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NHK Apologizes, Removes News Program's Racist Cartoon About Ongoing Protests

Japan's national broadcaster NHK is under fire after its reporting on the Black Lives Matter movement in America included a cartoon that depicted Black protestors as racist caricatures. On Sunday June 7, the station's program The World Now included a computer animated segment which purported to explain what was happening in America. The Black protestors were depicted in the animation as angry musclebound stereotypes.

According to a report in Variety, the segment made no mention of the killing of George Floyd, but instead claimed that the protests were caused by the income gap between white and Black Americans.

The post drew online condemnation, including a Twitter message from Joseph M. Young, the interim head of the U.S. Embassy in Tokyo, who wrote, "While we understand NHK's intent to address complex racial issues in the United States, it's unfortunate that more thought and care didn't go into this video. The caricatures used are offensive and insensitive."

NHK had uploaded the offending video to its Twitter feed, but subsequently took it down and posted a statement in English and Japanese. The English version said, "We at NHK would like to sincerely apologize for a computer animation clip posted on our Twitter account. The clip was part of a segment in the program “Kore-de-wakatta Sekai-no-ima” broadcast on Sunday, June 7th."

According to NHK's statement, the animation was part of a 26-minute segment during the broadcast. This segment, NHK said, did report that the protests in the U.S. were triggered by the death of George Floyd. NHK also claimed it acknowledged how many people are angered by the case, the handling of the matter by the Trump administration and criticism against it, and the divisions in American society.

Regarding the 81-second animated clip, NHK said that it had "aimed to show the hardships, such as economic disparity, that many African Americans in the U.S. suffer. However, we have decided to take the clip offline after receiving criticism from viewers that it did not correctly express the realities of the problem. We regret lacking proper consideration in carrying the clip, and apologize to everyone who was offended."

In a similar case, Nissin Cup Noodle pulled an ad last year that was supposed to depict tennis stars Kei Nishikori and Naomi Osaka as animated characters in the world of Prince of Tennis. The ad was pulled after Osaka, who is Haitian-Japanese, was drawn with fair skin and less textured hair.

Protests have flared across multiple cities in the United States and across the world after the May 25 death of George Floyd, an unarmed Black man, as local police forcibly held him down with a knee against his neck in Minneapolis for nine minutes. Floyd died short thereafter and both the Hennepin County medical examiner and an independent examiner hired by Floyd's family determined his death was a homicide. The four officers involved in Floyd's death have all been arrested and charged. Officer Derek Chauvin is awaiting charges of second-degree murder and officers J. Alexander Kueng, Thomas Lane and Tou Thao are charged with aiding and abetting second-degree murder and aiding and abetting second-degree manslaughter.

Video footage of Floyd's arrest where he is heard telling officers that he couldn't breathe quickly spread. The protests have also sparked sympathetic protests in other cities outside the United States, highlighting police discrimination and brutality in their own communities.

Japanese manga artists, including Chihayafuru creator Yuki Suetsugu, musicians, and companies have showed their support for the ongoing protests against police brutality.

Source: Variety (Mark Schilling)