I am not at all a fan of anime (don’t judge me, I just never got interested in it), but in my passing glances at it I had casually wondered why the characters never seem to have any of the attributes I associate with Japanese people. I can’t say I’d ever thought about it much until now, but now I know why: because I have a lot of implicitly racist assumptions.
Why do the Japanese draw themselves as white? You see that especially in manga and anime.
As it turns out, that is an American opinion, not a Japanese one. The Japanese see anime characters as being Japanese. It is Americans who think they are white. Why? Because to them white is the Default Human Being.
If I draw a stick figure, most Americans will assume that it is a white man. Because to them that is the Default Human Being. For them to think it is a woman I have to add a dress or long hair; for Asian, I have to add slanted eyes; for black, I add kinky hair or brown skin. Etc.
The Other has to be marked. If there are no stereotyped markings of otherness, then white is assumed.
Americans apply this thinking to Japanese drawings. But to the Japanese the Default Human Being is Japanese! So they feel no need to make their characters “look Asian”. They just have to make them look like people and everyone in Japan will assume they are Japanese – no matter how improbable their physical appearance.
Oooh. Processing. Consciousness raised. Will try to adjust perspective from now on.
Whoa. This affects a lot of things, not just anime that I never watched much anyway.
yes “default” image processing. EG that stick figure, is it male or female? a male observer will automatically assume it is male, even without a little hint of third leg. A female might see it as female, wondering why she isn’t skirted. ugh, that last line is my bias showing.
never heard that explanation for anime portrayals, as big eyed caucasians claiming to be asian characters. I previously would accuse “market forces”, trying to sell the anime to naive american *adults*. It’s nice to know that they are just drawn in an easy style and assume them to be themselves without any need to include racial cliche’s.
Worth re-viewing my anime collection thusly. BRB
It really depends on the anime. A lot of artists will give characters exaggerated physical characteristics or outlandish hair and skin colors just to make them easier to tell apart. Or just for fun.
It works the same way in other contexts. Take the Simpsons. Marge has yellow skin and blue hair and goggle eyes, but we read that as ‘white’. While Lenny and Abu need dark skin to read as black or Indian.
This makes perfect sense, and it’s good to see it pointed out. However there’s a much bigger issue in anime: lots and lots and lots of sexism. Before someone starts in with “#notallanime,” yes I know, not all anime. But a lot of anime sexualizes the SHIT out of female characters, even (or especially) 15-16ish year old girls. Biggest offenders I can name off the top of my head are Sword Art Online and Girls Und Panzer.
I think it might depend on the anime. Growing up, I watched a lot of Dragonball Z and read the characters as Japanese. Whereas Hellsing takes place in England and I saw them as English. These could be idiosyncratic and merely anecdotal though.
Zola Man was a popular…I guess “meme” for lack of a better word (see also: “Pucca – Funny Love”). The character was invented in South Korea. If you or I drew it, would we be perceived as racist because of the character’s eyes? Probably.
I draw and use stick figures when I teach, but I differentiate them by using different colours, and hair or no hair to represent gender. Xiao Xiao creator and animator Zhu Zhiqiang sometimes uses colour to identify his stick figures, but usually the hero is identified by being centred on the screen.
Anime fans won’t judge, we know it’s not to everyone’s taste. But if you dare to say the same thing about Star Wars to a fan, and….
Sometimes Japanese anime will depict Asian-looking characters, and it’s often because those characters are Chinese, Korean, or Vietnamese. The Default only extends to Japanese people.
@1 slithey tove (twas brillig (stevem))-
I’m pretty sure I see a crotch bulge in that stick person so I’m gonna say it’s male.
Or it has a cell phone in it’s pocket. Stick people always wear skinny jeans so it kind of gets confusing
Well, yes and no. The skin color, yes, absolutely. But the stereotypical “anime eyes” are notably non-Japanese — and the Japanese know this and sometimes make jokes about it. (Japanese people, mostly young women because of course there’s sexism mixed into this, have been known to get cosmetic surgery to enlarge their eyes. Whether this is “to look like an anime girl” or not I can’t say, but that’s definitely sometimes advanced as a reason by Japanese commentators.) There are anime and manga where the characters have more realistic facial characteristics, but they tend to be more for adults. (Meaning “targeted at grown ups”, not “explicitly sexual”, for once.)
Earlier, I wrote an analysis of the ethnicity in Xenoblade Chronicles X, a Japanese video game. There are a couple examples of Chinese characters, as depicted by Japanese.
thelastholdout @4
There’s this recurring meme about how sexualized Girls Und Panzer is supposed to be. Having seen the anime, I’m wondering just how it got started because while there’s a few scenes of non-sexual nudity while characters are bathing (hardly an uncommon thing in anime, given the Japanese views on group bathing) that don’t show anything that would get it censored on American television, there’s a couple of suggestive lines the first time the main characters fire their tank’s cannon. And that’s really it for the sexual content.
