Interchangeable Asian Cultures / Real Life

• East Asian societies like Japan, China and Korea undoubtedly share many similarities between them despite their differences. All of them are quite collectivist and don't always value individualism or rebellion. The Japanese language partially uses the Chinese script with its kanji writing system. The three share some similar fashion with articles of clothing like long, draping robes with intricate designs and straw hats being very common. They also have a strong presence of martial arts, with the Japanese samurai and the Chinese monks also having an entire lifestyle and code of honor tied into it. In Japan and China religion is a complicated mix of Buddhism, Confucianism, Taoism, and local religion and animistic deities. Art styles also tend to be similar with muted colors and nature scenes. Architecture can also share some similarities, with pagodas having very similar styles in all the countries.
• In the 19th century, the Filipino patriot Jose Rizal (who was himself of mixed Filipino/Chinese blood) once pretended to be a Japanese in a European museum, answering questions about Japanese artists and culture. He didn't know one word of Japanese at that time. When a member of the audience asked him to translate the words on a painting, he got away with by saying that because of his supposed background (he was shipped to Europe to learn about European culture), he didn't have time to learn Japanese. Looks like he did it For the Lulz.
• In an inversion, a lot of Asian societies (especially West Asian) tended to assume for a while that any and all Europeans were French. This is why European-style 16th century cannons, for example, were known as "folang ji" (Frankish machines) to the Chinese despite that technology actually being introduced to Asia by the Portuguese. They most likely picked that habit up from Arabs and Turks who invariably referred to Europeans as "Franks" during the Crusades (due to France being the most populous and powerful country on the continent) even if said Europeans were English or Spanish or Italian.
• After the Pearl Harbor attack, anti-Japanese sentiment in the US reached literally murderous levels. Asian-Americans who were not of Japanese descent often took steps to distance themselves from Japanese-Americans to escape spillover persecution.
  • Often, many Asian-Americans would wear buttons that said "I'm Chinese" (or any other Asian ethnicity) to avoid deportation. Japanese-Americans often tried to pass themselves off as such, too.
  • This persecution also extended to Korean immigrants since Korea at the time was under Japanese occupation for some decades since 1910 and for Americans it made no difference.
  • LIFE magazine published an article called "How to Tell Japs from the Chinese"◊. The features of Northern Han Chinese, who apparently represent all Chinese ethnicities in the article, are described as fine and graceful, while Japanese are described as mostly "aboriginal."
  • Similarly, TIME magazine published "How to Tell Your Friends from the Japs" after the Pearl Harbor attack.
• When political pundit Michelle Malkin wrote a book in defense of Japanese-American internment during World War II, her critics noted that, given that she's a Filipina, she might have been lumped in with Japanese-Americans herself due to this trope. Malkin is frequently the victim of racial slurs from trolls on her site, many of which involve China or Vietnam.
• The tragic murder of Vincent Chin, a Chinese-American who was murdered by Chrysler plant workers who blamed Japanese automakers for taking their business. The outrage over the lenient sentencing of the murderers was a catalyst for the political organization of Asians in America.
• Thienh Minh Ly, a Vietnamese-American, was stabbed and killed by two white youths, one of whom wrote in his journal that he "killed a jap ..."
• Since the 9/11 attacks the number of hate crimes against Sikhs in the US skyrocketed in number as many Sikh immigrants from the Indian subcontinent and their families were mistaken for Arab-American Muslims and horrifically beaten. This most likely relates to clothing customs: Sikhs are required to wear a turban by the customs of their religion. Many Westerns don't know the difference between Sikhs and Arabs, and typically associate turbans with Arabs. After the tragic shooting of a Sikh temple in Milwaukee in 2012, an image went viral stating a quote attributed to Eric Parsons, "I was gonna post something explaining the difference between Hindus, Sikhs, and Muslims, but then I realized that you don't need to know anything about someone's religion to know that you shouldn't shoot them."
  • Also in the aftermath of 9/11, a family of ethnic Greeks living in Jacksonville, FL were beaten up by thugs who thought they were Arabs. Hey, dark skin is dark skin, right?
  • In the 2013 Miss America Beauty Contest, Miss New York Nina Davuluri became the first Indian American to win the crown, and unsurprisingly, social media was full of racist morons complaining about an "Islamic terrorist" hijacking the pageant. Not only was Davaluri born and raised in Syracuse, but she and her family are Hindu. Not that the racism against her would've been in any way justified if she was Muslim, of course, but it certainly drove home how ignorant those people were.
