Interchangeable Asian Cultures

Hank: So, are you Chinese or Japanese?
Kahn: I live in California last twenty years, but first come from Laos.
Hank: Huh?
Kahn: Laos. We Laotian.
Bill: The ocean? What ocean?
Kahn: We are Laotian. From Laos, stupid! It's a landlocked country in Southeast Asia. It's between Vietnam and Thailand, okay? Population 4.7 million.
Hank: ...So, are you Chinese or Japanese?

— King of the Hill, "Westie Side Story"

Non-Asians mistaking that all Asian peoples are of one particular ethnicity. It is most commonly applied to East Asian countries such as China and Japan, but confusion may set in between other Asian countries as well, like conflating India with The Middle East.

Asia is a large and culturally diverse place, but East Asian cultures often get lumped together into one general mishmash. People who are generally unfamiliar with the intricacies of Asian cultures will often confuse the country of origin of various phenomena, such as karate being a shortcut term for any Asian martial art, when karate is specifically Okinawan in origin.^note This confusion is particularly widespread among American moviegoers given the outsize popularity and success of the Hong Kong movie industry—source of two of the biggest international martial-arts stars, Bruce Lee and Jackie Chan—where the prime martial art is kung fu, not karate. In fact, to American audiences just about the only really major films to focus on karate are those in the Karate Kid franchise, one of which even retains the word "karate" in the title despite starring Jackie Chan, moving the setting to China, and concentrating exclusively on kung fu. In places where the Asian and Nerdy trope exists, Asians from a variety of different cultures will be lumped together in the same stereotype.

It's something of an ongoing controversy over whether people should be able to identify the ethnicity of Asian people based on their physical characteristics. Audiences sometimes react negatively when an Asian actor plays a character with a different ethnic ancestry, such as an actor of Japanese descent playing (either type of) Korean, because they think it carries the implication that Asian ethnicities are not physically distinguishable, or at the very least that it doesn't matter. However, other people (such as Margaret Cho) insist that ethnicity is not always so obvious to the naked eye and that telling a Thai from a Tibetan can be as difficult as telling a Dane from a German. Although this is somewhat debatable as ethnic Thais are far more culturally, linguistically, and genetically distant from Tibetans than Danes are from Germans.

Like many things, politics plays a big role: Mistaking a Dane for a German would get you much less dirty looks than if you mistook a Japanese for a Korean, since Asian countries tend to have colder relations with their neighbors than European ones.

Nowadays it can be considered a Discredited Trope. In recent years Western audiences have been exposed to Asian cultures much more than in the past, and are learning how to correctly distinguish Asian countries. Playing straight with the idea that Asian cultures are easily interchangeable is considered a mere display of ignorance. When the trope is now used in fiction, it's mostly either for parodistic purpose or to point out someone's ignorance In-Universe.

Britain, a country with a different perspective on the idea of "Asian" to the United States, tends towards a post-colonial perception of the Indian subcontinent. Under British rule, it was all India: nation states yet to be born, like Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal, Bhutan and Sri Lanka, were all part of British India. This attitude persists: even in a simple thing like cuisine, everything is "Indian" even when the foodstuff in question comes from Pakistan or Bangladesh. Similarly, the peoples themselves are routinely misidentified, although the modern British do appear to be getting better at this. This doesn't arise so much with immigrants from the Far East: even in the 2020's, this community is still about 95% Hong Kong Chinese and there is little scope to misidentify here.

That said, there is some Truth in Television in this trope dating back to 4th century BCE, when migrants brought their culture from continental China and Korea to Japan in addition to subsequent contact and trade ties between the three nations. Needless to say that Asian countries didn't live in bubbles in the past millennia. There are many common trends in fashion, cuisine, architecture, linguistics, literature and the like. This sometimes results in people pointing out "inaccuracies" and thinking the trope's being played straight, when it's actually not the case.

Related to Global Ignorance, As Long as It Sounds Foreign, and Africa Is a Country. A Sub-Trope of Mistaken Nationality and/or Mistaken Ethnicity. Stepfather to the Far East. Compare Racial Face Blindness, which is when a character in-universe fails to distinguish individuals of a different race from each other. Also compare All Muslims Are Arab, which homogenizes a specific religious community that internally has little to do with each other. See also Dragons Up the Yin Yang, which is an iconographic shorthand for this trope. Latino Is Brown is a related trope, where people from Latin America are thought to be one single race of brown and brunet people despite their wide diversity.

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Examples

• Real Life

Anime and Manga

• In Gosick, most of the Sauville residents guess wrongly on Kazuya's country of origin (he's from Japan), the common answer among them being that he's Chinese. One kid even calls him "Mr. Chinese" despite Kazuya's vehemence and, when they introduce themselves properly, comments that his name is weird. This is hardly surprising, given the relative lack of international travel during The Roaring '20s.
• Rurouni Kenshin:
  • An apparently Japanese man turns out to be a Chinese feng shui practitioner.
  • Inverted when Kenshin finds a Western man waiting for him at home, he greets him with a "Bonjour." Turns out the man is actually German.
• In Black Lagoon, Revy refers to Shenhua as "Chinglish" and is corrected and told that Shenhua is in fact, Taiwanese. Note that Revy is Chinese herself, though Chinese-American. And a New-Yorker at that. At one point in the story where another Chinese character tries speaking to her in Cantonese, Revy replies that she doesn't understand a word of it.
• Played With: Magic Knight Rayearth has Fuu pointing out how the various aspects of Fahren seem to be a bizarre mishmash of various Asian countries; which she then lists. Princess Asuka is not amused by the strange person from another world talking about countries she's never heard of.
• Gundam Build Fighters uses this as a small joke: the American character Nils Nielson builds a very Japanese-looking Gunpla based on samurai, going so far as to write its model number in kanji and wear traditional hakama to his battles. But for all his Japanophilia, the martial art he uses in his fighting style is Chinese, which is Lampshaded by the show's Japanese cast: "Wait, he calls it the 'Sengoku Astray', but he's using Chinese techniques?"
• Discussed and averted in Delicious in Dungeon. Kabru's party members assume that Rin must know about all of the "Eastern" adventurers, since she's Eastern herself. Not only are there a variety of Eastern cultures, Rin was actually born on the island where most of the story takes place, so she's not as familiar with them as everyone thought.
• How Heavy Are the Dumbbells You Lift?: Gina Boyd is a Russian Occidental Otaku who came to Japan specifically to enjoy its culture. She lists kung-fu movies and yoga among the things she likes, which Satomi Tachibana points out aren't of Japanese origin.

Asian Animation

• The Simple Samosa episode "Sumo Momo", rather ironically for an Asian series. Sumo Momo is a wrestler momo (a Nepalese delicacy) with a Sumo Wrestling motif (Japan) who comes from a shaolin temple (China) according to an in-episode advertisement.

Comic Books

• The Avengers: One of the dumber early Silver Age The Avengers (1963) stories had Captain America going to Vietnam and confronting a general who is a giant sumo wrestler. A sumo wrestler, the national sport of Japan, as a high officer in Vietnam less than 20 years after the despised Japanese occupation. Sure.
• Invoked in the first issue of Steelgrip Starkey and the All-Purpose Power Tool when a Jerkass construction foreman tries to identify Sharri Barnett's ethnicity using a variety of slurs (she's Filipino).
• Teen Titans:
  • In the tie-in to Infinite Crisis, Risk calls his Japanese teammate Bushido "The Chinese kid." Mirage quickly corrects him, but he dismissively replies "whatever."
  • Cheshire is a half-white^note Originally of French descent in a DC encyclopedia but was later retconned into having an American father, half-Vietnamese assassin who has been known to use Japanese weapons like sais, shurikens and katanas. She also wears a cat mask inspired by Kabuki theatre masks in Teen Titans (2003) and Young Justice (2010). Futher complicating things is the fact she was adopted and raised by a Chinese man.
  • Chanda Madan, Lian Harper's babysitter, has a name of Sanskrit/South Asian origins, yet comes from the fictional West Asian country of Qurac.
• The Marvel superhero Shang-Chi's love interest is Leiko Wu, a Chinese-British woman with a Japanese first name (Leiko seems to be a poorly translated version of the Japanese name Reiko).
• The DC Comics Alternate Timeline Crisis Crossover event Flashpoint was criticized when a map of the world◊ was released that listed an "Asian Capital" in China, since it fell into this trope.
• An Animesque Avengers cover had Spider-Woman dressed as a Sailor Senshi, Cannonball dressed as a Super Sentai character and so on. The problem? The issue is set in Hong Kong, not Japan. The issue's artist, Mike Deodato, even made sure to distance himself and make it clear he did not illustrate the cover.
• Surprisingly averted in the licensed Godzilla comic that Marvel put out in the 70s. After Jimmy Woo asks Tamara Hashioka out on a date, Professor Takiguchi's grandson notes that Takiguchi seems to disapprove of Tamara flirting with a Chinese-American (a nod to the historical tensions between China and Japan).
• Lady Shiva, the fighter who taught Bruce Wayne the art of unarmed combat in the Batman comics, is usually depicted as Chinese and is sometimes given the improbable surname of "Wusan", but her title of "Shiva" is Hindu and describes the name of an Indian god (and a male god, no less). Just to add to the confusion, Shiva has in the past been drawn as a Caucasian woman, even when it's clear from the context that she is supposed to be Chinese, and actually grew up in Detroit Michigan.
• Black Panther: Lampshaded in an issue of Black Panther (1998), where Christopher Priest threw in a dig at the then-recent Iron Fist/Wolverine mini-series. When briefly recounting the ending of the mini (which saw Iron Fist becoming the protector of a group of mythical dragons from K'un Lun that had become stranded in Tokyo), Everett Ross asks why would they leave Chinese dragons in Japan.
  • In a much earlier issue, Ross tries speaking in Cantonese while ordering some Chinese takeout. The owner is completely flummoxed by the order, which causes T'Challa to state that Ross must not realize that the owner is actually Filipino.
• Deathstroke: The same writer later did Deathstroke, where he had several other examples. He seems to be fond of this subverting this trope.
  • This exchange from when Robin fought Ravager:
  Robin: And why is a Hmong girl using Japanese swords?
  Ravager: Caught a sale at Walmart.
  • And then again when some Hmong characters tried to talk to Hosun, one of Deathstroke's associates, in their language:
  Hosun: Dude. I'm six-two. You ever see a six-two Chinaman before? I mean, other than Yao Ming? I'm Korean, doofus. Speak American.
• One arc in Doctor Who Magazine featured a mysterious girl named Chiyoko, who was dressed in Sailor Fuku, debuted in a story set in Tokyo and got mistaken for the granddaughter of the local Corrupt Corporate Executive, and was later shown to be the result of a Fusion Dance involving a woman with a blatantly Japanese name. Yet at one point in the narrative, a character refers to her as “Chinese”.
• In an old issue of Justice League Europe, The Flash bonded with the Japanese heroine Doctor Light. During their discussion, Flash said that his girlfriend Linda was also of Asian (Korean-American) descent, but quickly corrected himself and stated that he didn't mean to imply that all Asians are alike.
• Iron Man: Early Iron Man 1968 comics had the Mandarin (who is Chinese) using Karate (which is from Okinawa). Some of the Mandarin's armored costumes over the years have also had a distinct Japanese samurai aesthetic.
• Wonder Woman:
  • In the early story Wonder Woman Goes to the Circus the Burmese elephant tamers are evil racist caricatures and are for some reason actually Imperial Japanese spies. The issue ends with the protection racket being the good guys.
  • The WWII-set Wonder Woman (Vol. 1) stories of the mid-late 70s featured a villain called Kung, a Japanese-American Imperial ultra-nationalist zealot. His costume's Chest Insignia is a yin-yang symbol and his animorphism powers are said to be inspired by the various animal-style forms of kung fu. Both of those things, and really the name "Kung" itself, are Chinese. This would be bad enough, but it goes against the grain of the character's core concept — the uber-patriots who worshiped the Emperor weren't known for remotely tolerating anything Chinese.
• A-Force attracted some controversy when someone decided that Nico Minoru needed a costume... and that costume was a cheongsam, a traditional Chinese garment, despite Nico being Japanese-American. Thankfully, the creative team caught on quickly, and the cheongsam was replaced with something closer to Nico's usual Goth sensibilities.
• Averted with New Super-Man. The book's star was going to be called Kenji Kong, but Gene Luen Yang decided to rename him Kenan Kong so that people wouldn't think he'd given a Chinese character a Japanese name.^ExplanationAccording to Gene, "Kenji" is both a Chinese and Japanese name, written with different characters and with different meanings. However, since "Kenji" is more associated with the Japanese, he went with the name change to avoid this trope.
• An issue of Totally Awesome Hulk has a group of Asian-American heroes teaming up for a charity event. While going out to dinner afterwards, Silk assumes Ms Marvel doesn't eat beef because she's a Hindu. Ms. Marvel quickly corrects her and says that her family is Pakistani, not Indian, and that she's a Muslim, not a Hindu.
• In the chilean comic Me llaman Pulp , a group of criminals plans a diamond robbery, and one of their members, Lee, who is Chinese, impersonates a Japanese businessman interested in buying diamonds.
• In a strange case of accentuating an example from the original work, Boom! Studios' Power Rangers comics did this to Trini Kwan, the original Yellow Ranger. The character's actress was of Vietnamese descent but Kwan is a Chinese surname, while the original show had her reference Japanese culture as well. Boom!'s comics keep the Chinese surname, but have her go to Korea to get a family heirloom for her mother. While it's possible she's of mixed ethnicity, later on her surname is misspelled as "Kwon", which is a Korean surname — except this wasn't a retcon, since it's not spelled that way in anything else.
• Alan Moore's The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen applies this to South Asian - specifically, Indian - cultures, depicting Captain Nemo as dressing like a Sikh and having a low opinion of Islam. In Jules Verne's novels, however, Nemo was from a mixed Hindu and Muslim background.
• The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Cartoonist: The Japanese Adrian pisses off an entitled fan of his, who calls him a derivative Chinese asshole in return.