Meanwhile, there are entire genres of anime about the fetishization of teenage girls: harem comedies, pantie fighters, magical girlfriends that often show explicit female nudity. But somehow Girls Und Panzer has a worse reputation than Girls Bravo or High School DXD.
Hmm. Well, ok, yes and no on this one. I agree that, to them, anime characters would see to be Japanese. Then again… If you look at something which contains both “Americans” and “Japanese” in them… the differences between the characters is… not much. You have to go clear up into stuff that has the quality of Studio Gibli in most cases, for the details to be precise enough to say, “Oh, right, the character is Asian.” The simple fact is that the actual differences are so minor, especially in drawn characters, that its not like someone is looking at the character and saying, “Oh, your Japanese!”, then getting an annoyed look, because *every* Asian person can tell they are actually Korean instead. The characters look like a default character because almost all of them are *drawn* with insufficient detail to be anything except a default character. Everyone is going to see them as their own race, other than skin color, because they just isn’t, in most of what gets made, enough clear, obvious, differences to mark them as, “obviously from X part of the planet”. And, as someone point out, with respect to the “anime eyes” – that is probably the single most “critical” detail, which might otherwise distinguish the “race” of the character, and one of the reasons why the Studio Gibli, and the like, levels of art actually “do” show clear and obvious nationalities. Its kind of hard to produce “subtle” in facial characteristics, when you start out by exaggerating a sort of critical one, to an extreme.
And, from the standpoint of accepting and adopting the stories and characters, this isn’t imho, a bad thing.
Regarding The Vicar’s comment @9 eyelid surgery is done in other Asian countries as well. Supposedly Jackie Chan had such surgery done back in the late ’70s.
I was under the impression that many of the more realistically rendered characters in japanese media look kind of “western” because that’s part of the established standard of beauty. Of course your stereotypical “anime faces” don’t really resemble human faces at all, they’re mostly iconic — I don’t think you can read any ethnic features into them besides maybe skin colour, so that helps when it comes to projecting your “default ethnicity” on them.
Pretty sure I also read the characters in Dragon Ball to be Japanese as a child, though.
I’m reminded of the Asterix cartoons, where most characters have pretty simple, iconic face shapes that don’t really imply an ethnicity (I guess big round noses *are* kind of a Gallic feature, thinking of people who look stereotypically French to me, but I doubt that’s intentional, since Roman characters have them too). But Caesar is drawn in a lot of detail, aquiline nose and narrow skull and all, because he needs to look like Caesar.
Thinking about it some more, I don’t think I ever read characters from japanese media as “white” as a child?
Of course “white person” isn’t really a category in how German racism works, and anime and manga were always marketed as an explicitly Japanese thing, so that probably helped. It doesn’t really make sense to assume that a character in a japanese story set in a fantasy realm is ethnically German, even to a child.
I’m surprised: given how much effort Japan has done to prepare the world for the inevitable takeover by the Star-Spawns of Cthulhu.
I’m a bit disturbed that the explanation PZ posted seems to equate “American” with “white.”
Well, a good chunk of SAO happens within deep-immersion MMOs, so I’ll chalk it up as very unfortunate realism
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Yeah, but there’s actually a story-related reason why Xeno X’s cast is such a white-fest (because it’s a Takahashi game, and you can’t have a Takahashi game without a couple “Fuck You Humanity!” moments)
thelastholdout @ 4;
And that is why my exposure to anime has been so selective and limited. The misogyny and gross sexualisation on display is horrifying and almost ubiquitous, and as you say has an even more nauseating tendency to focus of teenaged characters. Even otherwise more thoughtful and mature anime seems to have difficulty fully shaking off this tendency, which can often render otherwise intelligent story telling socially regressive and toxic.
Hollywood certainly seem to suffer from this particular prejudice, given the recent controversy over white washing of fictional characters with the casting of Scarlett Johannson in the role of Motoko Kusinagi.
@Gregory Greenwood
I haven’t heard much about that. I hope they’re doing a full translation-to-American equivalent, like what Magnificent Seven did with Seven Samurai, otherwise it’s going to be really strange and annoying when they try to rationalize why she’s very obviously a white American.
Although . . . . Kusinagi, at least in the anime TV series, is described as having a cyborg body since she was a child due to an accident that only she and one other child survived. So I guess she could look like anyone.
