Forum - View topicAnswerman - Why Aren't More Races Represented In Anime And Manga?
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Penguin_Factory
 Posts: 732 Location: Ireland |
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Part of me wonders if the new Star Wars movies might help shift this mindset, as they're notably very diverse in terms of cast (especially Rogue One). On the other hand, Star Wars is probably a poor test case because those movies are basically bullet proof; they're going to make tons of money no matter who they put in them.[/quote] |
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here-and-faraway
 Posts: 1528 Location: Sunny California |
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Another difference... white characters are often drawn with "sunken" eyes and slightly jutting foreheads. Korean characters are often drawn with more angular eyes. |
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infamoustakai
 Posts: 323 |
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I always picture characters as white any way.
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GVman
 Posts: 729 |
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Speaking of Gundam, isn't Amuro supposed to be half Hispanic, half Japanese, and born in Canada? |
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Levitz9
 Posts: 1022 Location: Puerto Rico |
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As much as I care about diversity in entertainment, I think Justin smacked the nail on the head with his answer. Japan has race issues, but most of its depictions don't come from outright racism so much as a plain-old-case of "not knowing any better".
I also appreciate his underlining of how this cry for diversity is, oddly, an American concept. This is something worth noting: people in the U.S. tend to think the rest of the world agrees with them. (I'd still like to see more positive depictions of Latin-Americans in the media. Mana Tatsumiya, Bleach's Chad, and KoF's Angel are nice, but I'd like some more please. Mana gets bonus points, because she's also half-Puertorican!) |
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Animechic420
 Posts: 1727 Location: A Cave Filled With Riches |
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Once....just once I'd like to see an animanga with a black/African-American girl MC. She could be a transfer student, young model, housewife, business mogul, singer. Whatever. I just wanna see that!
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revolutionotaku
Posts: 886 |
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Doesn't "Attack on Titan" have European-type characters (German)?
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NiPah
 SubscriberPosts: 205 |
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Use that drive to make something beautiful yourself, some of the best work if seen is from the creator wanting to see something that didn't exist and then working their butts off to make it a reality. |
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Gattix
Posts: 36 |
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WHY DON’T THOSE JAPANESE PEOPLE MAKE THEIR ENTERTAINMENT MORE AMERICAN??!!
Maybe you should take a step back and think about what you’re demanding there. This might be difficult to grasp for burgerlanders but most countries on this planet are pretty damn homogeneous. American culture is defined by not having any culture, not any specific one at least, everyone is welcome so entertainment should be more “inclusive” and feature any and all immigrants, it’s still American as long as you slap fast food, guns and the US flag on top of it. If you however sprinkle random races all over a work from an ethnically homogeneous country it definitely becomes less authentic, feels less like a work from that country and more like yet another globalization driven EVERYTHING MUST BE AMERICAN work. This isn’t about “not knowing any better”, any country is allowed to have its own culture and respect its own ethnicities, and when people on Walmart scooters try to change this you call it cultural imperialism. |
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prime_pm
 Posts: 2336 Location: Your Mother's Bedroom |
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They kinda sorta did with Peach Girl but that one doesn't really count. |
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LilyChan
 Posts: 101 Location: Arizona |
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they're brazilian but have you checked out "michiko to hatchin"? |
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BrianRuh
Posts: 162 Location: West Lafayette, IN, USA |
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I know this wasn't the point of the article, but I just had to jump in here.
I just felt like I should mention that there is far more diversity in Japan than people (including many Japanese) often acknowledge. There are Ainu, Okinawans, Koreans, just to name a few not-insignificant populations. A good place to start reading is the David Suzuki / Keibo Oiwa book "The Other Japan." (It's also sometimes titled "The Japan We Never Knew.") Interestingly (and probably tellingly), according to one article, "the book has not been published in Japanese due to the chapter on burakumin." |
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Souther
 Posts: 602 |
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There are quite a bit of anime/manga that have whites/asians in them. I've seen a few manga with black male MCs like Me and the Devil's Blues, and Blaster Knuckle, a manga about a black ex-heavy-weight boxer who goes around punching demons disguised as KKK members with an explosive gauntlet.
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Botan_TM
Posts: 18 |
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The funny things is, that many anime covers cultural and race interaction problems. Elfs, vampires, many fantasy humanoid species or different races, in science fiction like in Uchuu Senkan Yamato 2199 or conflicts between nations and so on.
The problem is with American point of view, when then think "race" or "diversity", whatever, the first thing they think is skin colour. They extrapolate this to whole mass culture and fail to notice other cultures often take this theme, but with different approach, which is based on their own history and so it's different. Like Polish game Witcher, is is base on culture of country, where black people are basically non-existent, but like many countries we had our difficult history with other nations. And so in books were many fantasy races. But some Americans criticised it because "hurr durr no black skin in game is racist". |
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HeeroTX
Posts: 2046 Location: Austin, TX |
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#1. If you mean actual anime/manga, in ALMOST all anime/manga the main character is supposed to be Japanese, because the target audience for the stuff is JAPAN. Yes, you get random foreign MCs, but it is exceedingly RARE as Justin noted. #2. No, no you wouldn't. Unless you're into unintentional racism potentially on par with blackface of the American 20s, then "no" you don't want to see what a somewhat xenophobic, 99% homogeneous nation with little to no experience with your race will do. Maybe you get "lucky" and it's the standard "valley girl" (blond hair, blue eyes, big boobs, usually in an American Flag bikini) or maybe you get Mr. Popo. |
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