Is Anime racist?

[Elfgore]

As a whole, no. The brush of generalization is swiping pretty broad right there. Even saying certain anime is racist is pretty much a stretch. I've seen some racist/homophobic/sexist elements in anime, but never has it been the point of the anime. Just something that happens in certain scenes, pretty few at that.

 

[Shadow flame master]

Everybody needs to get ready for the influx of forum topics like this when the Terrafromars anime releases. I'm calling it now.

OT: I don't really see anime as racist, but it could do with a little more diversity. Unfortunately, as you may already know, Japan's ethnic makeup is pretty much 99% natural born Japanese, with the remaining 1% being a mixture of Korean, other South East asians, and the few foreigners that live there. Because of this, anime might seem to be a little racist to you, but that's only because Japan, as a nation, doesn't have large quantities of people of different ethnicities (i.e.. blacks, jews, muslims) like, say, the U.S. or Britain.

 

[Fox12]

Not really, though that's a pretty broad topic. Obviously there's some xenophobia in Japanese culture, but that's fairly normal. The Japanese may dislike the South Koreans, but there are elements of American culture that dislike Hispanics. Japanese WW2 vets may dislike Americans, but there are American vets who feel the same about them. As a whole I would say no, at least not intentionally. Obviously they have a more homogenized society, but I haven't seen anything in anime that shows a clear dislike of other races. The worst I've seen are some of their old fashioned depictions of black culture, but they don't have the history of persecution we have, so they don't necessarily see certain images as racist in the same way we would.

You could make a stronger case for sexism, though even this only represents certain parts of the culture. The same can be found in aspects of American society (like in some comics). Miyazaki is the biggest feminist around.

 

[CpT_x_Killsteal]

Not in the slightest. There maybe be a select few shows with a select few scenes that can be construed as racism, but that's the same with everything in existence. This has been popping up more and more lately, people trying to find a way to paint anime in general as bad in some way.

 

[vid87]

Setting aside some of the presumed instance of "black face" in certain shows (Mr. Popo, Jynx, etc.), there was the bit on GameOverthinker that touched on anime style and how it was adapted from Disney into early manga, but leads to interpretations of characters stated to be living in Japan who look more Caucasian than anything else. Granted, this is the medium that famously sports hair and eyes of every color of the rainbow, but it is odd when someone like Usagi Sailor Moon looks decidedly Aryan or that a *Super* Saiyan or Sonic means becoming blonde (though the former is more serious and brutal in nature and the latter, as I've heard, was for a time depicted as pure evil in the comics). I've also seen a few shows with minor character sporting stereotypical features - narrow eyes and buck teeth - who are often liars and schemers.

 

[ExDeath730]

Everybody needs to get ready for the influx of forum topics like this when the Terrafromars anime releases. I'm calling it now.

OT: I don't really see anime as racist, but it could do with a little more diversity. Unfortunately, as you may already know, Japan's ethnic makeup is pretty much 99% natural born Japanese, with the remaining 1% being a mixture of Korean, other South East asians, and the few foreigners that live there. Because of this, anime might seem to be a little racist to you, but that's only because Japan, as a nation, doesn't have large quantities of people of different ethnicities (i.e.. blacks, jews, muslims) like, say, the U.S. or Britain.

This.

Really, that's the explanation. One problem with US is that it feels like the world must conform to it's standards. I remember in the Gamergate thread that some people were astonished by the existence of Marxists to this day. What if i told you that here in Brazil the liberals are considered Right, and work hand in hand with the Conservatives? The Left? Marxists, Stalinists, etc...

About Japan, one thing i noticed about anime is that the audiences expect and want really different things from it, not only that, but they like different stuff. You can just look at popularity polls, really. The favorite characters are usually vastly different, because the cultures and expectations are different.

More important, i feel that Japan is trying to protect it's culture, Globalization is an awesome concept, but it is not uniform. They don't have the mix of races and cultures that we westerners have, so i guess it must be hard and maybe even "alien" to have to conform to our standards. They don't have our...How can i say...Experience with the topic, that's why most times a black character appears in an anime, it's a caricature, it is rare the situations where it isn't like it. I actually loved how in Gundam Build Fighters the black character was a genius scientist.

 

[default]

Sigh, I'm so tired of this. No, it's really not. It's an art style. That's like saying watercolour painting is racist.

 

[Thaluikhain]

As mentioned, anime is a medium, and thus may or may not be racist.

If the question was meant along the line of "Does the current anime establishment have problems with racism?", however, that's a more useful thing to ask.