As people have pointed out, there is a fair amount of idealization of western features in anime, likely a result of being exposed to our culture through American occupation. Fun fact – many Japanese movies and video games have subtitled English-speaking actors, because it reminds audiences of watching big budget Hollywood movies.
The interesting other half of default image processing is the fact that it allowed anime to break into cultures that never would have accepted an explicitly asian-looking protagonist.
White? The popular Japanese standard for attractive skin color is lighter than for European-Americans. And that’s before tanning and before averaging in all the various shades of Americans.
I’m surprised no one has mentioned Osamu Tezuka. He was one of the major influences on postwar anime and manga, creating such classics as Astro Boy, Kimba the White Lion, and Black Jack. He’s often credited with the “large eyes” look in anime, which came from the influence of Walt Disney movies and other Western animation.
brett @ 31;
I assume they probably are going to move the setting to the US, given the fact that they have also caste a White guy in the role of Batou. Trying to explain why the two Japanese lead characters are both so inexplicably White might be a bit of a stretch, even deploying the cyborg body angle.
Whether or not the story will work properly when removed from its original setting is another issue, doubly so given that the US doesn’t exactly come off as a spotless paragon of moral action in the original story.
It’s a very pervasive attitude. We see it very glaringly when people complain about women or minorities being cast for certain roles, as if anyone who isn’t white male MUST have been cast in the name of diversity, because white male is the default. We notice it when overt misogynists or bigots say it outright like that, but until we read things like this we tend to overlook more subtle instances of it in ourselves. Would that everyone could take such things as a learning experience instead of an opportunity to scream “political correctness run amok!” at the top of their lungs.
Gregory Greenwood,
I have a feeling Hollywood just saw how Motoko is often drawn with large boobs and booty in body paint style fashion and that led to them defaulting to Johannson as opposed to more along the lines of Rinko Kikuchi. T&A sells.
Adela Doiron @ 27;
Very likely… and oh look – we are right back to the pervasive misogyny that infects anime again. At least the anime industry and Hollywood have that much in common I suppose.
It is particularly noticeable in Ghost in the Shell, since Motoko is the only female team member of Section 9, and also the only one who wears ridiculously sexualised get ups. Batou, Togusa, Saito, Bomar, Ishkawa, Paz, Chief Aramaki – all wear suits, casual coat and slacks, or sometimes combat fatigues, but Motoko rarely seems to go anywhere without revealing (and ludicrously unprofessional) bikini day wear or the ever reliable skin tight combat-catsuit of the physically impossible, would-have-to-be-painted-on-to-look-like-that variety. It get’s very grating, very quickly.
As you say, Hollywood execs probably took one look at that, and had cartoon dollar signs flash up in their eyes at the thought of being able to cram Ms. Johannson into the most revealing costume they can possibly get away with, all with the excuse that they are ‘just being true to the source material’, while glossing over the fact that they are completely ignoring the character’s ethnicity and nationality in search of an idealised physique for people to drool over.
Then again, I wouldn’t expect any better. Hollywood appear, after all, to have completely missed the point of the material they seem to be basing the adaptation on, since they are now seeking to caste the role of the Laughing Man from Stand Alone Complex as… the villain of the piece. Anyone who has seen that series could instantly spot how totally wrong that approach is, and yet Hollywood is charging ahead anyway, since the notion of having a story without a singular, easily identifiable villain (preferably with a physical deformity to help the audience remember that he is evil) is entirely unthinkable to them.
I’d like to consider myself a fan of anime and that I’m just very picky about it. I don’t like any of the stuff that depends on sexualizing teenage girls to attract its audience. A lot of the stuff I like tends to be ethnically diverse (for Japan) science fiction pieces like Gundam, Cowboy Bebop, or Legend of the Galactic Heroes. Anime is like almost any other medium. There’s tons and tons of stuff that is basically garbage and a few handfuls of stuff that’s good.
This is a direct result of them being almost as schizophrenic, or maybe more so, about sex, nudity, etc. than the US is. We are talking about a country with “love dolls”, a phone app for sexual hookups, and a whole branch of weird people called Otaku (I think that is the spelling) who would rather dress up as, and pretend to be anime characters, while watching hentei, than sleep with each other (yeah, this is literally what that class of anime fan is known for), but where, by contrast, you can be arrested for any display of anything having to deal with vaginas, while legally show casing statues of giant penises, in public areas. While there is no specific problem with nudity, to the extent the US has, or even just plain strange sex, they **invented** the absurd idea of blurring out female genitalia, but not, again, a man’s, unless it happens to come in close proximity with a woman’s, in most cases, even in actual porn.
