Japanophilia

• 1. Introduction

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  Japanophilia names an outside interest in Japanese culture, people, and history. Charles E. Tuttle Company once called the Irish-Greek writer Lafcadio Hearn "a confirmed Japanophile" in the foreword to his own books. Yet the word covers everyone from eighteenth-century botanists to twenty-first-century message board regulars. How did a term that once praised the cultivated foreign expert become, within two centuries, a label fought over on English-language forums? This documentary traces that shift, from the closed shores of a sakoku-era Japan to the imageboards where a word for admiration became an insult. Sometimes it becomes one again.

• 2. Scholars And A Soldier

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  Carl Peter Thunberg and Philipp Franz von Siebold carried Japanese flora, artworks and everyday objects back to Europe. They worked while the shogunate enforced sakoku, a policy of near-total isolation from foreign contact. Their specimens gave Europeans their first real curiosity about a country almost nobody could enter. That late eighteenth and early nineteenth century interest is where the term Japanophile first took hold.

  Jules Brunet offers a sharper case. A French Army officer, he took part in the Boshin War, Japan's civil conflict of that era. He became known for the role he played inside that conflict rather than admiring it from a distance. Decades later, a different kind of admiration would take hold, this time among British writers who prized Japan for reasons that had nothing to do with flora or war.

• 3. Looking East For Lessons

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  In 1904, Beatrice Webb described Japan as a "rising star of human self-control and enlightenment." She praised what she called its "innovating collectivism," along with the "uncanny" purposefulness of Japan's "enlightened professional elite." H. G. Wells shared that admiration, naming the ruling elite of his book A Modern Utopia "samurai" after the Japanese warrior class.

  Britain's industrial output was declining in this period while Japan and Germany's productivity rose. London drew two different conclusions from that shift. Germany read as a rival power to watch, while Japan read as a potential ally worth studying. Alfred Stead's 1906 book Great Japan: A Study of National Efficiency pushed British commentators to look to Japan for lessons in efficiency. That vogue did not survive World War I, and British interest cooled once the war ended.

  Efficiency and empire were not the only things Europeans found worth borrowing. One Spanish general would find something else in Japan entirely: a code of conduct he wanted to import wholesale into his own army.

• 4. A Creed Imported Whole

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  General José Millán-Astray, founder of the Spanish Legion, said the samurai code Bushido exerted a great influence on him. He called it "a perfect creed." He argued that "the Spanish legionnaire is also a samurai and practices the Bushido essentials: Honor, Valor, Loyalty, Generosity, and Sacrifice." He predicted Spain could become a great power like Japan by adhering to that code's principles.

  Millán-Astray backed his admiration with a text. He produced a Spanish translation of Inazo Nitobe's book Bushido: The Soul of Japan, and he wrote its prologue himself. A military man translating a Japanese ethics book for Spanish readers marks a literal transplant of Japanese thought into a European institution.

  The next transformation would not come from generals or colonial officers at all. It would come from cartoons, cheap videotapes, and teenagers who had never left home.

• 5. From Scrolls To Screens

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  During the 1970s and 1980s, Western Japanophilia went through a real paradigm shift. Attention moved away from the traditional arts, philosophy and military codes that had defined it until then. Interest swung toward modern popular culture instead, following Japan's postwar economic miracle. The international syndication of anime and the translation of manga introduced a new demographic to Japanese aesthetics.

  The kawaii, or cute, aesthetic spread globally out of shōjo media and its merchandise. Exported science fiction media built grassroots fan networks at the same time. The Cartoon/Fantasy Organization, founded in the United States in the late 1970s, ranks among the earliest Western anime clubs. It circulated unsubtitled VHS tapes through mail-order networks.

  That subculture spread fast across the Anglosphere. Dedicated fan groups formed in Australia and the United Kingdom as well as the United States. Their networks built the social infrastructure that would later be recognized as global otaku culture.

  Academic and sociological interest shifted alongside the fandoms themselves. Western commentators began studying Japan as a major producer of distinct post-modern pop-cultural aesthetics. That marked a real change from treating the country mainly as an economic powerhouse. That grassroots fandom would soon need its own vocabulary, and fans would coin words far less flattering than "Japanophile" ever was.

• 6. Words That Wound And Reclaim

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  Wapanese, a portmanteau of white, or wannabe, and Japanese, appeared in the early 2000s. It served as a derogatory term for a non-Japanese person unhealthily obsessed with modern Japanese pop culture. It targeted fans fixated on anime, manga, visual novels, light novels and Pokémon specifically. It entered the Urban Dictionary website in 2003 and spread widely on the imageboard site 4chan.

  Weeaboo, often shortened to weeb, first appeared in a 2005 The Perry Bible Fellowship webcomic. The comic used the word with no reference to Japanese culture at all. That same year, 4chan administrator Christopher Poole added a site filter replacing wapanese with weeaboo. Users adopted the substitute term themselves soon after.

  Weeaboo began as an insult, yet some of the people it targeted reclaimed it. They use the word about themselves now in an ironic or self-deprecating way.

  Justin Sevakis drew a line between the two ideas in a blog post on Anime News Network. He wrote that loving Japanese culture is not itself a problem. He argued a fan crosses into weeaboo territory only once they turn obnoxious, immature and ignorant about the culture they claim to love.

  Matt Jardin, writing for the Alaska Dispatch, described weeaboos as people who blindly prefer anything Japanese while looking down on everything else, regardless of merit. Sevakis's distinction and Jardin's description never quite agree on where that line sits, leaving each new fan of Japanese culture to draw it for themselves.