Fan Works

• The fourth chapter of the Harry Potter fic Amicus Protectio Fortis introduces Chie Shinohara, who is supposedly Chinese despite having a Japanese name.
• Discussed in the Mass Effect/Warhammer 40,000 crossover The Mission Stays the Same; Kasumi (Japanese) goes by the alias "Zhao Daiyu" (Chinese) during the team's visit to Illium, noting that fewer and fewer humans know the difference and that aliens wouldn't get it if you gave them a lecture on the subject.
• In Ghost of You (Harry Potter) Cho Chang has a Tokyo apartment. Yes, this was written by Tara and Raven, in case you're asking.
• Parodied in this Worm snippet; turns out, Asia is a big place with a lot of cultures who have a lot of grudges against each other, and Nicaragua isn't even in Asia, but you try telling Lung that.
  I am a dragon. You are now Asian.
• In White Noise, Weiss makes an insensitive comment about how Yang must know kung-fu because she's Asian. Yang later sarcastically mentions that she left her kimono at home, but Weiss misses the sarcasm.
• Plan 7 of 9 from Outer Space. In "The Old Equations", Proton and Buster have flashbacks to when the United States fought Panasia. Proton remembers dirigible combat against a Emperor Ming-like Yellow Peril, while Kincaid remembers fighting Kaiju as the child pilot of a Humongous Mecha.

Film — Animation

• Aladdin is the South and West Asian variant: the Kingdom of Agrabah has a culture that's a mix of Arabian, Indian and Persian. The Sultan's palace is designed after the Taj Mahal, a building in Agra, India. The name of the country is a portmanteau of Agra and Baghdad.
• The Aristocats: Shun Gon is Chinese, but he is a Siamese cat which is a Thai breed.
• In a review of the animated The King and I, the reviewer mentions that Crown Prince Chululongkorn practices kung fu, when as a Siamese prince he'd be much more likely to be a student of Muay Thai. And indeed, if you watch that particular scene, you'll notice that Chululongkorn has taped-up fists, which are more commonly associated with Muay Thai than kung fu. That said, that's pretty much the only thing about Thailand that the movie got right.
• Mulan generally averts this and shows its work in regards to Chinese culture, but there are a few exceptions:
  • Shan Yu's pet saker falcon is named Hayabusa, which is the Japanese word for peregrine falcon. Saker falcons do not even exist in Japan, so you cannot handwave the bird as an exotic import.
  • The Huns themselves are this, though this is in part justifiable. They should properly be called the Xiongnu, and the Chinese dub does correctly refer to them as such. That said, it's a popular theory among academics that the two were the same people, or at least somehow related. They were both nomadic confederations hailing from somewhere in the Central Asian steppes, and the Hunnic invasion of Europe seems to coincide chronologically with the Xiongnu raids in China. Research on the topic is far from conclusive however, and academics who dismiss the theory entirely aren't uncommon. So this is more a case of creators going along with a plausible interpretation rather than downright getting things wrong.
  • The costume and make-up Mulan wears for the Matchmaker is often thought to be this but actually isn't. The dress resembles a kimono but is actually a hanfu (a traditional Chinese dress). The geisha-like make-up is also traditionally Chinese. The kimono and make-up are Japanese things that were influenced by Chinese culture.
• In The Mockbuster Little Princess School, the Mulan clone is named "Hime", which is a Japanese name.
• Raya and the Last Dragon is meant to be a story set in a Southeastern Asian setting. However, all the Southeast Asian culture is mashed together where the viewers can see Cambodian temples, Filipino weaponry, Vietnamese mountains among others despite that Southeast Asian culture is completely diverse. Not to mention that most of the characters are actually voiced by East Asian actors.
• Like Mulan, Turning Red averts this and shows its work in regards to Chinese culture, but there is one possible exception: Sun Yee's daughters are shown wearing attire that allegedly resembles hanbok, Korean traditional clothing, as opposed to hanfu, traditional Chinese clothing.