Its… very very weird, unlike, say, some other Asian countries, which blur nothing, even in stuff that isn’t porn.
On the issue of Motoko though.. Yeah, there may be a reason for that though. I mean, in some sense she is the least human of them, having been, pretty much literally, one of the “first” people to ever get any sort of full prosthetic bodies, and, it seems like part of the way she dresses is also tied to her combat style, and the way her camo system is set up. Sure, you could make a suit, or body suit, that links into it, but a) if your body is nearly indestructible, b) your camo system is built into the skin, and c) you really don’t give a damn about human conventions about nudity, and the like, there isn’t much practical reason, other than making someone else more comfortable, to dress is suits, or other less combat effective clothing, or even dive into a fight bare assed naked. So, sure, you can see it as character that is sexualized, or.. as one that just doesn’t give a damn about such things, at all.
While there is no specific problem with nudity, to the extent the US has, or even just plain strange sex, they **invented** the absurd idea of blurring out female genitalia
Japan’s post-war policies regarding erotica were written by: General Douglas MacArthur. So if you were wondering “who came up with that stupid idea?” It was a corn-fed self-righteous American right-wing war fetishist.
kagehi @30:
If any of the male characters , who also have fully artificial cybernetic bodies, were as prone to wearing super-revealing costumes or going fully nude in combat, you might have a point. But since it’s always the sole female character who’s running around in the equivalent of a swimsuit or less, it’s pretty obvious that it’s being done for fanservice. Masamune Shirow is pretty infamous for it.
And then there’s the in infamous and completely gratuitous lesbian orgy in the original GiTS manga.
I don’t buy the premise. Japanese skin tone is, for all intents and purposes, indistinguishable from that of most Europeans. What colour should they be using, yellow? What makes most anime characters look European is eye shape and hair/eye colour. Don’t tell me it’s implicit racism to assume that a character with blond hair and blue eyes is not Japanese. We’re not talking about stick figures here. Eye shape aside (which I believe is exaggerated for emotive effect), anime makes liberal use of non-Japanese characters. I’ve heard this is largely an effect of the culture shock that followed Japan’s total defeat in WWII and occupation by American forces, but I wouldn’t be shocked if I’m remembering it wrong.
@Gregory Greenwood
I looked up the plot information that we know so far, and that’s terrible. It sounds like they’re using surface elements of the source material – the aesthetics, some of the names – and then making a garbage movie that carries over none of the themes or ideas from the TV series or films. Especially since the original Laughing Man was tied into themes of corporate corruption, the vulnerability of people to attack in such an interconnected society, and the toll the implants can potentially take on those who have them.
In other words, it’s an Earthsea-style adaptation except with a much larger budget and more star power.
@30
So for the sake of charity I’m not going to assume you’re making this argument, but one thing that really grinds my gears is when people try to paint hypersexual female outfits as acts of agency on the character’s part, rather than designs made to titilate.
People tried to do this with, say, Kill La Kill, arguing that it was actually super feminist and that feminists were being sexist for trying to control how women express their sexuality. This ignores, of course, that the overwhelming amout of underage and almost-underage softcore designs in that series were conscious decisions made by the artists, not an actual act of agency by real life women.
At the end of the day, said “women” are colored lines drawn by one group of people, “saying” things that were written by other groups of people. They’re not actually people, don’t actually have agency, and can’t really be brought up as a justification for the gross hyper-sexualization going on.
I guess what I’m trying to say is that the two aren’t mutually exclusive. In-Universe, Motoko Kusanagi could just really prefer showing off her body, or not care, or any other Watsonian explanation. But that doesn’t preclude her being designed to titillate from a Doyalist standpoint.
What I want to know is, where exactly did Japan get the poster children for the Aryan Nation that are Sailor Moon and Sailor Venus from? Mars and Saturn are the only ones who look even vaguely Japanese, mostly due to hair.
It’s both: the Major is a character who doesn’t give a shit about conventional notions of nudity, because This is how she looks naked, and she is what she is among other things because when he’s not using his mangas as an excuse to wax poetic about existentialism, Shirow likes to draw lingerie-models buts.
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Which is why I’m surprised we haven’t yet seen a pro-porn right-wing movement.
“It’s not about drooling over cunts: It is about Our Sacred Land of the Rising Sun’s Sovereignty!”
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Hey! At least the incestuous rapist mother was one of the villain.
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It’s both: the Major is a character who doesn’t give a shit about conventional notions of nudity, because This is how she looks naked, and she is what she is among other things because when he’s not using his mangas as an excuse to wax poetic about existentialism, Shirow likes to draw lingerie-models buts.
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Which is why I’m surprised we haven’t yet seen a pro-porn right-wing movement.
