Chinese or Japanese?

I watched the edited version of Oscar ceremony on Chinese national TV. "Edited" means a lot of funny jokes are left out, which is due to the harsh cencoring system in China. Thank god they don't dub the show anymore, although there are tons of mistakes in the subtitle. To save the trouble of downloading, I have to live with it.

"The Departed" is the biggest winner of this year, which is adapted from the movie "The Infernal Affairs" of Hong Kong, China. To be honest, I am not a big fan of the new version. Except for changing the location and cast, the director Martin failed in bringing anything new into this movie. Most of the subtle relationships of people from the original movie is lost. I'd feel much happier if Babel wins, although it suffers from a structure resemblance with "Crash", which is the winner last time.

Before the award was given, the nomination footage indicated that "The Departed" is the remake of a Japanese movie, which is a terrible mistake. Although Martin later thanked the Hongkong director on the stage, people from China are strongly evoked. Some people believe that this is not a mistake, but done intentionally.

I myself cannot imagine someone will be crazy enough to do this on purpose. However, this should be a mistake with truth lies behind. Although China is well know for its physical goods export, Japan has done much better in entertainment industry and culture export. For example, Japanese manga is especially well known around the world. When a western people encounter something good from asia, having difficulty from telling one country from another, they will tend to think they are from Japan.

There is a very good example. When a host from China is trying to interview Celion Dion, her first reaction is to ask if he is from Japan. Maybe she met much more Japanese reporters than Chinese ones. There are also circumstances when Chinese tourists are mistakenly taken as Japanese. Although China has a much bigger population, it is still a quite new face on many international stages.

Futhermore, the entertainment in China is regulated too much, which is bad for its culture imports and exports. Even though foreign cartoons cannot be show on prime time TV at all, it doesnot make domestic cartoons any better, most of which are ridiculously simple-minded no-brainers. There are so many things you cannot do. Recently, a very popular Chinese cartoon "rainbow cat and blue rabbit" was banned on national TV due to some so called "violence" and lack of "educational meaning". This is like a camel burying its head into the sand. The regulators think too less of the children nowadays. They treat all of them like babies when they are actually watching porn from the internet. No wonder online downloading is so popular in China.

In a nutshell, to make a bigger impression to the world, Chinese entertainment and Chinse culture still have a long, long way to go. However, I believe China will make it's mark in the future. By then, someone might mistakenly take Japanese stuff as from China.