Just knowing what a symbol means doesn't mean you've done your "homework". You still can't read it or know anything about it.
Now if a player could recreate the symbol on demand and explain why it means that, and what era the symbol was invented it, and how to make the symbol negative...well that would impress me because that is homework.
if someone has a particular word that is important to them, and say they love the asian culture, that would be acceptable.
as i said in that old tattoo thread a week ago, it is a person's body to do what they like. if they like it, thats all that matters. people shouldnt pass judgement or degrade them for that, imo.
Yeah, but the average American with an asian character tatoo that says they love Asian culture, probably knows way less than Asians know about American culture, and may very well know nothing. They are probably just interested in a romantic ideal of Asian culture. Look at how ridiculous The Last Samurai was. Or when they had Fortune Cookie Night for Yao and he was like "What the heck is a fortune cookie? I've never heard of such a thing".
It would be like if a Native American went to Japan and they had "Andrew Jackson night" to honor him saying Andrew Jackson was a great American. Not such a good idea.
You can't honor people or a culture with something you're ignorant of
Why do you care what other people do? It's their lives, their body, let them do what they want. You're not the person who gets the judge or decide what people should or should not do.
Most Asians probably know very little about American culture actually. Sure there are some rich ones that follow american pop culture (if you count that as America), but I hardly doubt most asians know anything about us.
You can honor people or a culture anyway you want, no matter how much or how little you know about the subject. There are no rules for honoring people.
They said the same thing about the guy who first invented fire, he burned himself, pretty bad too. What a stupid thing to do by inventing fire. Then you know what, he ate hot food and stayed warm and suddenly this stupid idea was genius.