Profiles: Daniel Kahl

I cant agree more! This guy makes me wanna smack him hard! Fair enough his Japanese is good, but…like you say…his fuck-stick “Im really JUST like a Japanese person!” act is painful in the extreme. Id like to ask him what the hell he thinks hes achieving. Now Ill give him SOME space, in that it might be demanded of him by his handlers. If thats the case, I imagine hed say “Its just an act, no-ones supposed to take it seriously.” But Ive never seen him out of character, and he really lays it on too thick.
All in all I still think a knee to the family jewels would be in order.

Lately I’ve seen him a fair bit on some more relatively sober NHK-Edu programs about family-raising and stuff (not that I watch it enough to know what the whole show is about), but he strikes me as being slightly less annoying than the thankfully-not-seen-these-days Kent Derricott (which I always thought was “Kent Delicate” with those coke-bottle glasses that meant when HE did the bug-eyed stare of amazement it really WAS a bug-eyed stare.

Japanese have always loved it when foreigners come in a go gaga over the country – ever since Lafcadio Hearn, who is idolised in Matsue entirely out of proportion to the time he spent there.

And to be fair to Kahl, there are plenty of Westerners who act like that without any provocation. I can recall meeting a few (mostly Californians, if that is relevant) to whom I would have liked to administer a sedative in the form of the swift boot in the rear.

What bugs me more, brought to mind by the book cover here, is the habit of Japanese for calling westerners by their first name even when it is not appropriate. It can’t be just confusing them (though I have had that a lot). I think it’s some idea they have about the ideas of informality of westerners. But stuff like “Doctor Daniel” is just silly. Ironically, when westerners do use a title and a first name, it’s always with very high rank indeed – starting with Sir Daniel and going on up to King Daniel.

Oh, an if anyone wants an antidote to those sorts of programs, watch NHK’s 視点論点 as long as you can, followed, if you have the stomach, for a live Go match….

I’ve also heard that Kahl is kind of a dick to other foreigners and acts like he’s better than they are. He, like Dave Spector, have invested so much of their bone marrow to divorcing themselves from being American and praying their Shinto forebearers (because Western religion disgusts them) that they wake up one morning with Asian features that the inertia of their actions has made it that there is no compromise or way back from the life they have made for themselves.

I think any white American that can’t understand how black Americans felt about Stepin Fetchit or minstrel shows, or how Asian Americans felt about Charlie Chan or Long Duk Dong only need to YouTube Kahl and Spector at their best to understand how demeaning characters can get under your skin when you are a member of that group.