Film — Live-Action

• 7 Faces of Dr. Lao:
  Fat Cowboy: ...Looks like a Jap to me.
  Toothless Cowboy: Naaaw. He's Chinese.
  Fat Cowboy: How do you know?
  Toothless Cowboy: 'Cause I ain't stupid!
• The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert: Cynthia speaks Tagalog but her cassette tape has Japanese written on it.
• All About Steve has this in-universe with Ken Jeong's character, Angus, played by a Korean actor, who states that he's from Vietnam, and swears in Mandarin Chinese and Japanese.
• In Angels Revenge, Keiko has a Japanese name and wields a katana, but is introduced as being from... Vietnam. Technically it's not impossible.
• In Apocalypse Now, the American sailors sarcastically yell "sayonara!" as they pass some Vietnamese fishermen.
• In Battleship, Hopper repeatedly thinks the Japanese Nagata should know the Chinese book The Art of War just because he's Asian. Luckily, The Art of War is studied in Japan as well as most other militaries throughout the world.
• Beetlejuice has a subversion. The Deetzes order Chinese food for their first night in the Maitlands' rural Connecticut home. Delia, who is a highly cultured New York yuppie (or at least thinks she's highly cultured), is disgusted that the only Chinese restaurant in town offers Cantonese cuisine (from southeastern China) when she wanted Szechuan fare (from southwestern China).
• In Bend It Like Beckham, Indian lead Jess gets yellow-carded when she reacts to being called a "Paki," which is considered a horrific racial slur. Also, when her father complains about not being allowed to play cricket in his youth on racial grounds, she points out that Nasser Hussain is (at the time the film was made) captain of England. Her mother says "He's a Muslim. They're different" (they're Sikhs)— a line which there is an Ironic Echo of later in the film in an inversion of the trope, when her sister disapproves of Jess having an English boyfriend:
  Jess: He's not English, he's Irish!
  Jess' sister: It's the same thing!
• Big Fish: Edward's flashback to his war career has him parachuting in to a deliberately vague military camp in Asia. The logos and uniforms are made up, the time period isn't given, and Edward pre-parachuting is even reading a book called "How To Speak Asian". The Asian actors in this scene also speak different languages; the puppeteer speaks Tagalog, the soldier who escorts him offstage speaks Mandarin Chinese, the twins speak Cantonese, and the other soldiers speak Korean. This was done to keep the scene from setting itself in a specific war, and also possibly because Edward, as an American, might not be able to tell the difference between different Asian cultures.
• Played for comedy in Black Dynamite, in which Vietnam War veteran Black Dynamite recalls a mortally wounded Viet Cong child and repeatedly calls him Chinese. He doesn't seem to be aware that Vietnam is not in China. And later in the movie, Black Dynamite is revealed to be a fluent speaker of Mandarin.
• In Brain Smasher A Love Story, the Chinese assassination team is constantly having to say, "We are not Ninjas!" They are happy the one time someone else says it first. "They're not ninjas. They're Chinese." So happy that they don't beat any one up there.
• Bulletproof Monk:
  • Lampshaded by Kar. Who would expect a Chinese theater to be owned and operated by a Japanese man?
  • Kar tries to pass off the Monk as a (Chinese) Shaolin to Jade, but she immediately points out that Shaolin have to completely shave their heads. She accurately identifies him as a Tibetan Buddhist (Chow Yun-fat is Chinese). Conversely, the Monk shows familiarity with Sikh tenets to an Indian cab driver, who then expresses that he'd almost think the Monk was a Sikh himself but for not having enough hair (observant Sikh men don't shave or cut their hair).
• Cannonball Run 2 brings back Jackie Chan who, in Cantonese, orders a drink at an American bar. Nonplussed, the bartender raises his voice: "Does anyone here speak Oriental?"
• In Cradle 2 the Grave, Jet Li plays a Taiwanese Intelligence agent named Su sent to the US to retrieve a stolen shipment of "black diamonds" (actually, synthetic plutonium). When Su and Fait go to see "Jump" Chambers, a crime lord currently serving a sentence in his luxurious cell, Chambers tries to speak to Su only to be informed by Su that he doesn't speak Korean. Chambers just shrugs, saying that one of his Korean hookers taught him a few phrases. In this case, it's obvious that Chambers just doesn't care.
• This is one of the main issues with Crazy Rich Asians despite being hailed as a movement for diversity by having an all-Asian cast. It is set in Singapore, which admittedly has a majority Chinese population (more than 70% as of 2017), but the film acts as if the country is completely homogeneous. The few Malays and Tamils who exist serve as random background characters. This led to accusations that the title is misleading. The director himself had to stress out that not all Asian nationalities are going to be feature in the film and that the story focuses on a Chinese-American's journey of meeting the Singaporean Chinese upper class. Ironically, Henry Golding, who played the Singaporean boyfriend, has no Chinese ancestry to speak of; his father is English while his mother is Iban.
• Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story: Bruce is working out at a gym when he's harrassed by a Jerk Jock who says "you killed my father in Korea. You think I'm happy to see you in my gym?". This soon leads to a brief brawl that Bruce wins, after which he says to him "Sorry about your father. Those were Koreans, I'm an American.".
• Mentioned in Falling Down, when a police officer being asked to translate snarks that he is Japanese, unlike the robbed store owner who is Korean. This example is especially hilarious, as the Japanese cop was played by a Korean actor, while the Korean storeowner was played by a Chinese actor.
• The film Fist of Fear, Touch of Death plays it straight and claims to be a documentary on finding a successor to Bruce Lee through a karate tournament, and makes the claim that Lee's great-grandfather was "China's greatest samurai", and that the young Bruce was "karate crazy". Anyone with cursory knowledge about Bruce Lee would know that he was Chinese and practiced kung fu, while samurai and karate are Japanese.
• Freaky Friday (2003) has the curse that causes said "Freaky Friday" Flip cast by a Chinese woman in the local restaurant. When theorising what happened, Tess says that they're a victim of "Asian voodoo". Not only is voodoo an African folk religion, the closest Chinese equivalent would be wuism, their form of shamanism. Of course there's no reason Tess would know the difference, since she didn't even know magic was possible until she woke up that morning.
• Joked about in From Dusk Till Dawn when Seth Gecko fails to wrap his head around the idea of a white man like Jacob Fuller having an Asian son.
  Seth: Well, you don't look Japanese.
  Jacob: Neither does he. He looks Chinese.
• G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra: Storm Shadow is a Japanese ninja. His backstory is that he hates Snake Eyes for being favored by the head of the Ashikage Clan despite being white. He is played by Lee Byung-Hun, a South Korean.
• In Goldfinger, Harold Sakata (Japanese) plays Oddjob (Korean), even though in the book Goldfinger's Korean Mooks hate being called "Japs" by Americans.
• Gung Ho is about American factory workers and Japanese auto executives learning to work together. The phrase "gung ho" is actually derived from Chinese words meaning "work together." Ironically, it was coined as an Americanism by soldiers in WWII who were fighting the Japanese.
  • One of the film's more subtle bits of comedy: when the Japanese representatives of Assan Motors come to America, they are greeted, among other appropriate elements, by a Chinese dragon costume, the kind one usually sees during Chinese Lunar New Year parades.
• Hard Ticket to Hawaii: Mr. Chang is described as half-Chinese, but his office is decorated with Japanese swords.
• Invoked in Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle, where Harold (who is Korean) is repeatedly mistaken for Chinese/Japanese. Kumar is Indian, but mistaken for Arab in the second movie (interesting, because there is much less of an ethnic link between Indians and Arabs than between Koreans and the Chinese and Japanese). Being correctly identified as Korean in the second film proves to be bad for Harold, as the inept Deputy Secretary of Homeland Security immediately assumes he's North Korean.
• On a Western promotional poster for the Chinese film Hero (2002), Jet Li's character holds a katana.
• In Order of Disappearance: All of the gangsters call the hitman "The Chinaman" despite him being a Dane with Japanese ancestry. Even when he's told otherwise by the man, Nils still uses the name.
• In the original Iron Man comic book, Tony Stark met professor Yinsen in Vietnam during the Vietnam war. Now, Yinsen is a Chinese rather than Vietnamese name, but the comic book character comes from a fictional place called "Timbetpal," so it's at least possible he is of Chinese descent (ethnic Chinese people do exist in Vietnam). However, the origin of Iron Man was later retconned so that he met Yinsen while both of them were being held captive by terrorists in Afghanistan. The Iron Man movie follows the retconned origin story, except that in it Yinsen comes from a village in Afghanistan and clearly looks like a man of Middle Eastern descent (he's played by the Iranian-American actor Shaun Toub), but inexplicably he still has a Chinese name (albeit pronounced in a way that could pass off as Middle Eastern).
  • The flashback scene in Iron Man 3 confirms that his full name is Ho Yinsen, like the comic.
• In Christopher Lambert's J.F. Lawton's The Hunted the very Chinese John Lone plays uber-ninja Kinjo. It isn't so bad at first, unless you can tell the difference between Hong Kong and Japanese accented English; but when the script calls for him to exchange dialogue with actual Japanese actors in Nihonggo, his lack of fluency becomes painfully obvious even to someone who only knows 3 words of Japanese.
• Joy Ride (2023): After the reveal that Audrey is of Korean, not Chinese, descent, the girls have a fight where it's claimed that Lolo and Audrey were only friends because they were the only Chinese girls in town. Lolo bites back that they would have been stuck together anyway because white people can't tell the difference between Chinese and Korean.
• In the 1942 Jungle Book: Mowgli's village, which is in central India, has the women wear saris (common throughout India) but their husbands wear turbans (the traditional headgear of the Sikhs, who live only in northwestern India!). Of course, there has been intermarriage between Hindus and Sikhs, but even then it would be extremely unlikely for the villagers to wear both traditional costumes, or for them to be gender-specific. Though some Hindu men wear turbans as well, they don't so in this uniform manner.
• The Jungle Book (1994) combines this with a somewhat baffling mid-story Race Lift. In the movie's prologue, Mowgli is a little Indian boy (as he was in the book and most other adaptations). However, after Mowgli grows up during a time skip, he is played by Chinese American actor Jason Scott Lee.
• The Karate Kid (2010) reboot movie is actually about a boy going to China and learning kung fu. The boy never does anything relating to the Japanese karate. It's basically an Artifact Title, though it's at least handwaved in a Title Drop where Cheng uses it as an insult.
• In Kick-Ass 2, Chris "The Motherfucker" D'Amico hires a Chinese ex-Triad enforcer for his supervillain gang and makes him a Mongol warrior called "Genghis Karnage", lamely justifying this as "just a character archetype". "Genghis" goes along with it because he's Only in It for the Money, but Chris's right hand man Javier calls him out for this.
• Lampshaded and played for laughs in Kid Detective (2020): Caroline assumed Patrick (the murder victim) was the one leaving her origami flowers in her locker because he's the only Asian in their school. When told that origami is Japanese and Patrick is Chinese, Caroline muses if she was being unconsciously racist.
• Averted in Kill Bill. One of O-Ren Ishi's subordinates in the Yakuza, the Japanese mafia, objects that she's half Chinese-American (she promptly cuts his head off). Similarly, Bill warns Beatrix that Pai Mei, the Chinese master of Bak Mei kung fu he sends her to train with, hates the Japanese, and not to mention them in front of him. Though O-Ren's casting still plays this straight, as Lucy Liu has no Japanese ancestry (her parents both emigrated from China and met in New York).
  • O-ren's Chinese background was added after Lucy Liu's casting. The original script she was half American, half Japanese.
• The Killer Elite. Yuen is referred to as Chinese, but it's not made clear whether the country he's returning to is Communist China or Taiwan. He can also fight with a katana well enough to defeat Toku, a Japanese ninja master. To further complicate matters, he dresses in ninja gear during the climax and wields a shuriken, he's played by Japanese actor Mako, and his daughter Tommie has a Japanese name (富江).
• An example of fantasy occurred in The Last Airbender, in the original series the Fire Nation is clearly inspired by China, with elements from Imperial Japan and Thailand, especially architecture. In the film, the actors chosen to play characters from that nation were Indians (Dev Patel), Persians, Arabs and even Māori. (A meta example occurred during the casting process, when it was suggested that the extras could come with their "ethnic clothes", more specifically "if they are Korean, come in a kimono")
• The Mask of Fu Manchu shows all the peoples of Asia rallying behind the resurrected spirit of Genghis Khan who would lead them to conquer the West. Never mind that most Asians, including the Chinese, would view Genghis Khan as a foreign invader rather than a beloved leader. There's also a statue of Buddha in Fu Manchu's lair, but he later tries to sacrifice Sheila to the Hindu god Shiva.
• In Mean Girls, in the scene at the end where Gretchen has become friends with the Vietnamese girls, they're actually speaking Mandarin, not Vietnamese. Also, the "Pak" in Trang Pak's name is Korean, not Vietnamese.
• Some people criticized Memoirs of a Geisha for casting Chinese and Korean actors in Japanese roles. Chinese actress Zhang Ziyi expressed the difficulty of speaking English (which she learned for the film) with a Japanese accent in one interview, saying it was like a native English speaker having to speak Russian with a Chinese accent. Word of God is that they had an open casting for Japanese actresses - none of whom showed up - forcing them to turn to actresses of other Asian nationalities.
• Despite the source material's rather spotty history with this trope, Mortal Kombat (2021) pointedly averts it in its opening scene, where the Chinese assassin Bi-Han (aka Sub-Zero) addresses his ninja nemesis, Hanzo Hasashi (aka Scorpion) in what the subtitles clearly tell us is Chinese. Hanzo, who only speaks Japanese, doesn't understand what he's saying. Both Scorpion and Raiden are played by Japanese actors, matching their characters, while Sub-Zero is played by Joe Taslim, who is Indonesian but of Chinese descent.
• No Escape (2015) takes place in an unspecified southeastern Asian country bordering Vietnam. The locals speak Cambodian, Thai and Burmese at different points in the movie.
• The Perfect Weapon (1991): James Hong is Chinese and Mako is Japanese, yet they're playing Korean characters.
• Piccadilly has an Asian female named Shosho (a Japanese name) who engages in the Japanese tradition of keeping a dagger on the wall. But she does a Thai-inspired dance and is referred to as a Chinese girl. She's played by Chinese-American actress Anna May Wong.
• Pineapple Express: The film is very vague about exactly who the "Asians" are that Ted's gang is fighting. The Asian actors come from a variety of nationalities, they speak nothing but heavily accented English that sounds like a foreign language if you're not paying attention, and what little we see of their lair is decorated in gang paraphernalia more than anything Asian.
  Saul: He's in a big war with the Asians.
  Dale: Asians? What kind of Asians? Indians are technically Asian.
  Saul: I don't know, man! Asians!
• In [REC], Cesar goes on a rant about the Japanese family in which he mixes aspects of Japanese and Chinese culture.
• The title character of Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings tells a story of how he met his best friend when she broke what would be a fight between him, a Chinese immigrant, and a guy who called him "Gangnam Style" ("I'm not Korean!").
• Cantu in Sinbad of the Seven Seas is described as Chinese and liberally quotes Confucius, but he's played by a Japanese actor and credited as "Samurai".
• Minor examples in The Sorcerer's Apprentice:
  • While in Chinatown during a festival, Balthazar and Dave battle the Evil Sorcerer Sun Lok, who turns a dragon costume into a real dragon. After defeating him, Balthazar and Dave pretend to be cops and go out to meet actual NYPD officers, who have just arrived. Balthazar tells them that someone just had too much sake, prompting Dave to loudly tell him that sake is Japanese not Chinese, earning an annoyed look from Balthazar. Luckily, the real cops ignore Dave's remark. After they pass, Balthazar tells Dave that he was "in character" (i.e. only pretending to be culturally ignorant).
  • Balthazar uses this trope to Bluff the Impostor. The Big Bad is disguised as an old Chinese woman. Balthazar addresses her in Cantonese, and he/she says in delight, "Ah, you speak Mandarin!" Balthazar promptly punches the impostor, correcting his mistake by way of Bond One-Liner.
• John Cho, while being Korean, was still cast as Hikaru Sulu, who is of Japanese descent, for the Star Trek (2009) reboot movies. J. J. Abrams himself was initially concerned with this casting decision knowing it would potentially throw off Asian viewers, but the original Sulu's actor George Takei vaguely assured him that Sulu as a character, even though he was just Japanese-Filipino, represented "all of Asia" on the Enterprise.
• J. J. Abrams strikes again with Star Wars: The Force Awakens. The criminal gang Kanjiklub has a Japanese-influenced name, yet its members are played by Indonesian actors from the Raid series. Of course, this movie is set a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, so any resemblance to Earth culture shouldn't be taken too seriously.
• In Street Kings, Ludlow invokes this to goad the Korean gangsters into beating him up and stealing his car.
  Thug Kim: Konnichiwa is Japanese. It's insultin' to Koreans.
  Ludlow: How am I supposed to tell if you can't?
  Thug Kim: Fuck's that supposed to mean, white boy?
  Ludlow: It means you got eyes like apostrophes, you dress white, talk black and drive Jew, so how am I supposed to know what kind of zipperhead, dog-munching dink you are if you don't?
  Boss Kim: Yo. Do you know who the fuck we are?
  Ludlow: Yeah. A couple of panheads buyin' a machine gun out of a trunk.
• In Sushi Girl, a Japanophile crook has built what he intends to be a Japanese-themed lair, but one of his comrades notes that the actual decor is "a little Ming Dynasty."
• Parodied in They Call Me Bruce. The protagonist is Korean, but his boss calls him "Bruce". Given that 'Bruce' is a Genre Savvy fan of martial arts movies, he has no problem playing the role to make himself look cooler, whether pretending to be a Chinese kung fu warrior or a Japanese samurai (the joke being he doesn't know any martial arts at all).
• Actually subverted in The Toll of the Sea. It's an adaptation of Madame Butterfly - which is set in Japan. It however moves the setting to China to accommodate the Chinese actress playing the lead.
• Played around with in the courtroom drama True Believer. A murder suspect was identified as the killer in a lineup. His defense attorney tries to get the cop who supervised the lineup to admit that all of the other people in it were Chinese, while the defendant is Korean, which could have helped set him apart from the decoys. The question is stricken by the judge, however, who rules that the detective is not an expert in ethnicity and could not distinguish between them by sight alone. Plus he had long hair and goatee (resembling the killer) which none of the rest did. Also, he was accused of committing a murder to get into a Chinese-American gang, which no one seems to find odd. To top it off, the actor playing the suspect is a Japanese-American.
• Lampshaded and mocked in The Tuxedo after Jackie Chan's character, Jimmy Tong, comes close to getting the crap beat out of him by an angry bike messenger:

  Jimmy's friend: Hey, I thought all you Chinese people knew karate.^note Bit of Genius Bonus folded into the joke here: Karate is a Japanese art (originally from Okinawa), not Chinese (however, it was influenced by Chinese martial arts).
  Jimmy: Not everyone Chinese is Bruce Lee.

• The Wrecking Crew: Despite Yu-Rang being Chinese, Matt and Freya associate her with Japanese things; Matt quips to Yu-Rang that he won't see a yen of the gold Contini stole, while Freya says she knows "where Yu-Rang hangs her kimono" (i.e. where her headquarters are). The "ah-so" expression that gets mocked in the movie's theme song is also Japanese.

Gamebooks

• The Fighting Fantasy gamebook, The Crimson Tide is set in the Isles of Dawn, Titan's Fantasy Counterpart Culture of Ming Dynasty China. However, while your character and most of your friends are based off the Chinese, with names like Long and Quan, one of your close friends is called Sunai - which sounds closer to Japanese.

Literature

• In the James Bond novels:
  • In Goldfinger, the title antagonist describes Karate as "a branch of judo." In the same book, one of his Korean mooks fights several US servicemen for calling him a "Jap."
  • In You Only Live Twice, Tiger Tanaka insults Bond for talking about Ming dynasty Japanese art.
• Carefully averted in the Jules Verne novel Around the World in Eighty Days. When Passepartout arrives in Japan, the narration makes a point of mentioning how different the Japanese and Chinese are in appearance.
• Terry Pratchett's Agatean Empire (part of the Discworld) deliberately confuses Chinese elements (Great Wall, one syllable family names like Hong etc) and Japanese ones (Sumo, Ninjas) as well as Western pseudo-Oriental things such as fortune cookies and Willow Pattern plates. It is a parody, after all.
  • Later works add to the "Agatean" mix: a sub-region called Bhang Bhang Duc introduces a suspiciously Thailand-like place, and a there is also a Korea-like place with a fondness for fermented cabbage called grimchi.
  • A possible straight example is Klatch, which is generally a Fantasy Counterpart Culture of the Middle East, or at least the Arabian Nights variant. But Klatchian cuisine is generally suggested to be Indian/Chinese. Possibly justified by the later retcon that Klatch is both a country and a continent. The Compleat Discworld Atlas clarifies this even more: Klatch covers the equivalent of a swathe of turf over North and East Africa into the Middle-East and beyond and has elements of everything from Libyan through Arabian to Persian and Pakistani. The Discworld's India/Pakistan is hinted to be an Expy of India under the Moghul Empire, and there is a hint that a Discworld "Israel" is in there somewhere as another fizzing-fused device in the volatile mix.
• Our Dumb World: From the entry on Japan: "1942: Japan watches on in embarrassment as a confused U.S. first blames Chinese, then Korean, Taiwanese, Vietnamese, and finally even Hawaiian forces for the strike on Pearl Harbor." Also, from their entry on China: "1999: NATO mistakenly bombs the Chinese embassy in Yugoslavia, claiming all the buildings look exactly the same."
• Portrayed in Snow Crash when a mafioso uses the slur "nips" when referring to Asians and another character corrects him, saying that the word is short for Nipponese and would only refer to the Japanese.
• In Sho-shan y la Dama Oscura Played straight because it's normal that people call anime Chinese cartoons or tell Violeta to stop speaking Chinese when she's speaking Japanese. It's also then subverted since Luis Monsalve and his wife Dagmar have a game where they try to hold a conversation in Chinese (Luis) and Japanese (Dagmar) so their daughters can know how different both languages and cultures are.
• In the poem "Growltiger's Last Stand" in T.S. Elliot's "Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats", Gilbert's army of Siamese cats (which are Thai) are referred to as a "fierce Mongolian horde" as well as a now-pejorative term for Chinese people.
• In Karen Chance's Curse the Dawn, a cross-dresser says "I'd bind my feet up like a geisha" in order to fit into a pair of designer shoes.
• J. K. Rowling used fairly stereotypical names for most of the characters in Harry Potter, but Cho Chang ended up being accused of this trope (since she was described as Chinese, but while "Chang" is a common Chinese surname, "Cho" is a Chinese/Korean surname, or a Japanese given name). The closest you can get with a realistic name, which is actually her name in the Chinese translations, is 張秋 (Zhāng Qiū). (Note that "qiū" is also pronounced similarly to "Cho") One possibility is that "Cho Chang" is a form of Cantonese romanisation of 張秋 (an uncommon style of name, but not unheard of in Hong Kong, e.g. singer Hacken Lee). In the films she is played by Katie Leung, who is of Hong Kong descent.
• The Man in the High Castle by Philip K. Dick is set in a Japanese-occupied America in a timeline where the Axis won WWII, but heavily references Chinese philosophy and religion, with several Japanese (and Japanese-influenced American) characters practicing Taoism and consulting the I-Ching. Dick was called out for this by his Japanese translator.
• In November 9, this comes up briefly when Fallon claims that pad Thai and sushi are "almost the same thing" simply because "they're both Asian". Anyone who is remotely familiar with either food - regardless of how knowledgeable they are on Asian cultures - will be able to tell you they're nothing alike, nor are they from the same culture: sushi is Japanese and pad Thai is...well, Thai.
• Carefully Averted in the Sandokan novels, with the author (noted for extremely accurate research) taking care of providing accurate if brief descriptions of the various people appearing in the series and their respective cultures, even differentiating between people that most would usually lump together (Tremal Naik and Kammamuri are both Indians of Hindu religion, but Tremal Naik is often described as Bengali and Kammamuri just can't shut up on being a Maratha).
• Sixth Column. The whole of Asia has amalgamated to a massive nation of PanAsia, with most elements resembling Japanese culture. They launch an Overnight Conquest of the United States. The story was originally written during WW2 when anti-Japanese propaganda was understandably strong...and the Chinese had already been fighting the Japanese for years. Author Robert A. Heinlein considered Sixth Column an Old Shame that he wrote to garner the favor of the racist but influential sci-fi editor John W. Campbell.
• The Star Trek novel Tears of the Singers , from Melinda Snodgrass, features the following phrase: “Yeoman Chou, a diminutive Chinese girl who looked like she ought to be wearing a silk kimono rather than toting a phaser.”
• Invoked in The Unraveling of Cassidy Holmes, about why the members of Gloss (an Expy of the Spice Girls) broke up and the negative effects being in the band had on them. "Yummy Gloss", aka Yumi, is Japanese, but their Jerkass management insists on doing lots of photoshoots with her in tight mini-cheongsams and other sexualized ripoffs of Chinese culture (like Dragons Up the Yin Yang), despite her protests.
• Eleanor & Park:
  • At one point, taekwondo is treated as interchangeable with kung fu. The former is Korean while the latter is Chinese. (To make matters worse, taekwondo is also misspelled as "taekwando".)
  • Eleanor refers to Park's mom a "dainty China person".
  • Eleanor talks about Park's "ninja magic" at one point. Park is Korean, and ninjas are Japanese.
• Cloud Atlas: The name of Nea So Copros, the future version of Korea, is a corruption of New East Asian (Sphere of) Co-Prosperity. It is named after the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, which is Imperial Japan's attempt to establish a pan-Asian union.
• In Kitchen Confidential, Anthony Bourdain tells the story of his time at Culinary Insistute of America, where at the time, all Asian cuisine was taught by one teacher, an elderly Chinese man, who was personally offended that he had to also teach the students about Japanese cuisine which he despised.
• To All the Boys I've Loved Before: Lara Jean mentions that she always has difficulty dressing up for Halloween, because regardless of what she wears, everyone assumes that she is dressing up as an anime character (Lara Jean is half-Korean).