“It’s not about drooling over uncensored genitalia: It is about Our Sacred Land of the Rising Sun’s Sovereignty!”
***
Hey! At least the incestuous rapist mother was one of the villains.
***
Hint
Hint
It’s both: the Major is a character who doesn’t give a shit about conventional notions of nudity, because This is how she looks naked, and she is what she is among other things because when he’s not using his mangas as an excuse to wax poetic about existentialism, Shirow likes to draw lingerie-models buts.
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Which is why I’m surprised we haven’t yet seen a pro-porn right-wing movement.
“It’s not about drooling over uncensored genitalia: It is about Our Sacred Land of the Rising Sun’s Sovereignty!”
***
Hey! At least the incestuous rapist mother was one of the villains.
This has been a perennial question since the prehistoric days before the internet existed, and I don’t think there’s one completely satisfying answer. For hair colour, it seems that there’s a certain amount of coding going on, explicated here. Sailor Moon is blonde because she’s special but not quite so special as to have white hair. I suspect she has blue eyes just because blue eyes go with blonde hair stereotypically.
Skin colour varies enormously among native Japanese, though, from milky-pale through to darkly tanned, even leaving out such fashion trends as geisha and ganguro. In my limited experience, I can’t tell the difference in range of skin tones between Japanese and “White” people. I’ve been brought up with the idea that East Asians are supposed to be more yellowish in skin tone than White people, but I’ve been entertaining the idea recently that this is some kind of cultural/perceptual programming. Certainly, from sampling pixels from digital photos on the internets, if there’s anything in East Asian genetics that produces melanin that’s slightly more sallow than, say, my Anglo-Saxon(-Pict-Celtic-Roman-etc) melanin then either digital cameras are screening it out due to assumptions in programming the firmware or it’s just very subtle indeed. See also humanae.tumblr.com and try to pick out the “Asian” skin tones from the “White” ones.
Once hair and skin colour are dealt with, the only typical distinguishing features left between East Asian populations and European populations are face shape and eye folds. East Asians tend to have somewhat flatter faces than Europeans, leading to aggregate differences in nose, jaw and cheek shape; but there’s a fair degree of overlap, such that one can seldom say definitively that an East Asian can never have a Romanesque nose, or a European a flat face. Besides, I have to question whether the ability of the average manga artist (never mind the average sweatshop inbetweening anime artist) is actually up to showing such subtlety of feature? In the Big Eye mode of manga/anime the faces of protagonists are so distorted that I doubt that there’s any room for much in the way of distinguishing between an ostensibly flat face and a less-flat one.
The epicanthic fold is tricky, I think. It is a widespread feature of East Asian faces, and not common in Europe and Europe-derived faces, but it is actually a fairly subtle feature when you look at it. Human brains are evolved to recognise and process human faces quickly, and so we spot that kind of thing in real life, but in simple cartoons there’s not a lot of bandwidth to put that feature in. Even in a close-up on TV we could be talking only a few scan-lines’ detail on the end of a line that represents the eyelid. And if every face you see in real life has that feature, is it a feature you’re necessarily going to want to draw when you draw a simplified human face? Any more than you may or may not want to draw the lachrimae, say, or the detailed folds of an ear?
And again, the Big Eye style of manga/anime distorts the drawn eye so much that I don’t know what an epicanthic fold would change. Maybe it’s just down to how much the artist wants that fold to show.
But then, there’s the tradition of ukiyo-e, the Japanese woodblock prints of the medieval to early modern period. To pick one example from a quick google image search, this picture by Utamaro from “the early 20th century” shows a woman brushing her hair who sports an almost stereotypical pair of narrow, angled eyes that I think you would be unlikely to see on a similar European print of a European person. Certainly, in this yokohama-e print by Yoshiiku there’s a distinct difference in eye shape between the Chinese in the foreground and the European behind him. Given that manga and anime drawing styles are undoubtably descended from the ukiyo-e styles, what happened between, say, Commodore Perry and the emergence of modern manga styles? Was there a conscious emulation of Western cultural imports? An unconscious turning from stereotypical Japanese features? Or is variation in eye shape among the Japanese wide enough that what I see as stereotypically Asian eyes is for Japanese viewers just another code?
Laurentweppe @37: Actually, in the GitS universe, I think the naked Major looks like this (SFW link).
Kagehi (#30)
Except she isn’t real. She can’t make choices. She doesn’t have her own reasons. She can’t actually give a damn or not give a damn. Just like with Quiet in MGS, whose apologists also like to cite there being “a reason for” her excessive sexualization, everything she does or wants is what the creator decided she should do or want. And the creator definitely sexualizes her, not only by look he gave her but also by how he sets up the camera to focus on her ass, crotch, or tits in nearly every goddamn panel she appears in.
