Come to Japan bearing pale skin and roundish eyes and you’ll inevitably be asked a few of the following questions:

Do you like Japanese food?
Do you like Japanese sake?
Do you like Japanese natto? (natto being a common fermented soybean dish, an acquired taste)
Do you like Japanese ____?

These are often phrased like “Can you eat Japanese ____?”, though they’re not meant as a question of gastrointestinal function. Japanese folks just phrase that kind of inquiry that way, and also tend to say things like “I can’t drink carbonated drinks” when it’s more a matter of taste than ability, or I suspect, ostentatiously girlish feigned inability.

Descriptions that are rendered as adjectives in English are often instead nouns with possessive modifiers in Japanese. For example, “American agriculture” would be アメリカの農業, or “America’s agriculture”. There’s no common adjectival form of “America”, nor for many other nouns. Hence, in my 2nd language learner’s mind at least, ownership and categorization tend to get a bit muddled, and I can’t always tell whether someone is telling how something is or to whom it belongs.

The above questions would be rendered in Japanese and back into English as “Do you like Japan’s food?” “Do you like Japan’s sake?” and so on. Now, I can definitely see the point, grammatically at least, of differentiating Japan’s food from other types of food to make clear the point of the question. I can’t see the point for sake or natto, both of which are assumed (by everyone I’ve met, anyway) to be inherently Japanese, thus not needing any further qualifiers to make sure the listener understands which sake is in question. 

This is where the ambiguities of grammar start to ruffle my feathers: is the person asking me these things just qualifying which type of natto they’re talking about to an unnecessary degree, or are they making an overt statement of ownership, i.e. asking whether I enjoy these things that they have cultural possession of? It’s true, even asking that unambiguously wouldn’t ruffle a lot of people’s feathers, since most people in the world actually believe in the objective reality of ethnicities, races and cultures. I’m not one of those people though – statements that presume cultures are made of ethnic groups which are made of races which tend to “be” certain ways do get under my off-white skin. Assuming that certain foods, behaviors or technologies “belong” to certain groups, a fiction within a fiction without several more volumes of fiction, just strikes me as pitifully ignorant and indicative of a way of thinking about humanity that can’t die soon enough.

Or maybe I’m just too sensitive to this kind of thing. That’s the downside of being blessed with a “multicultural” background.