The whole story about "Is it cultural appropriation for Westerners to wear #Kimono?" is already quite some time ago, but since the concept of adapting other cultures is very promiment in #Japan I nevertheless wanna share some thoughts on it. [Thread]

Japan always adapted things from other cultures, may it be Kanji which they took from the Chinese or things like Anpan for which they mixed Westerner's bread with their own traditional sweets. So this is nothing new to Japan.

And that's why Japanese also like to see other cultures doing the same like Western culture using Kimono in different styles etc. For Japanese it seems to be a way of appreciating a culture, cause "if they wouldn't care about our cultures they wouldn't adapt it, right"?

And I personally find this a legit way of thinking. It can help support integration of minorities and is somehow a way of cultural exchange/communication.
What Japan is sometimes neglecting though, is that there have been examples (like in the US) ...

... where cultures like the Native American culture have been used in a kind of mockery way (e.g. for Halloween costumes). I think that's why this "adapting cultures" is sometimes seen as "cultural appropriation", especially from an American standpoint.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but Japan is apparently not much aware of this concept because they more or less tried to destroy cultures/ethnicities they didn't like, like the Ainu's. They wanted to eradicate them instead of mocking their culture and showing superiority.

But this "adapting other cultures" can lead to problems as well, like I already sometimes wrote about the "Kataknification/Japenglishification". I often see that adapting other cultures seems to be more common than trying to understand other cultures in Japan.

And especially with English skills this can be problematic in the future when many Japanese might talk half English, half Japanese, while using English words meaning totally different things. Or thinking words might be English when they're not.

So I'm a bit worried how this will turn out in the end. I hope actual cultural understanding and not just good resolutions will be happening sometime in Japan.
But in my experience everything takes a few more centuries longer in Japan than in the rest of the world.