Anime is a medium. It comes from the loanword "animeshon", from the English word "animation". Ok, let's say Icelandic Cartoons are racist, Newspaper Strips By People Who Speak Hindi are trying to indocrinate your children into a homosexual cult going to overthrow straight civilisation, and that the Norweigan Puppet Shoes are all watching you sleep.
None of those make sense. So, let's just translate "anime" into its original, English form:
"Is animation, be it western or eastern, racist?"
No. Japanese culture has some iffy relationships with people who are not Japanese, and to say that this is reflected in their media is an understatement, but manga (which are cartoon strips or arts originating from Japan as of the late 1800's, which are themselves a medium but reflect a lot out Japanese culture) is not immediately racist simply because it's from a culture with some xenophobic elements. And full of people marrying pillows and with book awards for the worst books in the past decade.
Obviously, Japan is a very isolated society, because...
1) The language. Dear God, Japanese. Two character sets each with at least 60 relatively similiar looking symbols that have no relation to each other when it comes to sound or their inclusion in words with specific meaning. And then there's kanji...
2) Immigration. Japan in a way prides itself on clean subways, hard workers and clean streets, and it just won't do with getting itself in a mess or a tangle with people who simply don't understand a culture as rich and complex as Japan's. While it's gotten a little better, it's still a pretty big problem: not enough people are going to Japan to live or work, and as a result the economy is taking a tumble and is now diving, slowly, but steadily.
3) Culture. Japan is an odd place, no doubt about it. Even the Japanese realise how odd some of their fellow Japanese can be; Neets, otakus, and enough anime subcultures from moe anthopomorphisms to big publishers and the little ones to doujinshi circles just kind of makes one of Japan's biggest cultural landmarks a massive blur. And that's not even getting into all of the historical, tradionalist things, which many of Japan's senior citizens are fighting to protect. Oh, and the rest of them are in cheerleader squads.
The worst thing about it is that people who enjoy Japanese things, like manga and anime and all of that jazz, including jazz, tend to get pegged as odd or as worthless, ticking bombs who have no social life and probably still live at their parents'. And the people who vacation there or live there also tend to get pegged as such, though this is rather rare.
sources: wikipedia, mountains of worthless knowledge that has atoned itself in this situation from documentaries, and some rather sardonic Japanese dictionaries/cultural guides that I own out of morbid curiosity.
In the end, Japan is an incredibly closed off culture that intends to stay that way, and probably will always be if not for the younger generations, and it's hard to tell where it's going from here, what with the lowering child birth rates, crashing economy and more prejudice against people who sit around all day playing visual novels. And of course, just like how our cultures show through our art, Japan's shows through its art too.
And what we get is a rather dark image of ambitionless salarymen and crushed hopes and dreams.
