September 26, 2010
Japanese don’t draw anime characters to be white
I've written before about Japanese anime, or animation, as well as the genre's characters and their large eyes, and wondered if they symbolize a desire to look more Caucasian.
But this brief guest post by Julian Abagond on the blog Sociological Images titled Why Do the Japanese Draw Themselves As White? that offers very interesting food for thought.
Abagond makes the case that Americans (white people) think Japanese draw anime and manga characters to look Caucasian, but that's a Western construct, and that "Americans" (he conflates nationality with ethnicity, a common slip in race/culture conversations, even by well-intentioned people and often by Asians) see everything in terms of white unless there are stereotypical symbols that identify a character as another ethnicity.
A reader named Robin, who is Japanese American and born in Iowa and bakes apple pies, sent me this email:
"I was wincing yesterday when Martha Stewart asked an asian american woman in the audience (Sumi somethingorother, who baked an apple pie for Martha's contest) "Where are you from?" and the woman said with no accent "Oh I'm from here...New York City.". Martha continued with the (stereo)typical line of questioning something like 'where are you really from because if you are from Asia it's unusual to make an apple pie'. I don't have it verbatim but it was painful. Just another "What ARE you?" type of conversation. I really don't think Martha is a bigot but as she is the standard bearer of suburban white women I think it was totally disappointing for her to go down that path as if it were totally fine to question someone with Asian features about where they really come from."
She sent a link to