no knowledge of English) have tatoos with English words. Really, I saw a dude from Mongolia with a tatoo that read "Hamburgers Rule"!
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