I don’t give a flying fuck what one can justify “in universe” when these universes themselves are set up to justify the objectification of female characters. And that needs to stop.
seleukos (#33)
No one needs “culture shock” to make comic books about characters from beyond one’s home nation. It’s perfectly normal to include people of other nationalities and races in fiction.
As for Japanese characters that don’t “look” Japanese, I assure you they do look Japanese to people here (in Japan). The hair color and eye color are just read as fantasy elements in the vein of extremely gaudy school uniforms and characters leaping three stories in a single bound. Except that people can and do dye their hair blonde or wear colored contacts, so you’ll actually see that. (One of my students has lightning bolts bleached into his hair.)
NelC (#38)
If you look at manga characters in profile, you’ll often see the eyes drawn nearer to the bridge of the nose than looks “normal” if you’re used to Western cartooning conventions. But if you look at Japanese people in profile, the manga style is closer to how they actually look.
Say what? Manga and anime drawing styles are descended from homages to Disney more than anything. Also, most Japanese people don’t have especially narrow or angled eyes. The ukiyo-e eyes were as much an exaggeration as manga eyes are now.
Daphne in the Deep Blue sea – apparently, when going after bad guys, you put on lingerie or bikinis (or something in between the two). So, yeah, while I forgot the whole lesbian sex scene thing in GOTS (been a while since I watched it), there is no sensible excuse in some cases, even stretched ones.
There’s no sex scene in the GOTS anime: there’s some heavy-handed implications that the Major’s nurse friend in SAC sleeps with her because she’s turned on by Mokoto’s heavily modded cybernetic frame, though, plus there’s her terrorist boyfriend in Arise, but since their shagging involve connecting their brains to each other while getting high on some deep-immersion VR, the “sex scenes” involve virtual whales swimming around their VR avatar and are not titillating in the least unless you have the very specific fetich of fucking in apnea in the middle of the Pacific Ocean while large cetaceans gallivant around you.
There’s some sex scenes in the manga though.
For what it’s worth… Some decades ago I saw a booklet of Japanese origin, in cartoon form with some text commentary, explaining to Japanese visitors to the USA the different cultural pitfalls to watch out for. For example, if you have a fender-bender auto accident with another car, DON’T APOLOGIZE! Instead, ask if anyone is injured, and if not, say “we should exchange insurance information.” That artist did not portray Japanese with slanted eyes; they had round eyes and small button noses, while Americans were drawn as large and tall with big sharp triangular noses.
Scott McCloud touched on this in the original Understanding Comics, where he noted that cartoon characters are often deliberately simplified not just for ease of drawing, but also to make it easier for the reader to write their own impressions onto the character. He noted in particular comics like Tintin, where the characters would be very stylized even while the backgrounds could be extremely detailed.
@A. Noyd (#41)
I stand corrected then. I don’t mean to imply that it is abnormal or in any way wrong to have characters of different national origin in works of art, but consider this: How many American shows, or comics, or whatever, have protagonists who look East Asian? Most American productions are heavily skewed towards European-like characters, to an even greater extent than the actual American demographics. With anime, on the other hand, you have such extreme examples as Attack on Titan where there is literally only one person left alive in the world who is half-Asian, and all the rest are European. And this isn’t something one merely guesses from the art style, it’s directly mentioned in the plot. Americans, on the other hand, can’t even make a movie adaptation of Avatar: the Last Airbender without making everyone Caucasian.
microraptor:
Yep. I once tried to read the manga, after watching the anime. I couldn’t finish it, because I found his portrayal of women so off-putting. The anime actually tones it down (not far enough, IMO, but obviously they wanted to remain somewhat true to the source material’s visual style).
As for characters “looking Japanese”: from memory, there’s an episode of GiTS:SAC which features two CIA agents from the American Empire, engineered to blend in with the Japanese, and they’re practically walking cliches, the way the show’s CIA think Japanese should look and act. You can practically see Section 9 thinking “these guys have got to be kidding!”
Now that I think about it, I was wrong. Avatar: the Last Airbender and Attack on Titan are actually very similar cases, when it comes to casting. The former is an American cartoon with predominantly Asian/Eskimo characters who were played by Caucasians in the film adaptation and the latter is a Japanese manga/anime with predominantly Caucasian characters who were played by Japanese in the film adaptation. I haven’t actually seen either live action movie adaptation, which would explain my ignorance.
seleukos (#47)
What about it? America’s mainstream avoidance of portraying characters of Asian descent is abnormal and contrived. And Asian American activists are always speaking out against it.
