From my personall experience I can tell that there is still big deal of animosity and hate bettwen some European nations, for example Polish -German,Hungarian-Rummanian,Greek-Turkish,Russian-Polish,English-French (not to mention whole former Yugoslavia) and on and on.
But what I want to know is ,how people in Asia (Japanese,Chinese,Korean,
Vietnamese,Thai,Indonesian,Phillipines and others) interact with eachother.
Is there lots of hate and rivarly bettwen them.?
How about South American?
Well, I can honestly say that the Chinese and Taiwanese love each other. Same for North and South Koreans. The North and South Vietnamese have managed to work out their problems very peacefully in the past as have India and Pakistan.
I’m afraid that animosity is part of the human modus operandi and there’s not much to do about it. Every culture in the world has someone they like to dislike, even if not always downright hate.
Apart from us cool Italians. We have no enemies and we dislike no-one! Well, ok, apart from some friendly banter with French about who has the better wine (us, end of story!)… 
In my experience, Asians are pretty ethnocentric, much more than Europeans. OF course, Asians don’t think of themselves as “Asian”, they think of themselves as Korean, Chinese, Japanese, Vietnamese, etc. Many still hate the Japanese for WWII. Some can be very insulted if you accidentally assume they are one nationality when actually they are another. If you assume a Chinese or Korean person is Japanese or vice-versa people can be offended. Not a mistake you want to make.
There is no pan-Asian identity, except perhaps in 2nd or 3rd generation American immigrants.
Well, quite a few Koreans, Chinese, and people of a couple other Asian nations still have quite a bit of anger with Japan, due to WWII. (Can’t say that I blame them.)
And the Chinese and Vietnamese still have rivalies that have gone on for years; plus remember, China and Vietnamese were trying to kill each other as recently as 1979 when China invaded Vietnam.
Having come from Central European stock myself, I once asked Mrs. Kuniou (of Japanese descent) whether the ethnic rivalries in Asia were anything like those in Europe.
Her reply: the Japanese hate the Chinese
The Chinese hate the Vietanmese
The Vietnamese hate the Cambodians
The Cambodians hate the Laotians
What about Koreans?
“Everyone hates them.”
I’ve witnessed a little bit of ethnic rivalry from my in-laws, who are chinese mainlanders from Taiwan. Despite their rivalries though, they are really nice people and friendly to all people they meet, no matter where they are from. Still, you catch a little bit of it from time to time.
My father-in-law really hates the Japanese, which is odd because he loves sushi, Japanese electronics and cars, and his mother is actually fluent in Japanese and lived there for a few years. The Japanese are a inhumanly cruel race of people to him as well as cultural copycats of Chinese civilization (everyone copies the chinese). Once he even said he would never let my wife ever marry a Japanese, anybody else is ok but not a Japanese. My mother-in-law looks down on the native Taiwanese, and thinks of their language as dirty and the people uncultured. They think of Filipinos domestic servants. Never heard anything good or bad about the Vietnamese but the Vietnamese seem to dislike the Chinese a whole lot. A friend of my wife’s has never met her Vietnamese boyfriend/fiance’s parents because they refuse to aknowlege her existence because she is Chinese.
I work in an office with a lot of Asians. In fact, there have been times when I’ve gone to lunch with a large group and been the only person with European ancestory. There are about equal numbers Japanese, Koreans and Chinese, some born in America, some not. Everyone’s friendly, but there’s definitely a lot of cultural rivalry going on, most of which goes completely over my head.
Heh, my best friends are Chinese and I’m Japanese.
Maybe for some “hardcore” Chinese people, things like this matter. But as a first generation Japanese Canadian, I rarely see any reaction to me being Japanese. I have never seen or felt any anger over me being Japanese. Most people seem to like me more for being Japanese since all the cool stuff comes out from Japan 
But there is plenty of joking around. My Chinese friends likes to mention we should be blood enemies. I say if they don’t like Japan, they can give me their Acrua TSX and get a POS Chinese car or a Hyundai D .
My GF on the other hand does carry some ethnic “baggage” being Bulgarian. I don’t really understand it since I don’t think she’s been wronged by another group/race of people. I think it’s a by-product of their culture.
My brother just married a woman whose parents were born in Korea so I asked her. Apparently Koreans(especially the older generations) hate the Japanese because Japan occupied them from 1910-1945. Understandablely, they haven’t gotten over this. I asked her whether the people in general weren’t pissed at China because of its involvement in the Korean war, but she said they at least liked China better than Japan. This from a woman who spent a year as an exchange student in Japan.
-Lil
Mrs. Bizz was born and raise in Japan. We met and married.
14 years (and a grandchild) later, her parents deigned to meet the filthy round-eyed barbarian bastard who married their daughter. Well, her Mom did. Her Dad actually left the country when he heard I was coming to visit.
Since South America was asked about too…I have observed some friction/hosility in the rest of Latin America directed at Argentines. The rap on them is that they consider themselves to be ethnically/racially superior to majority mixed race/Amerindian nationalities such as Chileans, Peruvians, Colombians, and Mexicans and are seen as rather arrogant. Plus, Argentines have a reputation for very strident anti-Americanism. But personally, I ouind Argentines to be wonderful people - and I am Mexican-American (maybe my ‘negatives’ cancelled each other out).
The worst I got was some ribbing of my Spanish vocabulary.
In Central America, Honduras and El Salvador have a history of conflict…and most non-Mexican Latin Americans are very irritated at being mistaken for or labelled “Mexicans” in other parts of the world. This is mainly a resentment of Mexico’s size and relative visibility more than any specific hatred - though sometimes people do get a bit hostile.
Also soccer can fuel some powerful rivalries, especially between Brazil and Argentina.
I think every continent has this to some degree, except Antarctica
Nice little joke with a nice little punchline, but the “facts” are completely garbage. If anything, the last line should have read “Everyone hates the japanese”…
-
Oh, the Protestants hate the Catholics
And the Catholics hate the protestants
And the Muslims hate the Hindus
And everybody hates the Jews… *--Tom Lehrer, * National Brotherhood Week *
Sorry, couldn’t resist.
Who’s this Tom Lehrer person? He sounds like my kinda guy.
http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showpost.php?p=4556626&postcount=72
:eek:
The “facts” as illustrated by that nice little joke, are that Mrs. Kunilou responded that ethnocentric rivalries in eastern Asia are at least as strong as they are in central Europe. I apologize if I didn’t communicate that clearly in my anecdote.
Tom Lehrer was a satirist back in the '60’s who wrote a number of marvelously comic songs expressing his rather jaundiced views about Life, the Universe and Everything. There are about three LP’s worth, and I seem to remember that a search on Amazon showed they were available as CD’s. The humor is somewhat dated, but I think the songs are still accessible to you young 'uns. I don’t know if he’s still alive; someone should ask him.
My personal favorites from his work are the aforementioned * National Brotherhood Week, * and * Vatican Rag. *
Dr. Lehrer is alive, well, and still sarcastic, though he shuns media attention. He teaches math at UC Santa Cruz.
My daughter-in-law is Okinawan and is offended when anyone accuses her of being Japanese, even though she speaks Japanese fluently. According to her, this is pretty common among Okinawans overall. But, again, given WWII, I guess this is understandable.
Damn, doesn’t anyone like the Japanese?