White Wolf and Asian Themed Games

Okay, so I've obtained Kindred of the East and Land of Eight Million Dreams and I have to say- White Wolf, why?

Don't get me wrong, Kindred of the East is the most interesting of them all. I'd really like to explore it more. I'm especially interested in the gaki (Japanese Kuei-jin), but why does WW try to terribly hard to mix the cultures? Most often, it ends in a horrible train wreck.

When I was looking over the character creation for Kindred of the East, I was confused at the inclusion of Indian ideas for Chinese and Japan kuei-jin. You'd think WW would at least try to have Chinese and Japanese versions of each of these to better fit each distinct culture, but no, they just include them randomly.

I mean, you even read about how the gaki are extremely insular. You would think they would have a written down different belief system (I think something like that is mentioned, but never explained).

Don't even get me started on Exalted...

Typical western products lump India/Korea/China/Japan into one "eastern"-inspired character/faction/whatevs.

Can't blame them. All asians look the same to us, so the cultural/social aspect of it follows closely.

Much the same way whatever anything is inspired on Egypt, it is on Ancient, Polytheistic theocratic egypt, never on modern day muslim egypt.

It's just the sign of a bad product.

Do you really expect they did at least halfway decent research on the topic? They can't even get european feudal titles right. Except for rare circumstances, a prince while a member of royalty is not the ruler.
And why would an anarch domain holder who doesn't accept any authority beyond his own call himself a baron? Should be duke...
And it only gets worse for the church titles of the Sabbat.

-  

Exactly. It just baffles me how they can just squeeze out games like that with the reputation they have (or had, as it may be).

If you want to see a huge historical train wreck, go look at the British Isles supplement for the Dark Ages. So many historical errors (the 'Celts invaded Briton' to the Picts being some Native American like people of the British Isles to everything).