Also, the case of the obvious teen, who, when asking about full prosthetics is “offered” the chance to sleep with her, and turns her down, to which her reaction is just as dead panned as the offer. I.e., no disappointment, any more than there was any real encouragement, or obvious desire on her part, when making the offer.
Mind, I did get something dead wrong, on careful thought, and it actually represents a better argument than the one I tried to make – Motoko’s attributes as a fighter are “stealth”, “agility”, and “speed”. If you look at others on her team, you have:
1. A baseline human – Togusa
2. A tank – Botou
3. Sniper – Saito
4. Support/tech – Ishikawa
5. Administration – Daisuke
Umm, others I don’t remember so clearly.
The closest of any of them come to **needing** specialized clothing, that caters to their style of combat, is maybe Togusa, and only because he is the lest enhanced, and most vulnerable. There is even a discussion that takes place about Motoko’s cyberframe and how she has never tried other sexes, or designs, or upgraded to the lastest “strength and armor” enhancement model, but could still kick Botou’s ass. Why? Because she is better than he is, and one presumes, faster, in part because she isn’t upgraded, when it comes to close combat.
This presents a quandary, in a sense – why would someone who is basically stealth/assassin type be wearing a suit, instead of something that enhances these attributes? What exactly would that be?
So, yeah, on some consideration, I generally agree. It does present the character as more fan service than anything else. But, it redeems itself (a little) by at least having a bloody reason why she is using specialized clothing, and her overall attitude about a lot of things is.. so dead pan, and/or nonchalant.
Oh, and.. I really wouldn’t have minded, though “after the fact” some byplay/explanation for how the heck, given it later turns out she does have clothing that has the same camo capabilities, she landed on the roof of a building, with nothing on but a coat. I mean, other than the obvious fact that.. which would you rather piss off, really, someone dressed in a body suit, or like a ninja, that goes invisible, dives off a roof, and then rips through a mess of bad guys, or one crazy enough to do it while wearing **nothing**? From a WTF/bad ass stand point….
What I meant is that, for whatever reason, Japan seems to have overcome such biases in representation, compared to other countries. I have heard in the past that a possible reason was that, unlike the USA, for instance, which was victorious in WWII and retained its feeling of exceptionalism and the supremacy of its traditional imagery, Japan was totally defeated and occupied, and that made it more open to adopting foreign styles and characters in stories since its own perception of national superiority (that led to its militaristic expansion) was shattered. I don’t know if that is at all accurate.
Kagehi @51
Borma was a demolitions expert, this was mentioned precisely one time, during a Second Gig episode.
Paz has no listed specialty. He’s basically the guy who’s just there to provide another body on the team.
And Batou’s not the team tank- he’s no more durable than Motoko (in fact, in the original manga he was a lot less durable because he wasn’t a full-body cyborg, he just had cybernetic eyes and a single cybernetic arm). Batou’s the team’s number two- he’s almost as good as Motoko at hacking, almost as good at stealth, and almost as good at combat. And when he focuses, he’s about as smart as she is in the problem solving department.
And since Batou can go into Predator Stealth Mode just as easily as Motoko despite wearing much bulkier clothing, it removes any practical justification for the Major’s wardrobe. If Batou’s clothing were depicted as seriously compromising his stealth abilities, the Major’s skinsuit would make sense. Since his duds don’t do that, it really doesn’t.
And as far as who’s better in combat, well: https://youtu.be/cAPDFwHjUf8?t=59
seleukos (#52)
I assure you, Japan still has plenty of biases where representation of other countries are concerned. (If you go by popular media, Southeast Asia might as well not exist, for instance. And educational books tend to go the route of portraying South America as a massive war-zone for drug lords and Africa as a continent of nothing but poverty and starvation.)
Then why isn’t that a stereotype for Germany as well? I think the narrative about the significance of the defeat and post-war occupation of Japan gets bandied about because of American exceptionalism tied to racism. We like to think that we made an indelible impression on Japan with our might and righteousness.
The more likely answer is just how media is imported and exported and the role that white supremacy plays all around the world. It’s not a singular event but an ongoing trend. If you grow up watching movies that humanize Americans, you’ll have fewer problems seeing Americans (at least, those who look like movie Americans—ie. white people) as human. But Americans tend to remake and localize imports, so we don’t benefit from that effect as much.
A. Noyd @42:
Well, like humans, art can be descended from more than one line. If you’re learning to draw in Japan, you’re going to be at least as influenced by native art as by imported art, Europeans are influenced by the art that surrounds them, and Americans are influenced by the mostly European-descended art that surrounds them.
