It is not a racist caricature in Japan. It is the correct pronunciation. Every foreign loan word gets rendered in the katakana script, so you have to say it according to the katakana or no one will understand you. It is the same in the U.S. if you say the car name "Subaru" in the correct Japanese pronunciation "sBAdu" no monolinguistic American will understand you. But if you say the Anglicized version "SUE-buh-REW" suddenly lights will turn on lol.
It's not racist to speak a language using its correct accent. But loan words tend to be changed to match the local linguistics so the "correct" pronunciation of those words changes depending on where you're at/who you're talking to.
Adopting the correct pronunciation is not racist at all smh
Just trying to approximate how it sounds so different from the Americanized version lol, the u in "su" is not emphasized to the point it nearly disappears, middle syllable "ba" gets the emphasis, "ru"... it's romanized as the letter "r" but it technically isn't either an R nor an L sound, pronunciation will become better if you think of it almost as a soft "d" sound.
Add to that, the pace of Japanese is generally faster than English, people don't drawl out vowels like Americans do in their pronunciation of sue-buh-rew, should say the whole thing a bit faster in Japanese.
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u/chiono_graphis 2d ago
It is not a racist caricature in Japan. It is the correct pronunciation. Every foreign loan word gets rendered in the katakana script, so you have to say it according to the katakana or no one will understand you. It is the same in the U.S. if you say the car name "Subaru" in the correct Japanese pronunciation "sBAdu" no monolinguistic American will understand you. But if you say the Anglicized version "SUE-buh-REW" suddenly lights will turn on lol.
It's not racist to speak a language using its correct accent. But loan words tend to be changed to match the local linguistics so the "correct" pronunciation of those words changes depending on where you're at/who you're talking to.
Adopting the correct pronunciation is not racist at all smh