A Response
I have thought about it for a couple of years and I’m ready to write about it. I acknowledge my own lived experiences and biases as I explore this topic. Still, I have to go ahead and disagree with Abagond with this one. I won’t be writing anything sophisticated or worthy of Hemingway–just what I hope is an articulate opinion and possibly argument.
I’ve been watching anime and reading manga since I was a child. Despite my issues with it, I still read and watch, even though I’ve pretty much given up on the idea that anything about it is going to change in my lifetime. I have never thought at any point that many mangaka (manga artists) and anime artists are above colorism, racial bias, or racism in their art. In particular, the genres of shoujo and boys love (shounen ai and yaoi) are ensnared in these trappings.
Coloration isn’t black and white but at least for me the portrayals I encounter are just too poignant to ignore. My friend–who is white–and I have conversations about Tite Kubo’s portrayals of colored people in Bleach, the sparse colored characters in the Final Fantasy games, and in anime and manga in general all the time.
Harribel Tia from Tite Kubo's Bleach
I have a degree in Sociology as does the professor that I took Japanese from in college. I have seen dozens of animes and read at the very least a hundred manga titles. As lame as it might sound, I took Japanese as my foreign language requirement because I used to love anime, the complexity and beauty that its brings to the table in comparison to American cartoons.
What You Talkin’ ‘Bout, Ms. Queenly?
Some manga artists and anime producers do seem to have a fetish for whiteness and racial mixedness (particularly Japanese/white Western European mixedness) like most other American mainstream-drugged masses in the world. I don’t want to go so far as to accuse manga artists and anime producers of “drawing themselves as white” but I won’t fool myself about some of their portrayals.
Personally, I have never read a manga where one of the main characters was half-Black/half-Japanese. But I have read PLENTY of mangas and seen many animes where at least one of the characters is half-Japanese and half-white, whether it be half- German, white American, French, or English. Sometimes that mixedness is explicitly exotified or made an object ofsexual attention or interest.
Suoh Tamaki from Ouran High School Host Club (half-French/half-Japanese)
I have written my say about interraciality more than once on this blog and how–as much I support people’s right to be with whoever they want as long as its healthy and consentual–I believe that interraciality is sometimes viciously used as a means to devalue those who are not of mixed heritage (white and Black being the most obvious example), those who America has not accepted let alone loved and embraced. Ideas of racial purity and white mixing for upward mobility and for consuming as a fetisized commodity have not escaped the Japanese by any means. Moving on.
As a Black woman, I have found it increasingly disturbing how “colored” women in manga and anime are portrayed. They usually have animals with them or animal print accessories; I once read a manga where the Black gurrlfriend character to the Japanese schoolgirl (sound like a different version of a familiar stereotype anyone?) spoke with music notes in her speech bubbles, had big glossy lips, big kinky hair, she was loud, violent, belligerent, and had animal print everything every time that she appeared on the page. These “colored” women sometimes have large breasts and exaggeratedly curvy figures or they are petite, maybe tall, 85-pounders…with big breasts. They are portrayed as aggressive or bimbo-ish. They have blue eyes and blond hair. More times than not, they have abilities or physical characteristics that align them with portrayals of animals.
Look no further than Tite Kubo’s popular manga (which was made into an anime) Bleach for examples of “colored” (brown specifically) characters such as the so-called “dark-skinned” Shihouin Yoruichi, Zommari Leroux, Harribel Tia, Yammy, and the dreadlocked comic relief Don Kanoji. (I’m not sure that there’s anything I can say about Tousen Kaname (also a brown character in Bleach) other than the fact that he is revealed to be a “villain”. Furthermore, the entire staff of “villains” (tentative term) live in a place called Hueco Mundo and there’s a very Latin American and indigenous theme to the whole physical characteristics and naming of persons and places there (Kubo studied Spanish/Latin America), not to mention the theme of mixing that is readily apparent throughout series with reference to the whole boundary between shinigami/hollow being crossed like a border!) I have yet to see a brown female character that I can really respect; women in general and colored people are largely fetishized in these arts because of the large male audiences that are attracted to them–its gratuitous fan service. The American consumerism presented in anime and manga is also ridiculous, from McDonald’s to representations of designer jewelry, cars, and clothes. In that vein, racism is just as consumable.
Zommari Leroux (Bleach)
What’s My Point?
What I’m trying to say here is that whether its intentional or not, brown women and other brown characters in the manga and anime produced by Japanese artists trip too many stereotypes for me to think that its just a coincidence or that its “just me”, you know? …Or maybe you don’t?