• The application of this trope in regards to the subtrope All Muslims Are Arab, especially when it applies to poor regions, is particularly harmful. One of the sticking points that feeds into the conflict in that part of the world is the dire need for proper education, which includes the Arabic language. For example, many fiery South Asian Muslim preachers are criticized not because of their mastery of Arabic (and therefore, Quranic discourses), but their lack of one, which essentially means they teach the equally illiterate population — who have nowhere to go but them — based on half-truths at best and lies at worst. The Taliban managed to take over Afghanistan and enforced their interpretation of Islamic laws despite the fact very few of their leaders spoke Arabic.
• A common joke in Russian and American anime fandom is to call anime "Chinese pornographic cartoons" or "Chinese devil porn" (or simply "Chinese cartoons") after one utterly clueless and sensationalist newspaper report.
  • In some Latin American countries like Chile, anime is commonly named as "monos chinos" (lit. Chinese monkeys) for people who doesn't understand anime or can't difference from children animations. The saying is because the old phrase "monos animados" (lit. "animated monkeys"), a way to say "cartoon" in these countries, so basically "monos chinos" is translated as "Chinese cartoons" and is seen as a despective form to name anime, which was even parodied for some otaku groups.
• For the 2011 The Green Hornet movie, the Internet Movie Database at one point listed Korean-American John Cho as Kato, when in fact the role was played by Taiwanese pop star Jay Chou. About 500 subsequent movie reviews have also committed the same error. Cho himself joked on Twitter: "I am beginning to suspect that I am not in the Green Hornet movie."
• Actor Daniel Dae Kim, who played the Korean Jin on Lost, reportedly said that having played characters of every Asian ethnicity except his own it was nice to be able to play Jin (though unlike Jin, he was raised in the US).
• Yoshiko Otaka (AKA Yoshiko Yamaguchi, Shirley Yamaguchi), is a Japanese actress-turned-politician who was born in Japanese-occupied Manchuria. Speaking fluent Chinese and Japanese, she became an actress and singer under the name Li Xianglan, and played Chinese women in propaganda films supporting the Japanese position. Her Japanese nationality was not reported in China, and most Chinese people at the time really did believe she was Chinese. She became one of the "Seven Great Singing Stars" of 1940s Chinese shidaiqu popular music, and several of the songs she recorded under this identity (夜來香, "Tuberose"/"Fragrance of the Night" for example) became enduring classics. After the war, she was arrested for treason and collaboration with the occupying Japanese, but cleared of all charges and simply deported. As a Japanese citizen, she was legally an enemy (subject to deportation), not a traitor (punishable by death).
• During the bombing of Pearl Harbor, a downed Japanese pilot landed on the island of Niihau and was approached by a native Hawaiian. The pilot's first English words to the man were "Are you Japanese?"
• Despite being disparaging terms for the Chinese, the terms "chink", "ching chong" and "Chinaman" (derogatory at least in North America) are at times indiscriminately directed towards anyone of East or Southeast Asian descent.
• The word "Paki" - considered a highly pejorative term primarily in Britain - is a prime example. Despite being an abbreviation for "Pakistani", the slur and associated "Paki bashing" indiscriminately targeted all South Asians and sometimes any other person with brown skin.
• You don't even have to be Asian for the trope to affect you. During World War II, Navajo soldiers (Code Talkers and otherwise) were often deliberately assigned to units with whites. Code Talkers had bodyguards (who had orders to shoot them to prevent their capture), but ordinary Navajos were told to stick close to white people so other Americans wouldn't mistake them for Japanese.
• Many Chinatowns in any major city will feature stores targeting other Asian cultures, such as Korea and Japan. Cleveland officially renamed its Chinatown "Asiatown" to acknowledge the mix of cultures.
• For some time, the San Francisco Police Department has been referring to all arrested Asians as "Chinese."