Live-Action TV

• The Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. episode "A Fractured House" features a scene where Bobbi travels to Okinawa to meet with an old friend. The scene was filmed at a Chinese garden in San Marino, California.
• In Arrow, the Green Arrow villain Shado is depicted as being of Chinese descent despite being Japanese in the original comics (in fairness she's a hero here, so is virtually a new character anyway). Katana however is kept Japanese despite living in Hong Kong, with her family being Japanese expatriates.
• In the first episode of the British sitcom Bad Education, teacher Alfie Wickers, who dishes out most of the titular bad education, makes his class do a reenactment of the Battle of Pearl Harbor. He gives Asian student Jing Chow the role of a Japanese soldier, even putting a Rising Sun headband on her. He is soon reminded that "She's Chinese, you muppet!"
• In black•ish, one of Dre's coworkers asks Tanya, an Asian-American employee, how parents handle corporal punishment in China. An annoyed Tanya responds by saying that she wouldn't know, since she's from Torrance and is Korean.
• The Boys (2019): While the first season didn't really give Kimiko a clear origin, suggesting she comes from a fictitious country in Southeast Asia that is a hodgepodge of Japanese and Chinese cultures, it's ultimately averted in season 2 with her being explicitly stated as being Japanese (essentially matching her actress, Karen Fukuhara, whose parents were Japanese). The Shining Light murdered her parents and kidnapped her brother and her to the Philippines to indoctrinate them as soldiers. However, Kimiko didn't submit.
• Bridgerton: The Sharma sisters, while having been born and brought up in Bombay/Mumbai on the west coast of India, mix and match terms and phrases from all over the Indian subcontinent.
• Played for Laughs in the "Playa Hater's Ball" sketch from Chappelle's Show, where the top Hater from South Korea is a man named Mr. Roboto.
• Charmed (2018): Niko complains of this perception, since a fellow cop asked that she translate a Chinese menu for him, when she's not Chinese (to judge by her name, she's Japanese-American).
• Cobra Kai: Invoked in John Kreese's flashbacks. His superior in The Vietnam War, Captain Turner, promises to teach him "how to fight like the enemy" by teaching him Tang Soo Do... which is a Korean martial art.
• Done on Community, by of all people...
  Chang: Are you ignoring me because I'm Korean?
  Shirley: You're Chinese.
  Chang: Oh there's a difference?
  • Chang having been played by Korean-American actor Ken Jeong.
• In an episode of CSI, a Chinese actor was able to pose as a Japanese man in a con involving a fake Japanese sword.
• Spoofed in Danger 5, where the episode set in Japan uses Chinese and Korean tropes as if interchangeable.
  Pierre: Ling Ling is my soulmate. Like "Seoul", in Korea. Get it?
  Jackson: I thought these girls were Chinese.
• Daredevil (2015):
  • In the first episode, when the Hell's Kitchen crime bosses are rendezvousing at a construction site and James Wesley is running late, Leland Owlsley asks the Japanese Nobu if he can translate for the Chinese/K'un-L'unian Madame Gao. He immediately gets an offended look from Nobu and Gao, and Anatoly regards him in a way that can be summed up as "Wow, really? You idiot." It's clear that Owlsley has trouble understanding the two cultures and languages are nothing alike even after Anatoly points this out to him.
  • The slimy college professor in "Semper Fidelis" that Matt and Elektra seek out to translate some documents, tells the two Asian prostitutes he hired that he wants to eat moo goo gai pan off their naked bodies. When one of the women tells him they aren't Chinese, he just shrugs it off and says all Asians look alike to him anyway. And this guy teaches Asian Studies at NYU.
• Vincent Masuka on Dexter occasionally does this to himself, referring to all Asians as "my people" and setting up a Buddhist shrine for good luck, only shrugging after Dexter asks if the Japanese aren't traditionally Shinto (most Japanese people practice a combined Buddhism and Shinto though, with one third being exclusively Buddhist. Over half have a Buddhist shrine in their home). Another example is when Masuka says Dexter is "messing with his chi", and the latter points out that's Chinese, which Masuka responds to with "So?" (this is not really wrong, except it's called "ki" instead of "chi" in Japan).
• Played for comedy in Eastbound & Down when Ashley Schaeffer entertains some Korean business executives with Japanese food and a cross-dressing geisha dancer. In the series finale, he admits his error and says that the Koreans were very offended.
• Seemingly played straight in 8 Simple Rules when the Stern Teacher Mrs. Crup is furious with Kerry for assuming she's Japanese and says "I'm Chinese actually". Later she becomes a Defrosting Ice Queen thanks to a romance with CJ and admits she is Japanese.
• British Soap Opera Emmerdale features the Anglo-Indian Sharma siblings who have an Indian father and English mother. All are portrayed by half Asian actors but not exactly half Indian, with Nik Sharma being portrayed by half Lebanese Rik Makarem, Jai Sharma portrayed by half Asian Trinidadian ^note  South Asian Trini so likely has Indian ancestry Chriss Bisson and Priya Sharma portayed by half Filipina Fiona Wade.
• Goodness Gracious Me has played on the utter inability of white British people to see the fine details that enable them to differentiate between, for instance, a (Hindu) Indian and a (Islamic) Bangladeshi. This has been played for a sort of despairing humour about white Brits being colour-blind in the wrong ways for the wrong reasons.
• Invoked on FlashForward (2009), when a woman describes herself saying in her flash-forward that she needs to talk to "Agent Noh, or one of those names that's Vietnamese or Chinese or something..." Cut to Noh, who informs her with open annoyance that it's Korean.
• In an episode of Fresh Off the Boat, Eddie (who is Taiwanese-American) asks why the Japanese game developers behind Shaq Fu need to charge 50 dollars for it.
  Classmate: Aren't you Japanese?
  Eddie: Shut your damn mouth.
• Parodied (but played straight) in Glee. In "Throwdown," Sue splits the glee club in two and takes the minority students. Being Sue, she calls African-American members Mercedes and Matt "Aretha" and "Shaft" respectively, before moving on to Asian-American Tina (Korean) and Mike (Chinese): "Asian" and "Other Asian." This gets carried forward where, in the later episode "Ballads," when the club take names out of a hat to find their partners for ballads Tina picks "Other Asian." When they eventually become a couple everything they do, from dating to family meetings, is prefaced with the adjective "Asian," including "Asian Couples Therapy." Tina wonders why the couples therapy needs to be Asian. Later, when Sunshine Corazon (Filipino) considers joining the team, only to be mistreated by Rachel, Tina and Mike confront her and, when they are asked how they even heard about the situation, explain that the Asian community is very close.
• GLOW (2017): Jenney Chey, "Fortune Cookie" is Chinese Cambodian. Her character is a mixture of Yellow Peril stereotypes about the Japanese and Chinese. She also derisively notes that the Fan Tan Casino the show relocates to after being cancelled from KDTV, is "Asian themed".
• The Golden Girls includes a few instances of this, notably in the episode where Rose goes back to school to get her GED (with Dorothy as a class instructor). In taking attendance, Dorothy calls out the name "Jim Shu" and then mistakes it for a practical joke involving homophones ("Gym Shoe"). As Dorothy dismisses the name as a prank, an Asian-American man stands up and identifies himself as "Jim Shu." Shortly thereafter, "Jim Shu" hits on Rose, who sits in front of him, by asking her to "meet me at Benihana after class" and later telling Dorothy that he couldn't "drink [enough] sake" to fool around with her. "Shu" is typically a Chinese name, while all of the character's "Asian" cultural references (Benihana, sake) are Japanese. Of course, the actor, Ralph Ahn, was Korean.
• The Good Place: Jason notes that he's actually Filipino, not Taiwanese like the Buddhist monk he's been mistaken for, and says it's racist that the Good Place assumed that he was. Given the reveal that the neighborhood is, in fact, the Bad Place, the racism was likely intentional.
• Iron Fist (2017):
  • Colleen Wing was raised in Japan, but happens to speak both Mandarin and Japanese. It's revealed she was born in China but moved to Japan after her mother died.
  • Danny Rand was taught Chinese martial arts while living with Tibetan Buddhist monks in the Himalayas.
  • Danny references Edo-era Ronin Samurai traditions of challenging a school master to try to get a position to teach at Colleen's school, thus assuming a kendo school should also teach kung fu.
  • During the first episode, the spontaneous Chinese street festival Danny infiltrates trying to elude Ward Meachum's goons shows participants with Japanese kabuki masks.
  • Danny, as a kung fu martial artist, also practices Hindu meditative practices.
• In Kim's Convenience, Jung (who is of Korean descent) is greeted with a "konnichiwa" from the old white guy he's trying to buy sneakers off of. The guy then apologizes and says, "It's the only Oriental I know." And that's just the beginning of his unpleasant racist (and later sexist) exchanges with Jung and his boss Shannon, who is horrified.
• Kung Fu (1972):
  • In "The Assassin", half Chinese Kwai Chang Caine tries to explain the difference between a Shaolin monk and a Ninja with little comprehension from the white folk after he is mistaken for the ninja's accomplice.
  • In "Barbary Coast", the corrupt businessman Vincent Corbino forces Caine to become a prizefighter. Before a match, Corbino announces Caine as "The Shanghai Kid". Caine says he's never even been to Shanghai, but Corbino dismissively says, "All Chinese come from Shanghai."
• Law & Order: Criminal Intent had an episode written to feature a wealthy Kashmiri family involved in that region's struggle for secession. The episode was, for one reason or another (presumably news-related) rewritten to be about a Tamil family involved in the Sri Lankan separatist movement. They didn't change the cast and they didn't change the character names, leaving some viewers wondering how a prominent Tamil political leader would be called Bela Khan (a Muslim name-she also wears a hijab at times, while the Sri Lankan Tamils are Hindus) and look like near enough to being white (the actress, Indira Varma, is only half Indian).
• Lost: Happens in-story several times to Sun and Jin, who are Korean. Hurley refers to them as "the Chinese people" before he learns their true nationality. A flashback to the airport reveals a white couple making a reference to Memoirs of a Geisha (Japanese) in relation to them. Also, in "This Place is Death," when Jin asks Charlotte to translate, knowing that she speaks Korean, Sawyer assumes he means Miles (who's Chinese American) and encourages him to help, to which Miles replies "Dude, he's Korean. I'm from Encino."
• In an episode of Malcolm in the Middle, Reese tries to mail himself to China so he can beat up his pen pal for not sending him nunchakus signed by the Emperor.
• M*A*S*H:
  Frank Burns: When are you going to learn about Chinese treachery? Didn't Pearl Harbor teach you anything?
• Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers has Trini Kwan. Trini was played by the late Thuy Trang, who was Vietnamese-American. However, the character would refer to Chinese and Japanese culture, while her surname of Kwan is Chinese.
  • Her replacement in terms of ethnicity Adam Park wasn’t much better. Despite being played by a Korean actor, and explicitly referred to as being Korean, one episode has him inheriting a Chinese lantern, which gets identified by a sign as a “Japanese lantern”. Truncated Power Rangers ran with this, but having Adam get pissed off that his focus episode was “so damn racist”.
• A 1980 episode of The Muppet Show famously Flanderized the entire continent of Asia. Right after Kermit the Frog announces to the audience that the gang is going to be reenacting A Thousand and One Nights (or The Arabian Nights, as Kermit refers to it), a Chinese gong goes off, provoking laughter from the audience. Later, a random Muppet sings about going to Bombay and meeting a "sentimental Oriental" who is supposed to be a Hindu, but dresses like an Arabian harem girl and is played by the Ambiguously Jewish Muppet "Wanda." Furthermore, her love interest is a "whirling dervish," referencing the Sufi Islamic sect that exists in Turkey, Iran, and certain other countries, but not really India. Later, during the depiction of "Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves," Ali Baba and his horse are shown traveling through what looks to be a jungle - even though tropical rain forests are nowhere to be found near Arabia.
• The Pacific: Episode nine features angry confrontations over the rights of the Okinawan civilians versus the Imperial Japanese soldiers ("A Jap's a Jap!" one Marine protests).
• In an episode of Psych, Shawn takes a wushu lesson and tells the master that he always wanted to learn karate. The (Chinese) master is furious and tells him that wushu is completely different from karate, which Shawn, being a jerkass, ignores. He also calls the master sensei, which is a Japanese word for teacher, as opposed to shifu.
• Reservation Dogs: Bear ignorantly assumes that the home Dr. Kang wishes to return to is China. It's actually San Diego, and Dr. Kang is Korean. To illustrate the ignorance of the question, Dr. Kang asks Bear if he is Navajo or Inuit, of which he is neither (as he's Muscogee).
• Self-invoked on Rupauls Drag Race. Three East Asian queens featured on the show—Season 8's Kim Chi, 11's Soju, and 12's Rock M. Sakura—had anime-inspired drag styles, but none of them are Japanese. Ironically, the only contestant so far that really was ethnically-Japanese, Season 6's Gia Gunn, was more into Western high fashion for her look.
• On Sabrina the Teenage Witch, a Chinese food delivery man hears Salem talk and captures him, saying that a talking cat will make him enough money that he can move back to Japan. Salem wonders aloud why a Japanese man is working at a Chinese restaurant, only for the guy to sarcastically ask why a cat is talking (in fact, a lot of Chinese restaurants in the US are run by Japanese people. This can be very odd for the Chinese customers who go in).
• Parodied in a Saturday Night Live skit centered around the 1998 Nagano Olympics in which Chinese-American figure skater Michelle Kwan is interviewed by two sports reporters who keep referencing her non-existent Japanese heritage no matter how many times she tells them otherwise. She finally gets fed up and storms out, with them completely bewildered as to why she's upset.
• Played for Laughs in an episode of Scrubs where the Janitor tricks JD into using the word "chink" in front of the Asian Franklin (it was the answer to a crossword puzzle). Throughout the rest of the episode every other Asian doctor in the hospital is shown glaring at JD as he walks past. JD then leaves a $30 tip at a Chinese restaurant.
• On a Shark Week special, Craig Ferguson joked that he has "Small Chinese Feet" because his parents bound them, since they wanted him to be the first Scottish geisha (the latter being Japanese).
• In the episode of Shortland Street where Li Mei (who is Chinese) first appeared, Waverly welcomed her with a big platter of raw fish - which is a lot like welcoming a French person with bratwurst and sauerkraut. Li Mei was, naturally, insulted.
• In Son of a Critch, the Fox brothers keep trying to bully Ritchie based on his Filipino heritage, but being morons, their insults keep referencing stereotypes about the Chinese or the Japanese, much to his annoyance.
• In Star Trek, the character Sulu was supposed to represent all Asian cultures, so Gene Roddenberry deliberately gave him a name that is not nationally specific, taking it from the Sulu Sea, which touches the shores of two Southeast Asian countries, Malaysia and the Philippines. He was eventually revealed to have a Japanese given name. He's been played by a Japanese-American, George Takei, and a Korean-American, John Cho.
• Averted in Tomorrows Rejects. When Keiren is introduced to Phil Nguyen at his job interview, he said that he could tell just by looking at him that he's of Vietnamese descent, which impresses Phil so much that he gives him the job. Keiren later admits to Gilligan that Nguyen is the Vietnamese equivalent of someone with the surname Smith. In fact, it's estimated that up to 40% of the Vietnamese population have this surname.
• When Jack and Toshiko are sent back to World War II in Torchwood, Tosh is a little miffed to be mistaken for Chinese. Although the fact that she told them she's Japanese when Japan was an Axis power could have gone badly, if not for Jack's "she's a codebreaker for the Allies" explanation.
• Subverted in an episode of Touched by an Angel. An East Asian woman is asked to act as a Chinese translator on a business trip to China, only for her to become offended and assert that she is Korean. Turns out she really is Chinese, but was forced to flee the country after the Cultural Revolution.
• In Victorious Wing Lee runs a Chinese restaurant named Wok Star in early episodes; later she opens Nozo, a Japanese sushi restaurant. This is lampshaded by Tori, who asks her which ethnicity she is.
• Vida: Before Emma and Lyn's arrival, Vida's bar was named "La Chinita", with a geisha as its logo. Emma notes that's Japanese, not Chinese ("La Chinita" is "little Chinese girl" in Spanish), saying it was racist to conflate them so ignorantly.
• The Walking Dead, in Season 3's "Home":
  Merle: I nearly killed the Chinese kid.
  Daryl: He's Korean!
  Merle: Whatever, man.
• The Wire: In season 1, Carver makes a prank-call to D'Angelo Barksdale where he pretends to be a Korean counterman, to verify that Roland Przybylewski's code-breaking works.
  Herc: Fuck was that?
  Ellis Carver: That was my "Korean counterman."
  Herc: Sounded Chinese.
  Ellis Carver: Like you can fucking tell the difference.
• Westworld: Sylvester asks Felix, who is Asian, if he can speak Japanese to the Shogunworld hosts after they're being taken by them. Annoyed, he says he's from Hong Kong, and therefore doesn't speak Japanese. Luckily, Maeve does.