Setting aside some of the presumed instance of "black face" in certain shows (Mr. Popo, Jynx, etc.), there was the bit on GameOverthinker that touched on anime style and how it was adapted from Disney into early manga, but leads to interpretations of characters stated to be living in Japan who look more Caucasian than anything else. Granted, this is the medium that famously sports hair and eyes of every color of the rainbow, but it is odd when someone like Usagi Sailor Moon looks decidedly Aryan or that a *Super* Saiyan or Sonic means becoming blonde (though the former is more serious and brutal in nature and the latter, as I've heard, was for a time depicted as pure evil in the comics). I've also seen a few shows with minor character sporting stereotypical features - narrow eyes and buck teeth - who are often liars and schemers.

Possibly to an extent, but I think it's more that there is a different default.

If I were to say to you, "There was a little girl playing with a black kid", you could probably guess the ethnicity of the little girl whose ethnicity isn't stated...but this answer would depend on what country we were in. For that matter, for many years, lego had bright yellow heads with black smiley faces on them, which could represent any and no ethnic group. Then they released ones representing black people.

In Japan, where the dominant ethnicity is Japanese, they don't need to stick Japanese identifiers onto characters to make them seem Japanese, people can just assume.

 

[BrokenTinker]

Yes and no, some are, some aren't. Some authors are xenophobic nationalists while others (especially among the younger crowd) are more open. It varies. Japanese culture tend to be monolithic and VERY resistant to change (which can rightly be categorize as xenophobic in those cases). This can be seen in the various government sponsor campaign to do X, Y, Z (like the "Stay Cool" campaign after companies were asked to lower than electric consumption after the nuclear shutdowns and during rolling brownouts/scheduled blackouts) throughout the years. They still have a relatively conservative mindset and have still have certain expectations in gender roles. For example, women were (and still are to a certain extent) expected to be able to cook in the family kitchen, but not in certain types in restaurant (they've a saying that roughly say women should never be in a professional kitchen).

They also have a two-faced attitude in regards to how they speak, they will say things to appeal to the accepted norm even when they personally don't believe it. This isn't a criticism as much as a fact for life for them (this survey was done by the NHK iirc), especially when it comes to business dealings.

They have one of the biggest gap between individuals and a culture since they take the separation of private life and work life pretty seriously (been relaxing for a long while, but it's still there). Do some of them have superiority complex? Hell yeah, but that's true for all cultures. Does that make them racist, not necessary (but they ARE highly susceptible to perceived stereotypes). The average japanese would be nervous talking to certain foreigners (but I'll be damned if they don't at least try to be helpful in most cases, especially among the professions like station workers and cops). The same is true for producers of anime. They are limited by their own experiences, and sometimes, they just make shit up while other times they do so much research that it would make a native of the culture they are trying to portray drop their jaw in the accuracy or completely flabbergasted that they didn't know that about their own cultures (just look that anime about bath, roman baths vs japanese bath, and the level of details involved).

 

[Nubrain]

*sigh* I usually avoid these kinds of topics on the premise that taring any medium or even a genre with one brush no matter what that brush may be is just silly. Anime has it's gems and turds just like any other medium but I think enough people have and will point that out.

No the point that I wanted to make is that is it just me or do words like racist and sexist no longer mean what we all think they do because sometimes it feels like we're all working with a different definition. First these words only meant being about race or sex so a comment like "black people have a statically high risk of being lactose intolerant" is technically racist and "women live on average longer than men" is sexist. However I think you'd be hard pressed to have someone offended by either comment.

But these words not have a negative context to them. the offense is assumed even when it's not intended. See the problem is that all media and all art is made by flawed humans that draw on their own culture, life experiences and views to create. there are universal and regional tropes that have been used so much that people don't even think about them. the damsel in distress is the first that springs to mind and it's not bad persay but over used and something most people don't think of now days.

I just wish there was an better term for all this, a way to separate the discussion of trends that are used without thought from just hateful bigoted, misogynistic or homophobic behavior. the world is more connected than ever before now so we really do need to examine some of this lazy trope use and the message some defaults and assumptions give. On the other hand real haters are just going to hate and the less said to and about them the better.

 

[Casual Shinji]

Anime represents Japanese culture, and Japanese culture unfortunately is not too inclusive. There are very few anime that are outright racist, but at the same time there ain't many that show much diversity.

Back in the 80's and early 90's it seemed to be a lot more diverse, but it was pretty crudely done probably just to appeal to Western markets.

Anime isn't rasict, but it does expose Japan as a very closed off society.

 

[barbzilla]

I will fire off into the sounding chamber as well. You can only judge individual Anime for its racist/sexist/whateverist motivations on a case by case basis, otherwise you are being prejudiced to Anime by taking away its individuality and lumping them all together.

 

[NoeL]

Also hayao miyazaki said because many new anime directors won't go and get new experiences and is filled with otaku bullcrab anime industry has gone creative rot.

