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Answerman - Why Do Westerners Make Assumptions About Japan Because of Anime?

Ugh, you're always just super ripe for the most thoughtful conversation...
It's always, 'lets just disagree with everything everyone else says and look at things in the most simplistic manner while being as confrontational as possible'. Can you not, please?

Space Brothers aired in the middle of the day on weekends. It was a mainstream series, and had plenty of viewers from all age groups. The narrative is simplistic enough that it seems quite clear it was intended to be accessible to children/teens. Also notable is the inclusion of Japanese subtitles in the official OP and ED with furigana. Something that is pretty exclusive to shows aimed, at least in part, at teens and children.
If you think the target audience for something is entirely tied to the vague and archaic magazine demographic that it runs in, you have much to learn.

Japan companies even mostly ignore domestic "grannies" that complain about anime.
Any show that have too much fanservice are put in a time schedule and have enough censor that make difficult for people to complain.
So It will be very difficult for fanservice shows to change because of a few western complains.

Right, a "vague and archaic magazine demographic..." Have you even seen a seinen manga anthology magazine outside of the actual manga? Alas to be fair, as print media continues to decline, such boundaries between demographics are fading.

Jonny Mendes wrote:

Japan companies even mostly ignore domestic "grannies" that complain about anime. Any show that have too much fanservice are put in a time schedule and have enough censor that make difficult for people to complain. So It will be very difficult for fanservice shows to change because of a few western complains.

I wouldn't call it ignoring when networks move shows to later timeslots because parental watchdogs arbitrarily pick on something. Still, I can't remember the last time they did here in the West. It's usually over genuinely degenerate crap that happens live.

Compelled to Reply wrote:

The fact it didn't get a dub with said contention I recall was my point why it failed.

I think Space Brothers being a 99 episode show about astronaut training was the biggest reason it didn't get a dub.

Japan companies even mostly ignore domestic "grannies" that complain about anime.

If episode length and tackling subjects of dubious quality was a requisite for not dubbing an anime I can think of quite a few anime some companies would've never taken a chance on.

In Japan that is true but I was thinking more about Western companies that dub anime. The effort to demonize male sexual desire has become big in recent years and soon enough I think we will see targeted campaigns to try to get Western companies to stop releasing fanservice shows..

In Japan that is true but I was thinking more about Western companies that dub anime. The effort to demonize male sexual desire has become big in recent years and soon enough I think we will see targeted campaigns to try to get Western companies to stop releasing fanservice shows..

Chrono1000 wrote:

In Japan that is true but I was thinking more about Western companies that dub anime. The effort to demonize male sexual desire has become big in recent years and soon enough I think we will see targeted campaigns to try to get Western companies to stop releasing fanservice shows..

I doubt there will be any kind of campaign against anime because what we have atm is not a campaign to demonize male sexual desire, but to penalize sexual abuse of females at the hands of males. So unless we are talking about hentai anime (which is not streamed anywhere legally or illegally afaik), TV series with heavy fanservice for heterosexual males very rarely have what can be called female abuse at the hands of males (quite often you have the exact opposite played for laughs), the closest I can think of was Aesthetica of a Rogue Hero (2012) and it bombed in disc sales and we haven't had anything similar ever since

Jonny Mendes wrote:

Japan companies even mostly ignore domestic "grannies" that complain about anime.

In Japan that is true but I was thinking more about Western companies that dub anime. The effort to demonize male sexual desire has become big in recent years and soon enough I think we will see targeted campaigns to try to get Western companies to stop releasing fanservice shows.

Jonny Mendes wrote:

Japan companies even mostly ignore domestic "grannies" that complain about anime.

In Japan that is true but I was thinking more about Western companies that dub anime. The effort to demonize male sexual desire has become big in recent years and soon enough I think we will see targeted campaigns to try to get Western companies to stop releasing fanservice shows.

Which is why they're also frustrated when they can't export the "Anime Causes Deviancy" message to target the, quote-fingers, "clueless" West who "don't know" how dangerous anime is, and shut that market off to finish off anime once and for all, because we're smart enough to side with the rebel fans, but just not feel as persecuted about it.

In fact as mentioned, people from other cultures can get the wrong idea about Americans too. And this is also a result of American TV shows and Hollywood films that often portray stereotypes or exaggerations of their own nation.

More on topic, I'm not too surprised that some Americans assume anime is like Japan (though I see plenty of people who know better) because of how any culture relates to their television shows. Just looking at American shows I watch I see plenty of realism even in the more comically ridiculous shows, but I know what is fake because I live in America. When you live in another culture it is a bit harder to discern what is accurate to life as depicted in the media of another culture.