Music

• The Doobie Brothers song "China Grove" is about a Chinatown in Texas. It also mentions "samurai swords," which would be Japanese.
• There is a song by a bubblegum dance group Banaroo, called "Hong Kong Song," which, in the lyrics, mentions samurais, geishas, kimonos (which were technically derived from Chinese garments, so that can be overlooked) and uses a lot of vaguely Asian-sounding words. This all results in sentences like, "The lonely construction worker." WHY.
• All over the place in "China in her Eyes" by Modern Talking.
• Nicki Minaj's "Your Love" contains the lyric "When I was a geisha, he was a samurai / Somehow I understood him when he spoke Thai". Everyone knows that Japanese people don't speak Thai, they speak Japanese. The fact that Minaj is part Asian (albeit Indian) herself makes that lyric even more inexcusable. It's likely that she did that because "samurai" and "Thai" do admittedly rhyme well, but that came at the cost of her cultural credibility.
• In Eric Idle's song "I Like Chinese", one of the things he likes about the Chinese is "their tiny little trees", referring to Japanese bonsai trees. Lampshaded in Monty Python Live (Mostly), in which Eric's backup singers correct him. Although bonsai are actually based on earlier small trees from China, it was likely he didn't know this.
• The song "Jackie Chan" by Tiësto and Dzeko featuring Preme and Post Malone has a line mentioning Jackie Chan, a Chinese actor, preceded by a line about sushi, a Japanese food:
  I just ordered sushi from Japan
  Now your bitch wanna kick it, Jackie Chan
• Most of Wu-Tang Clan's theming and aesthetics come from kung fu movies made in China and Hong Kong. The one exception is The GZA, who is usually associated more with Japanese samurai movies, and his album "Liquid Swords" contains a number of samples from Shogun Assassin. In this video, The RZA, who produced the album and masterminded the entire Asian aesthetic the Clan would have, explains his reasoning:
  Most of our influence came from kung fu movies. Sometimes there's a lot of swing, and a lot of blockin'. But in Japanese samurai movies, it's one stroke kills. Bang, stroke, bang, stroke. When it came time to incorporate a film into the Wu-Tang world, I chose this film [Shogun Assassin] to represent The GZA. His lyrics are straight to the point.
• In "Very Super Famous", Jon Lajoie uses "Chinese" as a synonym of "Asian". This is intentional, as the song features his MC Vagina persona, an ignorant Stylistic Suck rapper.
  All around the world, people know who I am
  Even in the Chinese countries like Japan
• Day Above Ground's "Asian Girlz", in which the singer boasts about how beautiful his Asian girlfriend is (in a Race Fetish kind of way), lists stereotypes of multiple Asian cultures such as Korean barbecue, ninjas (Japanese), Feng Shui (Chinese), and nail salons (Vietnamese-American).

Professional Wrestling

• Luchador Sugi Sito was simply a Chinaman with a Japanese sounding ring name. That was enough to fool fans in Mexico, the US and Canada, though to be fair Sito started it while World War II war was still being fought. And hopefully had some fun with it considering what Japan was doing to China at the time...
• Korean wrestler Rikidozan had a Japanese gimmick in the United States to capitalize on the bad feelings still left over from World War 2.
• Killer Khan, despite having a Mongolian gimmick, was Japanese.
• Originally, Yokozuna was supposedly from Japan, despite his Samoan heritage (he's actually in the same Wrestling Family that gave us the The Wild Samoans, The Head Shrinkers, and The Rock). Eventually, his ring introductions were changed to announce that he was from Hawaii, but "representing the nation of Japan".
• Chinese wrestlers Ray, Li Fang, Su Yung and Jun Hado are often confused for Japanese. Ray for wrestling primarily in Japan, Yung for wearing a lot of Japanese symbols and Hado because he was given a Japanese name after his Chinese one proved too difficult for people to remember as well as the fact he teams with Japanese wrestler The Great Akuma (even though the team is called The Forbidden City Warriors, hinting at China). Li Fang because...who knows? Despite the name he sometimes has to be billed as "Chinese Warrior".
• WWE put a former WCW wrestler, the Korean Jimmy Wang Yang, in a Yakuza group and gave him the Japanese name "Akio". After Yoshihiro Tajiri protested that real Yakuza would find the group offensive though, Akio was changed into a Korean movie star.
• During the last two years of his WWE career, Japanese wrestler Funaki wrestled as enhancement talent under the gimmick "Kung Fu Naki," with his new entrance theme being an obvious knockoff of Carl Douglas' classic "Kung Fu Fighting." Thing is, kung fu is the main Chinese martial art.
• While explaining how Jessie Brooks was going to beat Mia Yim in Valkyrie Pro despite them being friends in Ring of Honor, Julius Smokes suddenly started ranting about why he didn't like Chinese food. Yim is, of course, Korean.
• Angela Fong:
  • She was billed from Hong Kong, but her finisher was called the Sake Bomb. Sake is a Japanese drink.
  • In Lucha Underground 'Black Lotus Triad' is made up of Japanese women wrestlers, Black Lotus herself being the only one of the expected nationality.