Deciding to color a character brown is not something that falls out of thin air, especially when its easier to leave their bodies and faces white like most paper is by not coloring anything in. Thought goes into coloration. Thoughts also do not fall out of thin air nor do perceptions of race and their portrayals. Believe it or not, Japanese manga/anime artists, just like the French and some of the most popular Jewish comic book artists, have a living history of portraying brown
Mila-Rose (Bleach)
people as villains and, in the case of the French, purporting racist exoticism and hypersexualization of the Black (female) body, devaluing and demonizing brownness and maintaining a white standard for goodness and normativity. Its been done before, before anime and manga got popular in America. At best, their portrayals of colored bodies and personalities are subconsciously racist and hypersexualized.
In conclusion, it is not too far of a stretch to say that Japan has not escaped the white wash of the American mainstream media.
For Real, Always,
Ms. Queenly
via Abagond
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jarronnelums
It is true that most Japanese manga and anime do fetish black people and women. I do love anime, but I stay clear if they have black people. Just to let you know that they took thier insparation from America. But you have some that to respect Black people, but it’s hard to find. I do blame American media and the American Army after WW2
Ariel
I always think it’s funny when people assume that anime characters are white because they have big eyes. Maybe it’s because they’re used to seeing Asian cartoon characters drawn with thin, super slanted eyes in American cartoons.
It’s rare to find a depiction of a black person in anime and even rarer to find one that’s not stereotypical and offensive. It especially sucks when I’m watching an anime and all of a sudden an offensive black (or other brown skinned race) character is introduced and ruins the whole show for me (ex: Naruto). It’s not a mistake that a character who is loud, brash, “sexy”, belligerent, annoying, and any other bad trait you can think of is depicted as black. Taking Naruto for an example, the black character with the most screen time is big, loud, annoying, wears cornrows, and raps for no reason. Seriously, a black rapper in a fantasy anime? That’s not a coincidence. The writer purposefully made the black character behave that way.
Claire K.
I don’t know if anyone’s reading these comments, since it’s been so long since the original post, but as a manga/anime fan with a degree in Japanese Studies I couldn’t resist throwing in my two cents.
About the half-white/half-Japanese characters: this is popular, but not for the same reasons as in the US. You write, “Ideas of racial purity and white mixing for upward mobility and for consuming as a fetisized commodity have not escaped the Japanese by any means.” Japan has a complicated history of battles over “racial purity,” including eugenics laws and the ostracizing of children fathered by white or black American soldiers. I don’t know how much this has leaked into anime, but if anything the portrayals of mixed-race characters would be a sort of commercialized, pseudo-positive response to the older treatment of mixed-race children, fetishizing them instead of turning them into outcasts. Even this interpretation would be kind of a stretch, though. Japan, despite its current economic hardships and the aftermath of the 3/11 earthquake, is a leading “first world” country. In addition, the vast majority is ethnically Japanese. Because of these things, mixing with whites is not associated with upward mobility. The implication of a desire to disavow racial otherness or to attain white privilege is mostly the result of (mis)translation across cultural contexts, like the idea that because anime characters aren’t coded as “Asian” according to US standards, they must be white. In Japan, being Japanese does not make someone other and is not something to be ashamed of, and the upper class is Japanese just like (almost) everybody else, so there’s no need for mixing with whites to gain a facade of respectability. Instead, many anime fetishize whiteness (especially stereotypical images of English and French culture) in the same way that white Americans fetishize “Asianness” and Japanese culture. For instance, many early Boys’ Love and Girls’ Love manga use European settings to enable fantasy. The general idea is that if the story is set in a foreign, exotic place no one knows much about, the writer has more freedom to play around with things that would otherwise be unacceptable, like homosexuality. This is comparable to the way white Americans generally invoke Japan when they want to imagine something totally weird (like “in Japan the age of consent is 13″ or “in Japan there are vending machines that sell women’s panties”). The point is not the accuracy of the representation but the opportunity for escapism. Racial mixing comes in as a way to translate between Japanese culture and the (imagined) European culture. If the story is set in Japan but includes a character meant to represent the exotic land of Europe, the character can be made half-Japanese as a plot device to explain why he speaks Japanese. Or, if the story is set in Europe, the main character can be made half-Japanese to make it easier for the readers to identify with her.