From my experience, one of the best windows to look at what Japan is and about the culture of the country is NHK World TV channel.
They have lots of programs and documentaries that take us inside of the daily life of Japanese people.

There are many preconceptions about Japan that are very different in real life. From my visits to Japan i can say that NHK programs are a very accurate portrait of what is life in Japan.

I think another factor is that the US doesn't have the same Anime's extreme-niche industry framework as Japan, so it's easy to think of the shows as at least mass-media enough to be aired at an hour people actually watch, and values naturalism much more than Japanese media seems to, so that there's not much of a difference between how English is spoken on the screen and in person other than the elimination of regionalism. As such, we kind of expect the series presenting themselves as relatable normalcy and the characters talking about how normal and unremarkable they are to represent Japanese perceptions of normalcy.

Not to mention, traveling to most countries outside of the US requires a pretty pricey plane ticket, whereas people in Most other countries, especially anywhere in Europe, can pretty easily drive to multiple countries within several hours, or less.
You can go to Canada or Mexico easily enough from some States, but the majority of people in the US are going to need to fly to any country they want to visit. Going to Europe for a Summer holiday cost me $2000 just for the plane ticket(and while that was more expensive than normal, it's still usually somewhere around the $1k range)! It's easy to see why one might rather spend a few hundred dollars and make it to the nearest domestic vacation spot(like you said, the country is BIG and you can literally get about any kind of environment you want)

Indeed! Want to eat Japanese sweets, such as dorayaki, castella, or imagawayaki? Unless you live in an area that has an international supermarket, good luck with that.

Videogames anyone ???

But no I hope no one watches Initial D and thinks that some gas station attendants and workers in Japan work in secret street racing teams.

Or Ben-To which has teenagers and college students brawling in grocery stores over bento meals.

Or take Japanese history lessons from Sengoku Basara.

For example I saw that the chinese movie "mermaid" was critically acclaimed and I simply couldnt get the sense of humor. Same with some japanese shows ... I have seen Gintama is rated incredibly high by viewers but I cant get past the first few episodes. What if what all Japanese people learned about the west was from The A Team or Dukes of Hazzard =P.

There's the "Foreign dream" that All Good West is Europe, and All Europe Is France, where everyone wears Victorian dresses and parasols and sips coffee...

Yeah, a large immigrant population means we have a lot of people going to old country to see family but immigrants love to travel elsewhere, too; Many immigrants to Canada now have the sort of money they've never had before and travel is high on many people's list of things to spend that on.

It doesn't help that US media always focuses on any Americans that happen to be caught up in such things. If none are available, then it has to be a really big deal to even get coverage at all. The media apparently (perhaps rightly, I'm sad to admit) thinks that Americans just don't want to hear about anything happening outside the US unless other Americans are directly involved.

I once had dinner in Scotland in the 1970s and was seated at a table with a nice young English couple from the London suburbs. The wife wondered how we could stand living in America since it was all so dark and grimy, which especially surprised my then-wife who was from Nebraska. Turns out the American crime series Kojak was being aired in Britain, and the English lady concluded all of the United States must look like the dark, dank New York City portrayed in that show. Guess she never saw The Rockford Files (southern California) or Hawaii Five-O.

This kind of thing has been a massive problem in Japanese culture for a long while. However, there have been some recent shows that have shown African-descended characters in a better light. Sword Art Online was very positive with that with the character Agil, and I give the show a lot of credit for going out of its way to have such a positive example, even if he was a relatively minor character (all the men other than Kirito are, for obvious reasons.) There have been some others in recent times, but unfortunately the heavily stereotyped black character is still a part of anime. So yea, I don't think the Japanese reader can really claim that America is much worse when it comes to stereotypes from media.

Well, can understand that was the case years ago. I mean even today there are people that garner assumptions based on word of mouth or someone's perception. But in this day and age and with the advancement of social media there isn't much of an excuse. Because there are tons of vlogs, channels and sites that at least give people a "somewhat" concrete view of fantasy Japan and RL Japan. But the key to understanding is to gain multiple views. For example who is more knowledgeable of the country a person who lives there or a foreigner (regardless of race) who's lived there for years? It's easy to go with the native person because it's their experience as a native, but a foreigner can do just as well of a job if he's versed enough in a particular topic. But natives know more. And even their views can be deconstructed by someone who's a native. After awhile it all starts becoming subjective.

Japan is not obsessed is separating things for age groups or sexes.

Been "kodomo" "shonen" "seinen" "shoujo" "Josei" is more a guide line of target audience than a define line that separate audiences.