In 1942 over 100,000 Japanese Americans were driven from their homes and relocated to internment camps around the country. About 4,000 of them were from Oregon. Many of them lost the homes they had, and what once had been a Japanese neighborhood in Portland became occupied by the Chinese.
So you can see how the relations between these two cultures would be strained here, to say nothing of their countries' warring past.
Flash forward about 73 years. My playwriting colleagues and I have just heard the reading of a play by a White woman, based on the actual bombing of the Oregon forest during World War II by a Japanese pilot. Few people know about it because the trees were too wet to catch fire (welcome to Oregon). At any rate the play is about bridging cultures and making peace despite a history of conflict. It really is well intentioned, despite some culturally inaccurate hiccups in the script.
As an example, in the last scene of the play, the Japanese pilot quotes Confucius, a Chinese philosopher from around 500 BCE. Some in the group mention kindly that the line may require some rethinking, but one young Asian woman is more emphatic and says in a very somber baritone: "I am deeply offended." And I, coming from the east coast where dry humor prevails, guffaw, except it isn't her intent to be humorous.
Sad to say, there was no conversation beyond that. We didn't get to talk about Japanese-Chinese relations, or cross-cultural influences over the centuries. We didn't get to ask if the play's reception might have been different if it were written by a Japanese person. We didn't get to talk about what exactly the offense was about—Was it personal? Learned from family? Cultural?—because she made herself the de facto arbiter, and a Japanese soldier would never quote a Chinese man from 2500 years ago, no matter how quotable he may have been. And we didn't get to talk about the very human drama happening right there at our table reading. Why? Because her declaration was final: It's offensive and that kind of declaration tends to shut a conversation down. It was also because I didn't take her seriously, and her offense was real whether I agreed with it or not. And lastly, because none of us were present with our own emotions, we were too fearful of confrontation, to say: Hold up. Let's talk about this, and maybe we'll learn something.
Art is about finding the connectedness of human experience. It's how we communicate with our audiences who come from all kinds of backgrounds. And because of that interaction, the potential for creating that deeper, more difficult kind of art was lost.