• The British take on this trope is to define "Asian" as solely meaning people from the Indian subcontinent. As with Americans defining "Asian" as solely relating to Sino-Japanese peoples, this is for good historical reasons: "India" was the heart of the British empire and there has been a lot of post-imperial migration to Britain. British-Indian comedian Sanjeev Bhaskar pointed out how this sounds to "Asians"; he cited the example of a retired Major from the pre-independence Indian Army who lived next door to the Bhaskar family, who at first impressed them with his fluency in Hindi, Urdu and Punjabi, but dismissed protest that his neighbors were not Indian but Bangladeshi with the dismissive comment Pakistan, Ceylon, Bangladesh, Nepal, who cares? It's all India! which irritated the Major's neighbors...
• Restaurants in the Western world that serve Asian food typically serve Asian fusion from a variety of cultures. Even those that advertise one particular cuisine will often serve food with influences from outside of that culture, such as a Chinese buffet serving sushi. There's also no guarantee that the people working at or owning the restaurant will be from the food's home culture.
• KTVU in San Francisco broadcast a list of the purported names of the crew of Asiana 214, with names like "Sum Ting Wong" and "Bang Ding Ow," oblivious to the fact that the racist fake names were Chinese instead of Korean.
• When Akira Kurosawa was working on the Soviet-Japanese coproduction Dersu Uzala, the Soviet producers wanted his favorite lead Toshiro Mifune (obviously Japanese) to play the eponimous co-lead, a Nanai^note A Tungisic tribe from the Russian Far East, the descendants of the historic Jurchens. by birth, but the scheduling conflicts prevented him from taking the role. In the end Maxim Munzuk, a Tuvan,^note Tuvans are one of the Siberian Turkic people once collectively known as Siberian Tatars and live in central Siberia. was cast-they couldn't find a suitable actor of Nanai descent.
  • Though Toshiro Mifune was actually born in China, and until age 19, lived in Manchuria.
  • In another Soviet cinema example, while Vladimir Wang, a former circus acrobat who had built himself quite a career playing various episodic Asians in The '70s, was ethnic Chinese, barely half of his roles were playing Chinese people. He has played Japanese, Mongols, Nanais, etc…
• After Girls' Generation won Video of the Year at the inaugural YouTube Music Awards, fans of some of the other nominated artists took to Twitter with racist remarks that often showed that they didn't quite understand that South Korea (the home country of Girls' Generation) was separate from Japan or China.
  • Similarly to the anime example above, some fans of Korean Pop Music in Latin America call Korean idols "chinos" (Chinese) or "chinitos", both parodying the way non-fans lump Asian cultures together and using it as a term of endearment. This is controversial, though, as other fans still consider it disrespectful towards the idols, no matter how ironically it's intended to be done.
• It's not uncommon for Asian tourists as well as immigrants and their children to be bombarded with "nihao"s, "konnichiwa"s and "arigatou"s when travelling overseas. Whether they take offence depends on how patronizingly it's said. Most agree it gets annoying right quick, even if no malice was intended.
  • It can also happen within a home country for a person of Asian descent. It isn't uncommon to be asked "So where in China are you from?" or "Where are you from? No, I mean, where are you really from?" despite being wholly American.
• Being lumped in with Chinese nationals tends to be a Berserk Button for ethnic Chinese outside of China (especially Southeast Asians). Countries like Singapore, Malaysia and Indonesia have significantly different cultures from that of China, so much so that many of these ethnic Chinese experience culture shock themselves when they travel in China or interact with Chinese nationals. Case in point: many Singaporeans refer to Chinese nationals as P.R.C.s (People's Republic of China) or Ah Tiong (derived from Tiong Kok, the Hokkien reading of 中国), leaving the label of "Chinese" for whomever has Chinese ethnicity.
  • Mainland Chinese and "Overseas" Chinese often get into mild conflict over culture in a third country (for example, Australia), whose other inhabitants can't work out why there's so much friction between people of ostensibly the same culture. On the other hand, if they dismiss him by calling him an ignorant Englishman... A very interesting case of this is with the Chinese community in Canada. There were many tensions between the old Qing Dynasty migrants from Taishan known as the "loh wah kiu" who loathed the newer Hong Kong immigrants that flooded the country many decades later. This conflict was largely socioeconomic as the Hong Kongers were on average wealthier and they considered the loh wah kiu to be beneath them.
    • There is a certain cultural gap between Mainland Chinese and the Chinese diaspora due to Cultural Revolution on the mainland and the diasporas all living in foreign countries which have influenced them. There can be a degree of disagreement over what actually constitutes "true" Chinese culture. On a related note, equating Macau, Hong Kong or Taiwan with Mainland China in any way (ESPECIALLY culture-wise) tends to be a good way to anger someone from one of those places.
