Memoirs of a Ho Ho Ho (Revisited)

I asked in the previous post, "If geishas are so cool, so respected, if it's such an admirable thing being a geisha and preserving traditional Japanese culture… then why do you feel the need to defend them? If you're not Japanese, why on earth do you think you have a dog in the fight?"

I think I found an answer I wasn't looking for. There's a whole internet subculture of non-Japanese geisha fangirls who identify with geisha. See the forums at this website. They give themselves Japanese names, use geisha pics for their discussion board avatars and commiserate about how their families don't understand or respect their high-minded obsession with Japanese geisha culture. It looks like they descended en masse onto the comments of this webpage that happened to incorrectly identify a geisha and left plenty of scorching remarks decrying ignorance about geishas.

My first reaction is "that's totally insane". I could talk about the probable racial and sexual underpinnings for their obsessions and their defensiveness about those obsessions (especially since I have a hunch that they're very predominantly white women) but it's Christmas and I'm about to go and open presents with my family and I feel pretty generous about the whole world today. So I just reminded myself:

There are people out there who think they are ninjas.

There are people out there who dress up as Confederate and Union soldiers and camp out on old battlefields and recreate battles.

There are people out there who play vampire-based live-action roleplaying games. I've even met a few of them and they're pretty harmless. I asked how they determined the outcome of battles between vampires. Did they roll dice? No, they used rock-paper-scissors.

The human imagination is an often embarassing but overall very wonderful force.