Appropriate

So I'm troubled about the subject of the next book in the series. I'm worried about appropriation.

Actually, there's a bigger problem I have with that particular setting. This is a series that cares about language, that talks about language. In the one I'm editing now there's business about the difference between "Standard German" and Bayern, the dialect of Bavaria. And there's a plot point about a guy who speaks a sort of mock High German but whose actual linguistic roots are from the North.

Well, the next book is London. And the problem with the UK? They speak English.

So I was able to do language games in the current book because it mostly came across in small snippets, or in, "They said something in German," or as slightly mangled syntax within English, "And do not the phone in the back pocket."

Having a book set largely in London means that there is multiple dialog in the actual dialect being spoken. Just doing RP (aka "BBC English") is bad enough. I've heard enough of it, and I can look up a lot of the word choices; boot versus trunk sorts of things. But I don't think I can do extensive dialog that is convincing and accurate.

Well, no-one can. The Brits are famous about picking faults in other people's attempts to do, well, anything right; English accents, English dialects, English life, Anglo-Saxon Attitudes (sorry -- Looking Glass reference.)

The idea after that is worse, though. See, part of the game here is writing from what I know, and that includes using places I know when possible. Of course I only spent two days in Athens (although longer in Greece) and my trip through lower Germany was a decade ago. Still, it seemed an archaeological plot I could work with; do something with the Dorian Invasion theory wrapped around an antiquities smuggling plot and I'd have excuses to set scenes in Athens and parts of Germany I'd actually been to (Frankfurt, Bad Münster, and Munich although I only saw the train station there.) Of course I ended up with a whole sequence in and around Venice but oh well.

So I've also been in London, Paris, Tokyo, and Berlin. Also Bangkok (briefly), Kyoto (over a week), Salzburg (a day), and a bit of the states, too.

So Japan is an obvious one. I've read pretty extensively on modern Japanese culture (well, post-war). But why does that feel so much more like appropriation?

Maybe because it isn't considered as bad to make fun of Germans? But I have Italian and especially Greek culture right up there. I mean, at the climax I've got a piece of Greek cultural heritage being rescued by an American. It's pretty appropriating, and that's before we get to suggestions that she might have been chosen by Athena for this role. (Which is one of several good reasons why I downplayed that angle as much as possible).

I read a lot. I especially read at forums where native Greeks react in their own words to what other people think of their world and their people. And I was careful to create a variety of Greeks, so there is never one person saying, "Let me tell you about my people." Instead there are six people arguing, and half of them don't give a hoot for the opinions of the outsider.

And, well, it certainly gets done. Out of all the things I think I've learned, it is that Greeks are very, very familiar with people appropriating their culture. I think I have one character pointing out it's been going on since the Romans (don't know if that line survived the edit, though).

It just feels worse to be doing Japan. Maybe because there is a longer history of such cringe-worthy appropriation. And of course the nature of this series is deep dive. Although I could breeze through Italy with just surface impressions, I had to go into the lived experience of being Athenian, from politics to racism to economics to history to language.

Japan would be the same. Even as I'm contemplating having a companion for that adventure who is a total weaboo, it isn't going to sit at a surface level. And maybe that's where it starts to get acceptable in my mind. Two things, really; one is that I will be visibly making the effort to get below the shiny surface of anime and yakuza, samurai and salarimen. The other is -- if I can communicate it -- that the Japanese are very conscious of role-play and surfaces. That the surface ephemera is to them also artificial, though not necessarily as alien.

I also really want to get into post-war Japan, and the Takarazuka, and other stuff that's, well, old-people stuff. Sigh. I had that happen already. My protagonist is in her early twenties and is not shy and nerdy. The first book, though, was about her getting her travel legs, becoming the "globe trotting" part of the adventurer archetype she is growing into, and travel at that level is weighted towards being an old person's game.

I guess that's another reason the current scene had me blocked for so long. She's at the bar on a car ferry and although my feeling is a number of the passengers are guest workers or the families thereof, (aka people visiting across the distances modern economies have forced on so many families), the people up in the bar with spending money and leisure time are going to be experienced travelers. Meaning mostly retirees. That's what I've seen across my own travel. Yes, there are backpackers and Instagrammers and all that, but generally people travel for pleasure after they've become financial stable.

Once again, my young woman is having to hang out with old people and do old people stuff. Or is that a culturally appropriating thought, too?