    • Although relations tend to be cordial due to several common elements in their background (both being Special Administrative Regions that've been strongly influenced by a colonial power), people from Macau and Hong Kong generally don't like being mistaken for each other either. This goes double for Macau, which tends to be overlooked compared to Hong Kong.
    • However, this regionalism far predates the Cultural Revolution. People from different parts of China have always suffered from disagreements or cultural shock when interacting with Chinese of other villages, cities, or provinces because China is massive in geographic scope and culturally diverse. One of the oldest and most well-known of these divisions is Northern China vs. Southern China with how they both see themselves as being "more Chinese" than the other. Chinese civilization began in northern China thus the Northern Han Chinese are genetically more or less the same as the ancient Han Chinese with DNA testing proving that the Northern Han population is very homogeneous while the Southern Han Chinese have large amounts of foreign admixture from territories that the ancient Han conquered (in fact, some Northern Han Chinese are genetically closer to other Northeast Asian like Koreans than they are to Cantonese or Taiwanese Han who are closer to Southeast Asians). Even until the Song Dynasty, the Southern Han were not considered "genuine Chinese" due to their mixed ancestry. The Southern Han argue that due to the north constantly suffering from warfare, famine, and other problems - many northern Han fled to the south and thus Southern China has been better at retaining certain aspects of traditional Chinese culture than the North... well sort of... since there is debate over what "Chinese culture" even means due to its high internal variation and long history.
    • Some Southern Chinese will worship a sea shaman goddess named Matsu, especially in Fujian and Taiwan. They consider Matsu to be a part of "traditional Chinese culture" but Matsu did not exist until the late 10th century (which is recent in terms of Chinese history) and was very much a foreign import derived from the conquered Minyue peoples in Fujian province (probably proto-Austronesians). The worship of Matsu is near non-existent in Northern China, particularly in the Central Plain which is considered the "cradle of Chinese civilization". Worship of dragons as water deities is an indigenous belief to the Chinese and classical Chinese mythology would have dragons governing the sea while Matsu did not even exist.
• There's a big Chinese-Korean community in Chile, and despite coming from vastly different countries, they're so unified that some people get confused.
  • The so-called "Chinese Mall" is a shopping center owned by Korean and Chinese families, originally (and legally) known as the street where is located, but people just called like that and they just ran with it.
  • The commercial neighborhood Patronato is known for their Korean-owned stores and supermarkets, but it is not rare to find in said places products coming from China and Japan as well.
  • Some Chinese restaurants now serve sushi, probably because actual Japanese immigrants are very few.
  • Another Asian-owned mall averts it by having the more generic name "Portal Asia". It doesn't stop people calling it "The other Chinese Mall"
• Also in Chile, Arab immigrants (generally Palestinian) and their descendants for a long time were called "Turks", because they came from areas that were part of the Ottoman empire before their disappearance, and therefore arrived with a Turkish passport.
• A series of racist attacks called "Nipper tipping" or "Nip tipping" occurred in Ontario, Canada during the late 2000s. While derived from the anti-Japanese slur "nip", the attacks primarily targeted the Chinese.
• Partially invoked in real life, as Imperial China tended to think of itself as the rightful ruler of the world and many of its neighbors actually agreed or at least played along. So in addition to paying tribute, nations from Japan to Vietnam adopted parts of Han Chinese culture to imitate the "center of the world" until the arrival of the West. ^note Vietnamese scholars have also noted that Vietnam was too busy fighting off China's repeated invasions - and a thousand years of domination - to develop a culture distinct from China's. Enforced during Chinese domination with an assimilation policy, in which Vietnamese practices like teeth dying and chewing betel nuts were banned but others have argued that China's domination of Vietnam was actually very loose hence why Vietnam was able to retain its identity and language unlike other territories conquered by China. Vietnam at many points actually decided to adopt Chinese culture of their own volition - in fact, it continued to follow Chinese culture even when it was not a part of China to stay up to date with technological advancements and high culture to not only defend themselves but to dominate its own Southeast Asian neighbors such as the Cambodians and Chams.
