@1 that's not how you spell "imperial" btw. But sure, you go ahead and wear your racism on your sleeve like that.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but your cultural heritage IS many people's fetish. It seems common, even.

@2

They didn't know how to spell "paid," either, in the only post they will ever make on that account.

So somebody -- presumably an editor -- changed the headline on this article from "How to Appreciate Japanese Culture Instead of Creepily Fetishizing It" to the current version, "My Japanese Heritage Is Not Your Fetish," to take advantage of the "My Culture Is Not Your Prom Dress" craze that was big last month. A week after its publication with the milder headline, the more confrontational headline has given the article new life as fresh commenters predictably show up to yell.

The article itself contains some brief cultural history lessons and a list of events for anybody who is interested, as well as the sentence "To non-Japanese people who want to engage with Japanese culture, I wholeheartedly encourage you to do this." Nowhere is the word "appropriation" used or implied.

The author's dismay is more directed at the weebs and fratboys who creeped on her when she was a teenage girl than at white people who think kimonos are cool. But headlines are everything I guess.

Creeping at Japanese schoolgirls is such a cultural tradition in Japan that the JR East platforms have huge posters telling any leered-at schoolgirls to call the railway police on the creepers.

Just because something is a cultural tradition doesn’t make it good.

You obviously never lived in Japan for an extended period of time. If you did, you would realize that fetish over young Japanese girls is not exclusive to 'weebos'.

Do you know 'idol culture'? Because that is a bigger thing than hanami. Moreover, based on your article, I feel that you find butoh, and/or bon odori to be extoic because you are actually perceiving them through a foreigner's lens even if you do not realize it. I am sorry, but you are not Japanese by any stretch of the imagination.

Seriously, people need to stop with the 'MUH CULTURE' crap. Just because an individual has one drop of the heritage from the culture in question does not make that culture his/hers. Especially when the said individual is unable to speak, read or write the language.

I hail from overseas, I speak, read & write Chinese & Japanese fluently. Yet, I do not claim them to be 'my' culture as if I made the thing, copyrighted it and own it. No, I am merely a major subscriber to them.

Just one comment. Some of us have lived much of our lives in Japan as the previous commenter points out. And believe it or not, we have seen the fetish culture and taken no part in it.