Well, but you are now saying, "ignore the past 60-odd years of appropriation of the culture, and buy into this new appropriation! It's all different! We're marketing authenticity now!"
This site's theme uses the gravity of the old "Oriental mystique" trope to seem a little more impressive - to make programming practice sound "exotic" or "badass". What the fuck does a ukiyo-e image have to do with programming? No Japanese site would choose this theme, in the same way that you have observed that no Japanese person would think of 形 as a militant word. The Western equivalent would be to plaster a Dutch Golden Age painting onto the background and substitute Dutch words like "drillen" and "uitoefening" for "kata". It would be ridiculous and nobody would take it seriously.
The problem is, we already have fine English words for what is being done: "exercise" and "practice". "kata" remains associated with McDojos that want to impress you - it's not a borrowed word that has entered everyday use. And we've grown into accepting that it exists in that context over time. But its usage can still be considered not just offensive but colonial, in any Western context. It's an outright theft of culture.
This site's theme uses the gravity of the old "Oriental mystique" trope to seem a little more impressive - to make programming practice sound "exotic" or "badass". What the fuck does a ukiyo-e image have to do with programming? No Japanese site would choose this theme, in the same way that you have observed that no Japanese person would think of 形 as a militant word. The Western equivalent would be to plaster a Dutch Golden Age painting onto the background and substitute Dutch words like "drillen" and "uitoefening" for "kata". It would be ridiculous and nobody would take it seriously.
The problem is, we already have fine English words for what is being done: "exercise" and "practice". "kata" remains associated with McDojos that want to impress you - it's not a borrowed word that has entered everyday use. And we've grown into accepting that it exists in that context over time. But its usage can still be considered not just offensive but colonial, in any Western context. It's an outright theft of culture.