About the “brown” characters: yes, absolutely. There are a lot of Japanese teenagers and young adults obsessed with a kind of stereotyped hip-hop culture. One of the most incredible examples of this is in Harajuku, where stores selling stereotypically “black” clothes hire black men just to stand in front of the store and chat with people, to lend the stores a sense of authentic coolness. The most ironic part of it is that while they have American hip-hop blaring inside the stores, every single one of the black-men-standing-in-the-street I have talked to is from Ghana. Authenticity is apparently not *that* important when selling consumable race. So many anime cater to this same enthusiasm, either by including ridiculous rapper characters or by associating brown characters with animals and “wildness” in order to invoke the same feeling of lawlessness and primal energy that attracts teens to the clothing stores in Harajuku. The stereotypes in the anime then become even more harmful when those anime are brought to the US. In Japan, the fetishizing of “blackness” is similar to the fetishizing of “whiteness.” The black stereotypes are much more negative than the white ones, but it’s the same basic type of exoticism. It’s about imagining a faraway, distant culture that one will never really see for oneself in an exciting, escapist way. In the US, on the other hand, black stereotypes carry more weight because they’re used to justify the continued oppression of people right here in this country. Because Japan has only a tiny black population and does not have the US’s history of violence towards and exploitation of black people, stereotypical images there are more fully a celebration (albeit a misguided one) and less an attempt to degrade black people and keep them in their place so that white people can continue to exploit their labor. That the images seem less harmful in Japan becomes a problem because it means manga-ka go much farther in their stereotyping, so that when the manga are imported to the US they are then even more racist than much US-produced media.
A lot of the racial issues anime raise in the US are issues of cultural translation, as in the examples of characters who would appear Japanese in Japan appearing white to American viewers, and racial mixing that in Japan would be a sort of “occidentalist” exoticism appearing in the US as a disavowing of racial otherness and a linking of mixing with whites to upward mobility. Japan has a completely different set of racial politics: for instance, because Japan does have a history of violence and exploitation towards zainichi (people of Korean descent living in Japan), representations of zainichi and Korean culture are much more weighted than representations of black people. These stereotypes are still harmful –especially to the handful of black people living in Japan– and the manga-ka really need to stop writing them, but I think American media companies that import, dub/sub and distribute anime and manga also need to take some responsibility. They should think about how an anime’s racialized characters will be perceived in the US when they’re deciding which shows to license. They might not be able to find anything with healthy/realistic representations of black characters (because there just really, really, aren’t that many black people in Japan) but they could at least avoid shows with negative representations. (Well, that might be difficult to implement, given that a bunch of the major Shonen Jump manga are so racist, but they could at least try.) Instead, they should bring in more manga/anime in which all the characters are, though not stereotypically slit-eyed, recognizably Japanese even to Americans. There are actually many, many anime in which all the characters have dark eyes and hair on the brown-to-black spectrum. These anime would force American viewers to recognize more deeply that in watching anime they are dealing with a country in which white is not the norm and in which whiteness, though often fetishized, is not associated with political power or economic success. Ideally, importing these anime would help decenter white Americans.
Ms. Queenly
Dear Claire K,
Thank you for your recent commentary on “Why do the Japanese draw themselves as white”. I get an e-mail when people comment and I always check, no matter how old the article. You made some excellent points that I agree with.
I have a friend, who’s white, who is a Japanese Studies major studying in Japan right now, who would probably disagree with you on several points. As I do.
I think what your analysis leaves out is an inclusion of the topic of globalization and white supremacy. Japan does not live in a bubble. The way Japanese/mangaka exotify racial whiteness is not the same way they dehumanize and caricature Blackness. I actually find it rather insulting that your analysis continues to weigh what’s better and worse by your own interpretation, Japanese portrayals or U.S. history and it’s racism. As a Black woman, both of them are racist to me and it doesn’t matter why they are. White imaginations. Japanese imganations. It’s racist, it doesn’t matter to me why it’s like that.
Are you an upper class Japanese persyn? I would say when race and class come into play for Black peoples, nothing good ever comes of it.
There’s no excuse for racism, no matter where it is in the world or why in the world it is. I think you need to reflect on why you felt the need to justify and excuse Japanese racism.
This is my initial response, I will summarily review your post at a later time.
PS– “There are actually many, many anime in which all the characters have dark eyes and hair on the brown-to-black spectrum. These anime would force American viewers to recognize more deeply that in watching anime they are dealing with a country in which white is not the norm and in which whiteness, though often fetishized, is not associated with political power or economic success. Ideally, importing these anime would help decenter white Americans.”
No, Claire K, just no.
Rosalind
Ms,Queenly
Have you ever watched Nadia The Secret of the Blue Water the main character is a story of a girl from central Africa And her poeple Resemble that of a African tribe. Another good manga would be Soul to Seoul the black character Spike is the bestfriend of the main character Kai Lee, the alienated Korean/white hero of the comic book series by Ji-Eun Kim. The two pretty boys hold their mixed Korean heritage in common. Princess Prince is also a manga with a brown skinned main character her name is Janice,Janice is a dark beauty who is treated pretty badly in the kingdom for being dark-skinned. She goes to bathe in a ‘magic’ lake hoping her skin color will change. Prince Matthew sees her and falls madly in love with her.
Yes there is ALOT of racism in anime’s/manga toward black and people of darker skinned but there still is some characters we can be proud of
Taviante Queens
Thank you, Rosalind, I appreciate the recommendations. My hope continues to flag so I’m hesitate to give them a try. ~Queen