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> This is a huge psychological factor in the hearts and minds of Japanese people. I think countries mostly fall into one of two baskets: * those who normally
by brabel 3y ago
> This is a huge psychological factor in the hearts and minds of Japanese people.
I think countries mostly fall into one of two baskets:
* those who normally favor their own country's products.
* those who almost universally loathe their own country's products.
I was born in one of the latter types of countries. Where I am from, the word "imported" was absolutely synonym with "better quality". It didn't even matter where it came from, as long as it was not local. This was due to 1970's and 80's protectionist/socialist policies which wanted to make the national industry protected from foreign competition - which it did, but had the side effect of making such industries completely non-competitive with the rest of the world.
Then I moved to a country in the more nationalist group: Australia. The "Australian Made"[1] logo is proudly used by anyone who produces even a tiny bit of their products in Australia (I think there's a minimal threshold for that to be allowed, but didn't really check it)! The most popular car there was the Holden Commodore for decades (recently, Holden closed down production in Australia - so now it's all Toyota), proudly Australian made - even if the mother company, GM, was not Aussie. After traveling around in a few countries, I came to the conclusion that most countries that actually have a competitive industry tend to be more like that. Japan is of course in that category, but so are most developed nations: USA, Canada, Sweden, Germany, Italy, even more recent "arrivals" to the upper league, like South Korea.
Poorer countries tend to be in a paradoxical position where their people will swear they love their nation and will be extremely irritated if any foreigner dares to criticize them, but in private they consider their own industry a joke, will go to great lengths to buy "imported" products, even if they're more expensive (given the high tariffs for imports), have almost zero trust in their compatriots (specially politicians and business people) and totally expect them to be dishonest without further evidence to the contrary, and so on... things that just lead to a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Anyway, I just wanted to say that this is not at all particular to Japanese people :).
[1] https://australianmade.com.au/ https://australianmade.com.au/
- dilawar 3y ago> those who almost universally loathe their own country's products. In Indian rural side, "desi" (native) is almost always synonyms with bad quality, not cheap which is implied, but bad quality. I heard that desi in many foreign country means Indian?! Desi or swadesi (home made) had a special emotional appeal to urban upper middle class leadership during freedom struggle. I don't know how they feel about it. Chandrayaan from ISRO was a very significant moment in this regard. Done by desi engineers educated in desi schools. I am one of those.
- finite_depth 3y agoAmerican here: I've only heard "desi" used as a self-descriptor by South Asian people, usually Indian (but I think Pakistani sometimes as well?). It doesn't carry a negative connotation here that I know of, though I might have missed one that does exist.
- Conan_Kudo 3y agoAs an Indian-American, I've heard variations of this to describe first-gen American born Indians in a negative fashion. Sometimes, the shorthand "ABCD" is used (meaning American Born Confused Desi) to insult American Indians. This is principally used by Indians who either live in India or emigrated to the US and encounter American Indians. (As an aside, it's rather difficult to accurately describe my ethno-national status given the regular confusion with people of the First Nations...)
- samatman 3y agoThere's no need to worry about confusion, Indian-American always means ancestry or origin in India. Native American is the usual term in the US for the indigenous, although many of them call themselves Indians and prefer it, a generation ago it was American Indian, but it's never been the other way around, hyphen or otherwise.
- sfink 3y agoAs a white, vanilla American, I have always understood desi to be very similar to "hick" or "country bumpkin", but from the subcontinent. (And usually applied to people who have never been anywhere near the countryside.)
- have_faith 3y agoThe UK these days is a bit of a mixed bag. The love/loathe difference depends a lot on the product category.
- fiddlerwoaroof 3y agoI was just thinking about the IT Crowd joke where the fire extinguisher’s flammability is explained because it was “Made in Britain”.
- em-bee 3y agoit is particular in just how strong this sense in japan is. the isolation policy in the past didn't come from nothing. everywhere else it generally also differs by industry more than in japan.