Tabletop Games

• When the World of Darkness had its "Year of the Lotus" event where it released Asian-themed material for its gamelines (Kindred of the East in particular), it treated the entirety of East and Southeast Asia as the generic "Middle Kingdom"—actually an epithet for China—with only lip service to cultural distinctions between the various countries.
• Sahud in Banestorm. Justified in that they came from disparate parts of Asia and were thoroughly mixed.
• Not an in-universe example, but the Turko-Mongol Hung of Warhammer fame were for some odd reason given tribal names that basically amounted to East Asian sounding gibberish. This may have been a Take That! against the tendencies to conflate Chinese and Mongolian culture together in popular cultures (those bloody fu-manchus...), as the other Turko-Mongol horse-warriors, the Kurgan, were actually portrayed fairly accurately to real-life Steppe Nomads; having names actually drawn from real world Turkic and Mongol ethnic groups - like "Khazag", "Dolgan" and "Kul".
  • There is one hilarious moment of this actually occurring in-universe when an Kislevite noblewomen (Eastern Slavic) derisively asks "what's the difference between the Ungol (Kazakh-type horse-nomads) and the Kurgan (psychotically violent Mongol-Hun types)?" A nearby Ungol's response?
    Ungol Waiter: "Difference is, we serve YOU dinner. They serve YOU AS dinner!"
    • He's not wrong, either. Cannibalism is no great taboo in Kurgan society.
• On a similar note, the White Scars of Warhammer 40,000 are ostensibly supposed to be based on Mongol and Turkic horse-warriors, but still have inexplicable Chinese and Japanese influences despite that.
• Largely averted in the Eclipse Phase story "Nostrums". On colonized Mars the most common language is Mandarin Chinese, the main characters, Jae Park and Sage Kim, are of Korean descent, the Yakuza is supplying Traditional Chinese Medicines (made from uplifted apes) after the Triads ditched it as an "embarrassment", and the main villain is Indian but wearing a Japanese body for most of the story.

Theater

• One Avenue Q song has the line "Tried to work in Korean deli / But I am Japanese." Or in the British and Australian performances, "tried to work in Chinese restaurant." The second line is occasionally adjusted to reflect the actual nationality/ancestry of the cast actress.
• Flower Drum Song was restricted by this in its first run - where not only did all the cast have to be Asian, they had to be able to sing and dance as well. There were some Japanese, Filipino and Thai actors in there (in addition to a couple of non-Asian actors in Yellowface.) The film adaptation in 1961 used pretty much every Asian actor in Hollywood at the time, regardless of their ancestry.
• Subverted in Dangerous to Know. The character played by Anna May Wong was written to have stereotypical Japanese mannerisms, but she was Chinese and convinced the director to let her make it more authentic.
• Miss Saigon has received some criticism for its originator in the role of Kim (a Vietnamese country girl) being Lea Salonga (Filipino). Many other Filipinos have been cast as Kim and other Vietnamese characters.
• Theatre/Allegiance is based on the Japanese American internment in WWII, but had Filipino (Paolo Montalban and Lea Salonga), Chinese (Telly Leung), and Korean (Michael K. Lee) actors in both its runs.
• Here Lies Love, based on the life of former Filipino First Lady Imelda Marcos, starred Korean actor Ruthie Ann Miles as Imelda in New York and Cantonese actor Dean John-Wilson as Filipino Senator Benigno Aquino on the West End.

Video Games

• Subverted and played for laughs in Not a Hero; the final criminal organization to fight is called the Pan-Asian Triad Yakuza, a name they chose.
  • Despite this, all of their aesthetic design is Japanese-inspired, their special units are Samurai and Ninja, and their leader is named Akemi Unagi.
• Invoked in Guilty Gear: Anji Mito is a Japanese person (in this "verse," their race was almost wiped out in a war with the eponymous Gears, and are placed in protective colonies throughout Asia supposedly for their own safety) who takes up the guise of a Chinese person in order to travel freely.
• In Fallout 3's Mothership Zeta expansion, Paulson (a 19th century cowboy) refers to Toshiro Kago (a 16th century Samurai in full armor) as a "Chinaman" until he is corrected.
  • Actually averted in the main game; while most American works of fiction assume all Asian swords are katanas, the Chinese swords are militarized Jian.
  • In the Operation Anchorage expansion, you encounter a simulation of General Jingwei, a Chinese military commander who is obsessed with honor and can be convinced to commit seppuku. Considering the many other inaccuracies in the simulation, this is probably intentional.
• Played for laughs in Fallout 4, where Paladin Danse accuses Takahashi (a malfunctioning robot only capable of saying "Na-ni shimasu-ka?" ^note What would you like) of being a Chinese spy since it is only capable of speaking Japanese.
• At one point in EarthBound (1994), a museum curator refers to Poo as a samurai. While Poo does come from the typical Asian-Fantasy Counterpart Culture-in-an-otherwise-Western-world, it subverts the Wutai trope by making it have more in common with India and Sri Lanka than Japan or anywhere else. This being EarthBound, it's likely that the curator just didn't know any better. But then again, despite being from a takeoff South Asia, Poo is a martial artist with slanted eyes and wears a gi...
• Blizzard Entertainment offended its Chinese fans by giving the Pandaren—a race of humanoid pandas in Warcraft—a Japanese-ish culture complete with samurai in concept art. In the real world, pandas are the national animal of China and the only place in the world where they can be found wild. Blizzard quickly gave the race Chinese markings.
• Mortal Kombat:
  • For the early Mortal Kombats Midway had trouble keeping the races of the Asian characters straight, which is why you have things like Chinese Ninja and the series' main character (a Chinese Shaolin Monk) being named after a Japanese samurai in preproduction and the like. Later games retconned all of this to make sense to a certain degree (co-creator John Tobias downright stated that the series evolved into "a hodgepodge of nonsensical Asian mythological hooha"). This is also likely why all of the Asian characters yell gibberish when they utter battle cries.
  • This is continued in Mortal Kombat: Legacy, where the Lin Kuei (a Chinese assassin clan) is outright stated to be in Japan, with Bi-Han (AKA Sub-Zero) speaking Japanese in season 1 (season 2 goes with Translation Convention). In season 2, the Lin Kuei are neighbors with the Shirai Ryu (a ninja clan).
• Wutai in Final Fantasy VII is a strange blend of Chinese and Japanese culture combined some elements just made up; a character from Wutai, Yuffie, has a name neither Chinese nor Japanese. It's on the extreme west of the map and there are people with Russian names living there. Especially strange is that in the high-tech city of Midgar there are signs in Japanese everywhere yet is considered culturally different from Wutai.
• Age of Empires II gives Japanese-style buildings to all East Asian civilizations included in the game: Japanese, Chinese, Korean and Mongol. The Age of Empires III expansion The Asian Dynastyes, which brought Chinese and Japanese civilizations, had them using completely different sets of buildings and also units.
• Tzar: The Burden of the Crown only has three civilizations: "European", "Arabic" and "Asian". Asians have access to a mix of Japanese and Chinese units like ninjas, foot and mounted samurai, Shaolin monks and priests, towers firing primitive rockets and war chariots based off the ones found in Qin Shi Huangdi's tomb (even though the game's setting is loosely Medieval). They are also the only civilization that can train dragons, but they are Western rather than Eastern-style dragons.
• Knuckles in China Land is a Sonic the Hedgehog Edutainment fan game RPG which teaches Japanese as a foreign language, yet it takes place in "China Land".
• One mission in Hitman: Absolution takes place at Chinatown during the Chinese New Year, yet you can find a katana as a weapon.
• The Aspari Corporation, of Syndicate 2012, is a mix of Chinese and Japanese. On the one hand, Mandarin seems to be their lingua franca and many of their citizens and employees are either Chinese or Chinese-American. On the other hand, according to the intel, their headquarters is in Tokyo, there are several prominent advertisements of a geisha in their commercial district, and their Agents are all Japanese samurai. Additionally, their building decor contains influence from both cultures. This is justified in-game since the Aspari (or Asia Pacific Rim) Corporation was founded from a merger between various Chinese MegaCorps and Japanese Zaibatsus and, as national and cultural identity has given way to corporate identity by 2069, there would likely have been some cultural melding by that point.
• Occurs in-universe in Homefront. Due to the invasion of the US by the North Koreans, many other Asian ethnicities are caught up in anti-Korean sentiment.
• Averted then invoked in the Deus Ex series:
  • During the missions in China in Deus Ex, you can find a melee weapon called "sword" used by the triads. It appears to be a Dao. Later, you can find the Dragon's Tooth sword, created by the late leader of the Red Arrow triad, is a sort of energy blade shaped like a Jian. Both of these are Chinese swords, which makes sense as the triads use them.
  • On the other hand, in Deus Ex: Invisible War, all the energy blades look like Katanas. This is fine on its own (they weren't necessarily created by the triads), but the Dragon's Tooth sword (the same one, mind) has morphed into one as well.
• Nerves of Steel is set in South East Asia, where the villains were led by one General Kim Dung-Moon with a suspiciously Korean-sounding name. The game doesn't attempt to explain the reason behind it.
• The titular city in Paprium is located in East Asia, and the city buildings have signs in Chinese, Japanese and Korean, all mixed together and making zero sense when translated, even for anyone who understands any of the three languages. Partially justified in the backstory; the game is set After the End where a nuclear war decimated most of the world's civilizations, and Paprium is built on the remnants of Shanghai, Tokyo and Pyongyang.
• Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines: The Nosferatu hacker Mitnick sends you to hack into various tech companies across LA. The last one being a company called "Kamikazi Zen" located in Chinatown. He himself points out in his email to you that the name is Japanese.
• Wizard101 plays this mostly straight in Mooshu, but its sister game Pirate101 subverts it by splitting Mooshu into a Chineese half and a Japaneese half with a small area of blended cultures in between.
• The Asian gangsters in the first level of Eat Lead: The Return of Matt Hazard are implied to be the Yakuza, but the mini-boss, a jive talkin' black kung-fu master who looks like he walked out of a 70s Blaxploitation film, claims to be working for a "Mr. Chang". On the other hand, said mini-boss also threatens to turn you into sushi and makes a couple Karate Kid references. Fortunately, none of this is meant to be taken at all seriously and the game's Meta Plot kicks in soon after.
• Similarly to Age of Empires listed above, Empire Earth doesn't do an especially good job about differentiating Asian cultures, with the poorly-received third game being the worst offender by just having a broad "Far Eastern" civilization; at least in that case it was the same for the other continents, too. Vanilla Empire Earth is arguably better because it's more overtly focused on Western cultures and doesn't really have aesthetic cultures, whereas Empire Earth II has a distinct Asian architectural style shared between the Chinese, Japanese, and Koreans, but special mention needs to go to the Asian Campaign in the first game's expansion pack. Set in the near future, the focus is less on Asia itself and is more an exhibition of the game's new Space Age modes, but the centerpiece of it is the fictional United Federation of Asian Republics, which is mostly represented as China and distinguishes between it an other Asian countries but still composites basically any Asian something-or-other into it as the plot demands.

Visual Novels

• Double Homework:
  • Lampshaded by the protagonist when Morgan tries to celebrate her Japanese ancestry by saying, “Ni hao.”
    Protagonist: I’m pretty sure that’s Chinese.
  • Also used at the Asian festival where Lauren gets a job. She wears a kimono (a Japanese robe), and learns to cook, among other things, bibimbap (a Korean dish).