Right. But Hayao Miyazaki is a figure of Japanese culture, so clearly not all Japanese culture is of one mind.

Not that I agree with Mad as a Hatter, but I've got to defend him on this one. Japanese culture can be xenophobic even if there are prominent individuals that are exceptions. "Culture" reflects the commonly held beliefs of the area, and if it's common for Japanese people to be xenophobic and have that reflected in their culture then it's fair to say that Japanese culture is xenophobic. If Miyazaki recognises it in the industry and speaks out against it, him being Japanese and part of Japanese culture doesn't invalidate the argument.

 

[Riot3000]

Well the obvious answer is that no anime the medium is not racist unless it is made to be racist.

That and the comments about Japan being closed off or xenophobic are a bit to minimal because I think this is a more broad and complex thing than just "look at the anime it proves it". Japanese culture is diverse as many others with individuals and picking sensationalist articles to describe the whole country is like someone looking at the Florida Man Twitter page and saying this is America.

Also we have to look at context like in the 70s and 80s all those popular space operas like Space BattleShip Yamato and Captain Harlock wear there analogies of post war Japan on their sleeves and the enemy can interpreted as the United States looking back at it. Now is this racist I mean these anime writers and artist grew up in the post war or born after and around others so obviously that is going to influence the work. This can make for interesting critical analysis but the reductionist "is xenophobic" or is "closed off" wont allow that.

Now to the Miyazaki comment now I love his work and respect the man but he been saying that since like the 80s. The fact that that comment is still under review for him talking about artistry or "going outside" is up for debate. And while yes I do respect him I think his comment is a bit on the old man kids these days compounded by his strong opinions so I will not see his comments as some proof about the state of the industry or xenophobia in Japanese society most of that just comes off as confirmation bias.

 

[Silvanus]

Not that I agree with Mad as a Hatter, but I've got to defend him on this one. Japanese culture can be xenophobic even if there are prominent individuals that are exceptions. "Culture" reflects the commonly held beliefs of the area, and if it's common for Japanese people to be xenophobic and have that reflected in their culture then it's fair to say that Japanese culture is xenophobic. If Miyazaki recognises it in the industry and speaks out against it, him being Japanese and part of Japanese culture doesn't invalidate the argument.

That is a different argument. "Japanese culture is xenophobic" is an absolute statement; "Can be xenophobic" is not.

 

[Rayce Archer]

Some of it is, not all of it.

For instance Castle of Cagliostro is not racist but any anime parodying or referencing American action flicks (I'm looking at you, Mad Bull) probably will be. And while Vampire Hunter D is quite diverse and nobody gets worked up over it, the world of Black Butler contains exactly 3 ethnic groups: Asians, who are all gangsters, the English, and Italians, who are all gangsters.

In general racism in anime is less a matter of "Hahaha take that, ethnic group X" and more a matter of "I am an animator who has never left Japan and has met only three Westerners and my boss wants an anime about plucky girls in Central Europe SHIT time to watch Heidi again." If you don't have personal experience for a culture you're depicting you have to go to research and stereotypes, and the results just won't be perfect. That's why so much anime takes place in nations that are just vague mishmashes of all over Europe: towering, mountainous fjords with Monte-Carlo style posh modern towns on the coast and hills littered with towering forests, medieval villages full of old mustachioed men, and impossibly huge gothic castles. It's a foreigner's romantic idea of a place instead of the real thing. America is usually similarly exaggerated as gigantic and busy and impossibly big just really huge, and full of crime to the point that stepping outside is nearly a suicidal act.

Also sometimes stereotypes are straight there for larfs. For instance here's Samurai Champloo's take on America. AS AN AMERICAN I THINK THIS IS AWESOME.

 

[CrystalShadow]

I don't really think it's fair to say something like this about an entire medium...

But... Japan... Well, again, generalisations don't really do well...

I will however note something I found fascinating... Could be a one-off thing, not representative of anything, but it does potentially hint at something...

We have a TV channel in my country that largely shows foreign content.
It shows things from dozens of countries, and a wide variety of things, but one thing in particular you see regularly;
News broadcasts from around the world. There are dozens of them.
English, Dutch, German, Italian, Portuguese, Russian... Indonesian. Chinese... Etc. Arabic...

While most of these are in their native language (Some are not, such as the Russian broadcast), and all have specific political biases, (Which can be interesting, when you compare, say, the broadcasts of German news vs Russian news...), but regardless of these biases, most of them contain a decent mix of foreign and local news. (Local to the country of origin, I mean).