The ukiyo-e eyes are stylised, for sure — all art is stylised, even photorealism is a style — but why are the hair-brushing woman’s eyes stylised that way, while anime eyes are not? Is it commercialism, is it the exuberance of not having to conform to an approved national style after being defeated in a war, is it that epicanthic folds or the lack of them are not a mark for Japanese artists and consumers, or that they are a mark but for obscure politeness reasons the Japanese choose not to confirm or deny it in a straight-forward manner? No single one of these is a completely satisfactory answer to my mind.
NelC (#55)
You’re overestimating the ubiquity and character of “native” art a wee bit there. And people tend to learn to draw based on the standards of a given medium, not everything that’s around them.
Because eyes in Chinese art were stylized that way. And then China lost its cultural impact sometime before manga became a thing and the Japanese gained another style of representation they can just as easily see themselves in.
They’re really not. Epicanthic fold stands out to Westerners because we place great significance on them in relation to East Asia, but when Japanese people talk about eye shapes, they mention single or double lids (you can have either with an epicanthic fold), narrow or wide eyes, whether the eyes tilt up or down on the outside, and how many sides of the iris have white showing. Actual Japanese eyes are extremely diverse and the language unsurprisingly reflects that.
(As for why eyes in Chinese art are that way when Chinese people also have diverse eyes, it might have been an enduring fashion that fulfilled some aesthetic need beyond direct representation. Rather like how medieval baby Jesuses looked like ugly old men.)
Well, OK, point. He relies on it far less, but.. yeah.
@Kagehi
Might I recommend the Bikini Armor Battle Damage site’s Female Armor Bingo: Rhetoric Edition for your perusal?
A. Noyd @56:
Which just puts the cause of the angled eyes in Eastern art back a step without explaining it. Why did Chinese art do eyes that way? And why did the yokohama-e draw the European and the Chinese eyes differently?
I’m not saying you’re wrong, it’s just that the competing explanations for why manga and anime are the way they are just sound a bit similar in character to other things “everybody knows”. There doesn’t seem, from the Google searches I’ve done, much more than people repeating what they’ve heard other people say, or sometimes just making assertions without any supporting evidence.
Me @59: Oops, my eyes skipped over your final paragraph, A. Noyd [embarrassed laugh]. Still, I find the idea that East Asian artists drew angled eyes because that was the style without reference to any perception of the angle of the eyes they saw everyday… well, it seems to be reaching to rationalise the idea that Asians see Asian eyes and European eyes the same way. Or maybe, that Europeans were influenced by Asian art into seeing Asian eyes that way long before many Europeans commonly met East Asians? Kind of like the yellow skin thing?
90% of animu, like most things, is garbage. But, it isn’t a genre. There’s some really great stuff if you look outside their standard superhero team schlock. A lot of people will recommend Grave of the Fireflies, and I’m not going to buck that trend here.
NelC (#60)
I’m not saying there’s no reference to real eyes. But realism is an inadequate explanation given that the majority of the population of either China or Japan do not have particularly “angled” eyes—people’s eyes tend to be level or angled downward at the outer corners as much as upward—and there’s a huge range of variation in all characteristics. It’s doubtful that real eyes gained their current breadth of variation in so little time, which points to some distortion of perception going on back then.
Anyway, do you think medieval European painters were referencing some sort of epidemic of geezer-ish hideousness in infants of the time? Weird conventions tend to stick around in art. It’s possible the hyper-angled and narrow eyes of so many Chinese and Japanese paintings represented some era’s ideals that stuck. Or they depicted some idealized subpopulation. Or were supposed to convey an emotion or quality like anger, pleasure, serenity, or sageness. Or were an exaggerated contrast to another convention (like the bulging, round eyes of demons or Niō statues). Or all of the above. And if you look at other art forms, you do see different conventions.
Anyway, the point is, it’s not unreasonable for Japanese people to decide that manga eyes are just as representative of themselves as ukiyo-e eyes were. Or that stylization convention don’t even stand out to them until there’s some effort to depict racial differences.
I mean, if you’re going to bring up Yokohama-e art, then there are quite a number of prints and paintings where white women have narrow, angled eyes and are instead differentiated by their noses, hair or clothing styles. Like this one which compares, from top to bottom, a French woman, an English woman, and a Qing Chinese woman. Here are four Americans (presumed white) and one Japanese person who all have eyes that could be seen as stereotypically “Asian” going by today’s standards. Overall, it seems like white men’s faces made more of an impression and that the artist of the time were struggling to find a way to depict the differences they saw, resulting in creative but inconsistent deviations from tradition.
That is a very interesting consideration!