Webcomics

• Turns up in the penultimate panel of this The Non-Adventures of Wonderella.
• Similar to the Discworld example listed in the literature folder, The Order of the Stick gives us Azure City, a deliberate mishmash of Asian tropes and settings, in homage to the "Oriental Adventures" of D&D, which played this trope alarmingly straight. Quite a few years after Azure City was first introduced, it also got a justification for this trope in one of the bonus stories released as a Kickstarter reward. It turns out that Azure City was once part of an ancient, far reaching empire that assimilated numerous different cultures and ethnicities who all had their own traditions. While that Empire has long since fallen, Azure City still has a mix of those various peoples living within its domain, and its culture reflects that.
• The Inexplicable Adventures of Bob!: Bob obviously can't tell the difference between Japanese and Chinese...
• In Misfile, Missi is accused of preferring Japanese cars simply because she's Japanese. She snaps back that she's actually Chinese.
• The Wotch has Mingmei Wu who is a girl who speaks Japanese and likes stereotypical Japanese things, but has a Chinese name. This is actually a plot point as from the outset the reader knows she's actually the once male adult Latino Prof. Sorgaz transfromed and brainwashed. The inaccuracy being down the person who developed the spell in the first place being an anime nerd without much cultural knowledge and then writing in spell books for others to use as a generic "anime girl" spell.
• In Least I Could Do, when Rayne prepares to go on a date with Chinese-Canadian woman Cyndi and meet her parents, he prepares by studying anime and styling himself after it. His friends know how incredibly dumb this is, but are sick of Rayne's Jerkass ways, so they decide it's more fun to sit back and watch it blow up in his face.
• In the American Barbarian side comic Final Frontier, one page gives us "Kimono Dragon", protector of "The Great Wall of Tokyo".

Web Original

• The YouTube video 500 Impressions in 2 Minutes is based on this — since "all Asian people look the same," for one Asian guy to impersonate another is trivial.
• Cracked: #5 of this list.
  • This one by the same writer devolves into another inversion by the end.
• On the Instance and all his other podcasts, Scott Johnson often uses a generic Cantonese-ish accent in his impression of "Ding Pong," a fictional WoW gold-seller. This trope is invoked because he often mentions that the "real" Ding Pong is his adopted brother, who is Korean. Note: I am 99% sure he knows the difference.
• Many a Sickipedia joke, such as this one. However, they actively try to be offensive.
• In The Rap Critic's review of "Just Can't Get Enough", just after Fergie says "I love you long time so you know the meanin'" and the Critic points out the line was originally used by a Vietnamese prostitute offering herself:
  "The cameraman's sister": I'm offended by this line.
  Critic: You're not Vietnamese.
  Girl: Who cares? All Asians are the same!
• Parodied in the flash movie "The End of the World". The US launches a nuke at China, and China is shown to have cultural elements of Japan, including a large wooden bath tub, and a conspicuously large flag of Japan.
• The music video for the ARK Music Factor song "Chinese Food" (the same guys who produced Friday) makes a ton of cultural mixups, such as Japanese geishas dancing at one point, or the restaurant more resembling a Mongolian grill than one for Chinese food.
• The SCP Foundation very, very pointedly averts this with SCP 953, an Asian Fox Spirit that is a Korean kumiho and definitely not a Japanese kitsune. Kitsune may or may not be friendly with people, but in most tales they are fairly benign. Kumiho are Always Chaotic Evil Ax-Crazy killers with Mind Control powers who eat human hearts and livers. Mistaking the two is likely to prove fatal. Also, being mistaken for a kitsune annoys her.
  As misidentification of her species tends to violently agitate SCP-953, all personnel are to be hereby ordered to refer to her as a "Kumiho," and not a "Kitsune." Personnel asking what the difference is are to be reminded of the difference between a Cherokee Indian and a New Delhi Indian.
• Epic Rap Battles of History: One battle has Hulk Hogan threaten to kick North Korean dictator Kim Jong-il's ass "back to Beijing". As Kim points out, Beijing is in China.
• Uncle Roger is a character played by comedian Nigel Ng, a stereotypical middle-aged Asian man with strong opinions on traditional cuisine. He reviews cooking videos where he criticises chefs, usually Westerners, for preparing Asian cuisine incorrectly. Uncle Roger is presumably Malaysian like Ng, but will passionately comment on Chinese, Thai, Vietnamese and even Indian cuisine, which he groups together as simply "Asian". If he deems that an Asian chef has made a mistake, he will criticise them by saying "you make our ancestors cry" regardless of their background. The one exception appears to be Japan, which he views as distinct from the rest of Asia as their cuisine requires precise measurements.

Web Animation

• Bedtime Stories (YouTube Channel): "The Curse Of The Dab Tsog" lists several Southeast Asian monsters- the Laotian Dab Tsog, the Manananggal of Philippine Mythology and the Penangalannan of Malaysian Mythology.

Western Animation

• Bojack Horseman: In "Thoughts and Prayers", a valet greets the Vietnamese Diane with "Konnichiwa, Princess Mulan". Diane is just about to explain that he used a Japanese greeting and referred to her as a Chinese mythical character before Courtney pulls a gun on him.
• Parodied on Catscratch, when Blik and Gordon both try to win the same trip to China. They call China things like the "land of cherry trees" or "the land of miso soup." Every time they do this, Waffle calls them out, saying "That's Japan." Ironically, he gets it wrong when Gordon calls China "the land of French fries." Waffle guesses, "That's... (Beat) Canada?"
• Code Lyoko: In the prequel "XANA Awakens," Yumi Ishiyama yells a few times at people that she is Japanese when they mistake her for being Chinese.
• Ironically played straight in Code Monkeys, where Japanese businessman Matsui mistakes the Korean Benny for Chinese and gets called out on it.
• Disney's Magic English was a series of videos using footage from various animated Disney films to teach English as a second language to children, and most videos were accompanied by print magazines with further educational material. One of the magazines has an image where a cartoon clock◊ representing China wears an Asian conical hat and a pair of Japanese geta. Ironically, this image also made it into the Chinese version of that magazine.
• In one episode of Family Guy, Peter Griffin calls a Japanese sumo wrestler Jackie Chan, who is Chinese.
• One episode of Godzilla: The Series has the gang traveling to Japan, where Godzilla has to fight a giant cybernetic King Kong Copy that is sometimes referred to as a yeti, even though we're in Japan, not Tibet or Nepal. When one character comments on the monster's apparent mastery of judo (which actually is Japanese), another jokes that "Maybe he trains with Jackie Chan!" Chan is Chinese and is mostly known for the Chinese art of kung fu, and not judo.
• Jackie Chan Adventures: The aversion of this trope is a major part of season 4, where the season's main antagonists are Oni. Japanese chi magic is shown as being far removed from Chinese chi magic, to the point where Uncle is of no help. Fortunately, Tohru (a Japanese ex-sumo wrestler) possesses knowledge of Japanese folklore that allows the Chan Clan to stand a chance against the Oni. The Oni are also where previous Big Bad Shendu (a Chinese demon sorcerer inspired by Taoism) gets his Shadowkhan henchmen from, as he possesses the mask of one of the Oni, allowing him to summon them at will.
• Jem:
  • Aja has been implied to be Chinese and Japanese on different occasions. Considering we know nothing about her past before becoming Jerrica's foster sister, she could be both though.
  • The riff to the song "A Father Should Be" is Chinese inspired despite Ba Nee being half-Vietnamese. It's not even like this is a minor fact. Her father was an American soldier stationed in Vietnam, she was born in Vietnam before being sent to America, and the music video shows the fact she has Vietnamese heritage.
• Kim Possible: In the episode "Exchange", Ron goes to a "sister school" in Yamanouchi, Japan, where he learns kung fu, a Chinese martial art...
• King of the Hill zigzags this trope. The show makes a point that Kahn and his family are Laotian, and there's at some effort to depict their background and heritage. On the other hand, it often gets the details wrong or falls back on generalized Asian stereotypes.
  • Hank Hill and his friends can't wrap their head around their neighbor Kahn Souphanousinphone not being either Chinese or Japanese, even after he corrects them:
    Hank: So, are you Chinese or Japanese?
    Kahn: I live in California last twenty years, but first come from Laos.
    Hank: Huh?
    Kahn: Laos. We Laotian.
    Bill: The ocean? What ocean?
    Kahn: We are Laotian! From Laos, stupid! It's a landlocked country in South East Asia between Vietnam and Thailand, okay? Population 4.7 million!
    (Beat)
    Hank: So, are you Chinese or Japanese?
    Kahn: D'oh!
  • Subverted with Hank's father, Cotton Hill, as despite being very racist (which, by the way, isn't even his most reprehensible character trait), he correctly identifies Kahn as Laotian without being told just by Kahn's smell (and for good measure, he then immediately assumes that Kahn is Hank's servant). His experiences in World War II likely contributed.
  • In another episode, Ted Wassonasong (also Laotian) speaks to another Asian man, Mr. Ho, in Cantonese, and Hank asks Kahn what they're saying. Kahn angrily retorts that they're speaking Chinese, so how is he supposed to know?
  • King of the Hill also uses the Souphanousinphone family to uphold the Asian "model minority" stereotype (specifically the episode "The Redneck on Rainey Street") even though the Laotian immigrant community in the United States struggles with extremely high rates of poverty and school dropouts, and they are in fact a counterexample to the stereotype.
• Chloe from Miraculous Ladybug states that Marinette's uncle should just make sushi "like everyone else". As Adrien points out, sushi is Japanese whereas Marinette's uncle is Chinese.
• In a season 2 episode of Polly Pocket, Lila and Bella's karate sensei has a Japanese accent, but she is refered to as Grandmaster Khan.
• In the The Powerpuff Girls (2016) episode "Take Your Kids To Dooms Day", a ninja character appears on screen with Korean writing.
• Despite being of Chinese descent, the Chang triplets from The Proud Family practice karate, an Okinawan martial art.
• Robot Chicken: a sketch spoofing Captain Planet and the Planeteers refers to this when Wheeler says that Gi is Chinese; she points out that she's Thai, at which point Wheeler identifies Thailand as the capital of China.
• South Park:
  • Parodied in "City Sushi" when a Japanese sushi restaurant opens next door to City Wok. The residents of the town refer to both restaurants as "Chinese" — and to the area where both restaurants are situated as "Little Tokyo" — much to the frustration of the owners, who are violently racist toward each other. The owners put aside their differences to educate residents on Asian cultural diversity in the hopes that residents will come to share their hatred of the others' culture. Ultimately it's revealed that the Chinese guy is actually a white man with multiple personality disorder.
  • In "Tweek x Craig", one of the Asian girls in school makes a comment in her native language, and Craig tells another one to translate. The girl replies that she has no idea what was said; she's Japanese, and the first girl is Korean. Later in the episode, Randy calls the Chinese president to ask about the Japanese "art style" of yaoi.
  • One recurring "Chinese" character's named is Tuong Lu Kim, which are respectively Vietnamese, Chinese (Cantonese), and Korean. Given that, as noted above, the character isn't actually Chinese and his real name is William Janus, this was probably intentional.
• In the Japan episode of Total Drama World Tour, Chris wore a Chinese costume. Harold called him out on it (though oddly, didn't seem to care that they were also using pandas).

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