But... The, Japanese news broadcast really stands out here.
I can't understand most of what they're saying. It's in Japanese, and these news broadcasts aren't subtitled.
(Specifically, what we get shown here is NHK tokyo's news broadcasts)

But, unlike the news of pretty much any other country, there is NO foreign news. AT ALL.
None. It's all local stuff. (And often mostly about the weather).
I thought at first it might've been a fluke, but after watching several broadcasts, it was clearly something that was going on all the time...

Contrast this with just about any of the other several dozen news broadcasts from around the world, and this really stands out...

It could of course, be a fluke, and just be down to this one channel whose broadcasts they happen to show, and perhaps they're only showing part of the broadcast... (Or foreign news is somehow a separate show from what they're broadcasting here.)...

But... If this is actually the entirety of a Japanese news broadcast, and representative of news broadcasts in Japan generally (And not just the NHK specifically), then that has some... Interesting implications.
To ignore foreign news altogether is very strange. Even china doesn't do that...
Yet, if they truly don't show anything, what does that say about Japan?

Are they truly so insular they don't even have a passing interest in what's happening outside their own country? That seems highly unlikely... Yet that's what this news broadcast hints at...

Very odd...

 

[Izanagi009_v1legacy]

So my question is,is Anime racist?

(just a random thought for today I thought was worth discussing with my betters, and no I do not understand grammar)


In my opinion it?s not inherently racist as to be racist there really has to be negative concepts at paly, though while not inherent it can and has been done. Since Anime is Japanese who tend to be polite xenophobists it makes the content at times woefully stereotypical. But even so do stereotypes that are not inherently negative equal racism? Even if in these days if it bleeds its racist/sexist/negative/unfair?

The concept they have, Uchi and Soto, is based on the separation of the pure "inside" and the impure "outside". This leads to a lot of issues when it comes to immigration and their receptiveness to the outside world and this leads to people in Japan being very closed off

In addition, the closest to the plight of black people during the age of slavery is the Burakumin, a group of outcasts due to their ancestors working in professions dealing with death which according to Buddhism makes them impure (executioners, undertakes, butchers, tanners, and so on). In other words, they never had anything like our civil rights movement so race was never a thing for them but simply a same or different mentality

I wouldn't call it racist but xenophobic but that will have to change in the near future.

 

[Izanagi009_v1legacy]

Anime is a medium, and a medium can almost never be inherently racist, that is like saying all reality TV is racist. Is some content racist? Sure, but the same can be said about any type of content. There have been plenty of games with racist content but that does not mean all games are.

Exactly. Saying "anime is racist" makes about as much sense as saying, "Watercolor painting is racist."

If someone wants to do a thoughtful analysis of racist tropes in anime, be my guest. There's probably a goldmine of data in there.

Since Anime is Japanese who tend to be polite xenophobists it makes the content at times woefully stereotypical.

Japanese culture is xenophobic.

Neither of these statements are strictly accurate and Mad as a Hatter's statement is both inaccurate and racist itself.

There are definitely xenophobic people in Japan and expressions of that xenophobia in Japanese culture. Believe me, I liver here, I have to deal with it. But other people in Japan are also remarkably interested in other cultures and very positive about other cultures. Japan's the only place I've ever been where I've found a bar that gives 5% discounts to foreign patrons because they want to attract more Japanese business by making their customer base seem more cosmopolitan and diverse. What I'm saying is it's a mixed bag, and trying to analyze anime's racism as a "yes/no" question rather than a nuanced discussion of positive and negative portrayals within anime is going to be a waste of time because a "yes/no" answer is never going to be accurate enough to be meaningful.

Instead of answering "yes, it's racist" or "no, it's not". I'd rather see people put up examples of depictions and describe them. That would even be more interesting to other readers, because I'm sure there are others here like me who haven't watched much anime in the last 10 years and aren't caught up on what the state of the industry is.

If I recall, Uchi and Soto is a big thing that leads to the "xenophobia" of Japan and that they never really had a race thing. They have a thing with the burakumin but that's based on old Buddhist interpretation of ancestral profession.

At the same time, Japan also seem to have something called iitoko dori [http://books.google.com/books?id=TW7lHYwXhS4C&pg=PA129&lpg=PA129&dq=iitoko+dori&source=bl&ots=4mqbXjFJG1&sig=eJapklAB4lxlA02yQddnJW53Vm4&hl=en&sa=X&ei=m5wyVOPhA5HGgwTX-YL4Ag&ved=0CCUQ6AEwAQ#v=onepage&q=iitoko%20dori&f=false] in which they seem to incorporate aspects from other cultures and integrate them. Apparently, they will take stuff like Christianity or German naval structure and incorporate them into their fold with changes to make it more acceptable to Japanese.

It's a very interesting paradigm that reflects a peculiarity of Japan; they don't want outside people but outside culture fascinates them.

You have any insight on what I said.