John Fairbairn wrote:I cringe every time I read or hear a reference to "the Orient."
Since the poster of this message made me cringe by declining to explain the statement, I can't know exactly why he cringes. However, not very long ago a person from a family of Chinese origin living in the USA wrote to me about my frequent use of "Oriental" and said he, like some other people in the USA, found it pejorative. He was not really complaining but rather was puzzled because my usage of the term was clearly not meant to be pejorative!
I think it would therefore be useful, mostly for Americans, if I point out that, for historical and cultural reasons, we in Britain, and I think to a large degree other countries in Europe, have in our consciousness the many people of India and Pakistan who live here. They tend to prefer being classed as (British) Asians, and this usage is enshrined in many official government usages. We therefore often use Oriental for people from China, Japan and Korea. There is not, and as far as I know never has been, any suggestion of this being pejorative. People of this origin in Britain also use the term about themselves. A large supermarket near us in London run by Japanese and selling food from Japan, China, Korea, Thailand and Malaysia (but not from India or Pakistan) called itself, in huge neon letters The Oriental Centre. And I might add that within Japan they sometimes use the English word Oriental about themselves.
We do not exclude such people from Asia, of course, but when we refer to the CKJ countries in that way we often tend to say South-East Asia, although whether China is then included is often a matter of debate.
Such definitions are always fluid - I can well remember as a child finding it hard to get my head round some people calling the Middle East Asia (not wrong but it did confuse me) - and some people will have a slightly different take on the nuances. But I can say with certainty that "Oriental" or "the Orient" when it comes from this side of the Pond has nothing bad about it.
Wow, I had no idea how this thread had been blown up and separated off from the original thread because of my small comment. I don't follow the European Go Federation sub-forum very closely, so I missed all of this until now.
John, it's not a matter of political correctness. It's about the inadequacy of the term, and it's overwhelming ambiguity. It's scope is much larger than European or another term of such kind, and as you yourself suggested, what an American thinks when hearing it might be quite different from what a European hears.
The problem with the terms "Orient" and "Oriental", especially when capitalized, is that they are aberrations, representing something that can not really be said to exist in any coherent way. The words just make grave differences superflous.
