As a fan of Anime, I find it hard to call Anime racist,
however there have been moments within Anime which can be deemed problematic
either on purpose or due to a lack of research.
One of the biggest issues non-anime watchers raise with
anime is the aesthetics of characters.
Since Anime is a Japanese creation, many assume that Anime
characters should emulate Japanese people. However if you look at a cast within
anime you will notice a range of bright coloured hair and eyes. This has led to
many believe that anime character are trying to emulate Westerns and therefore
is racist. The Anime Man, in his video “Is Anime & Manga Racist?” talks
about this view of racism within Anime.
The Anime Man explains that character having brightly
coloured hair and eyes, is not a way to racially categorise their characters
but rather a way to keep production costs down. People of a certain race may share
similar features however in individuals, facial features will be different from
person to person. Doing that for every character presented in an anime would significantly
put up productions costs. So having to change just the colour of hair and eyes
is easier than making facial structures.
Despite this justification for why Anime is not racist due
to character design, this doesn’t excuse anime for using stereotypes and
culture appropriation in with Japan seems superior compared to others.
The use of stereotypes are common in earlier anime in
depicting Americans. Blonde hair, blue eyes and a chiseled face is the image
that American’s a portrayed as which is feed back to the Japanese.
This sort of portrayal of the
white race shows Japanese characters as the civil while the White (mainly
American) as wild in an urban setting.
A trope which can be commonly seen in anime is “The foreigner”.
This character type is usually a white American male who cannot speak a lick of
Japanese in which the characters of the anime try their hand at English to
communicate with the foreigner. Communicating with a foreigner is portrayed as
difficult and as somewhat a nuisance. However when a Japanese character shows success
in communicating with the foreigner, they are praised by their peers. There is
no doubt that knowing many languages in powerful but how it is presented in
anime has a slight air of conquering another culture.
However not all anime are problematic when it comes to
dealing with foreigners or the English language. A recently anime called Free! Iwatobi Swim Club it has an
episode where Rin with his friend Haru go to Australia to visit Rin’s host
family. It was enlightening to see a close to realistic portrayal of a positive
student exchange in a popular anime. Here Rin is able to speak English decently
well due to the time he spent in Australia as a youth. The conversation between
Rin and his host family consists typical “how have you been these years” without
being to be aware that they are speaking English.
While it is hard for anime to drop the trope of ‘the
foreigner’ from life of life or parody anime, with examples such as Free! Iwatobi Swim Club, there are able
to be Japanese/ Foreigner relations without having one superior over the other.
Some anime, I cannot begin to describe how annoying accents and voices are in some shows- I personally love Detective Conan, but an American character in the show has this phrase she says a few times throughout the anime “a secret makes a uu-man, uu-man”, each time I hear that phrase I literally yell at my screen “IT’S WOMAN! Wo-man”.
ReplyDeleteAnyway, my point is that cultural appropriation, as far as, anime voice-casting- anime production has not done well in this area. They hire/use Japanese voice actors to imitate “foreign” accents, that sound very bad and is evident that the voice behind that foreign anime character is Japanese; how I tell is the endings of English words, eg “what”/ “and” Japanese pronunciation is “what-o”/ “and-o”; sometimes it sounds so Japanese that it almost mocks the English, making it appear racist. Anime production companies have not taken time to cast “foreigners” into the industry and taken thought of the culture appropriation into consideration. Rather than having racial politics of casting, I would argue that if anime starts correctly casting their voice actors to their correct racial characters, further, if they give opportunities to foreigners to play the part of foreign anime characters, it creates a sense of authenticity that can boost the profiles/ detailing of the show; and overall have foreigner sound “foreign”.