  • Korea once labelled itself "little China" because it wanted to model itself after its neighboring nation. Heian Japan was so obsessed with Tang Dynasty culture (an era which China had already left behind hundreds of years ago at this point), Europeans at first thought that Japanese culture was just an off-shoot of Chinese rather than its own.
• This can be an unintentional result of genetic tests that lack extensive samples from Asian countries. For example, this person took the Ancestry DNA test to solve a mystery about the origins of their grandparents, only to discover the site's coverage of East Asia merely listed every country in the area, without a specific breakdown.
• Half-Korean, half-Caucasian actress Lindsay Price has been cast as Chinese (An Li Chen on All My Children), and Japanese (Janet Sosna on Beverly Hills, 90210).
• The role of the Vietnamese Kim in Miss Saigon has mostly been played by Filipina actresses.
• Jamie Chung has spoken about this trope and how modern attempts to avert it haven't necessarily had good results; namely that turning down Asian actors for not being of the same nationality as the character (she has a Korean background but has played Japanese and Chinese before) is narrowing the pool of already limited roles for Asian actors. She was in fact turned down for a part in Crazy Rich Asians because she wasn't ethnically Chinese - and then producers opened up the casting to include non-Chinese Asians (and a South Korean actor Ken Jeong ended up cast).
  "Also, there’s more consciousness now of putting Asian actors in specific roles. They want someone ethnically Chinese to play Mulan, which I appreciate, but it’s cutting into my roles as well. You have actors who can play Australian, British, Irish, but Asian, it’s very specific. It’s a double-edged sword."
• The above can result in a curious cycle where this trope is concerned with acting. There are less roles for Asian performers than there are for white - so there are going to be less working Asian actors due to the lack of opportunities. Therefore when attempting to cast actors of only one nationality - as Memoirs of a Geisha and Crazy Rich Asians attempted to - they have to turn to Asians of other backgrounds to fill the roles.
• In Brazil, due to its large population of people with Japanese ancestry, East Asians are assumed to "Japanese" and often will be called "japa", a term usually not used or seen as a slur and even adopted by people of Japanese background. In fact, sometimes Chinese and Korean immigrants, specially those who are undocumented, will try to pass as Japanese in order to avoid discrimination and racism, as Japanese people came to be accepted as part of the Brazilian melting pot and are seen as "good immigrants".
  • Similarly, there are more Japanese people in Iran than Chinese, so East Asians are generally assumed to be Japanese in that country.
• During a practice session for the Four Continents figure skating competition held in Gangneung, South Korea, an announcer introduced Japanese skaters Yuzuru Hanyu and Shoma Uno as being from China. Cue a WTF reaction from the former. When they finally got it right (with Boyang Jin, who is actually Chinese), Hanyu and his coach Brian Orser was spotted on camera laughing and clapping.
• When the trailer for Raya and the Last Dragon came out, there were many comments comparing the film with Avatar: The Last Airbender and Raya with Korra, due to similarities in the design of both characters and because both works present fictional worlds inspired by Asian cultures; however, Avatar is mainly inspired by countries from East Asia (China, Japan, Korea, Mongolia) while Raya is inspired by the cultures of Southeast Asia (Vietnam, Philippines, Thailand, among others). This type of comparison is something that especially irritates some people in that region.
• Singapore may be an Asian nation with majority Chinese diaspora and most of the minority being Malay and Indian, but it is not unknown to this trope, for one can find food stalls that lump together Japanese and Korean food.
• The Battle of the Chinese Farm between Egypt and Israel during the Yom Kippur War was named after the so-called "Chinese Farm", an Egyptian facility using Japanese equipment, where the Israelis mistook the text as Chinese.
• Various Asian dishes are fusion dishes, especially Chinese-inspired due to large amounts of Overseas Chinese in several countries like Japanese-Chinese, Korean-Chinese, Indian-Chinese and Filipino-Chinese ones.
  • One of the non-Chinese example is Japanese curry, inspired by Indian curry that was introduced to Japan by the British during the Meiji era (1868–1912). The dish became popular from then and it was adapted to suit Japanese tastes by using local ingredients.
• In terms of casting this can happen a lot. It isn't uncommon for East Asians, Southeast Asians and Oceanians (usually Polynesians) to play each others ethnicities. Same way it is very common for South Asian, West Asian and North African actors to pass off as each other ethnicities.