Are Asian MAists being overlooked?

[butterflygirl]

I was reading Black Belt the other day and there was an article on how Westerners tend to overlook and dissmiss Asian, mainly Japanese in the article, fighters. It was something I would not have thought of on my own, but in a way, I think it might be true. When you look at the pop culture associated with MA, most of the bad guys are from the East and they are defeated by the strength and determination of the Western practioner. I don't know why this is rolling around in my head, but anyone else have thoughts about it?

 

[JulianWhite]

Hmm, you know, to tell you the truth, I would have thought it would be the other way around. That the western martial artist would be dismissed. But then I think of movies like "Best of the Best" and that makes me think otherwise. Although that movie portrayed both as strong Martial Artists, just portrayed the guys form the East as the mean bad guys (until the end of course). Love that movie, but I see what you're saying. Maybe it's just because the pop culture that we see is from here, maybe in Eastern countries it is the other way around ?

 

[Drewshbag]

Maybe it's just because I live in a very multicultural city, but I don't very much racial discrimination at all. The makeup of my dojo is about 50% Japanese, so there's not really a chance of Eastern guys being overlooked.

 

[PrinceElectra]

Your right, Vancouver is very multicultural and I don't think that people feel this way about someone they train with. It is hard to overlook someone's ability to continually slip one past you and connect with your head. I was just thinking in general. Like the UFC stuff. When a Brazillian guy loses to a Japanese guy, there's a lot of stuff like "he's just lucky" or "the ref helped him". Its like the Japanese guy is expected to lose, like it was just written before hand and the guy just didn't follow the script. Also, you look at Western MA movies and they are all the same... some Asian baddie shows up and wrecks what would have otherwise been a lovely day and the Western guy has to put him back in his place.... or maybe I am just reading too much into crappy scripts.

 

[MissRoZy]

I think it may be the crappy scripts . Or just the fact that its a western movie, so theres gonna be western good guys.

 

[maAku14]

-I think it could be that, plus two other factors. A backlash to the older notion that many people used to have that asians were superior martial artists based on their race (the fallacy of logic that if you were of the same country of origin as an art, you or your training was inherently superior). And that generally in unbiased (wherein one group or nation does not control most of the judges) international competition, MOST(not all) of the asian competitors and teams lose pretty badly.
- Personally, I blame this more on antiquated training methods where this occurs. Hand me down (from tradition) rather than scientific research and methodology. In the cases where tradition may be observed, but is not restrictive, and the fighters and training is very adaptive, you don't see the Asian teams and competitors out of the winner's circles as much.
-Giving more thought to the previous posters mention of the western screen image of the western hero "putting the asian villain in his place", I was reminded of an article I once read years ago. It mentioned how as a propaganda tool used by the USA during WW2, one film highlighted an American hero(actor) who was trained in either judo or jujitsu and used "their own tricks against them" against those "yellow devils" (Brief mandatory PC disclaimer- the following quotations do not reflect the opinion of the poster. They are to best memory, the words of the USA propaganda machine during a time of war. So please, no hate e-mails). There might be more of that attitude left over in some circles than we would like to admit.

 

[lovebeinamum]

Sounds reasonable. Like I said, it was just something that I never really thought about before. Then I read the article and was watching a UFC match which got me to thinking. Not to mention all of the popular van Damme movies from the eighties such as Bloodsport. There aren't that many movies in which the protagonist isn't Asian, well, at least amoungst the older movies. I think they are getting better.
Isn't there still a pretty big drive to go and train with the traditionalists? If you care to look in the forums, just about every art has some thread about going to train in the "mother country" of which ever art. Is it really that overrated?