Excellent essay by Matt Thorn (with a curtsy to Shati):
A key concept in semiotics is that of “markedness” and “unmarkedness,” elaborated by linguist Roman Jakobson in the 1930s. ((See On Language, by Roman Jakobson (edited by Linda R. Waugh and Monique Monville-Burston), Harvard University Press 1995.)) An “unmarked” category is one that is taken for granted, that is so obvious to both speaker and listener it needs no marking. A “marked” category, by contrast, is one that is seen as deviating from the norm, and therefore requires marking. Well-known examples in English are the words “man” and “woman.” “Man” has for a millennium meant both “human being” and “adult male human being.” The word “woman” comes from a compound meaning “wife-man,” and denotes the relationship of the signified to that “unmarked” category, “man.”
In the case of cartooning, of course, we are dealing with drawn representations rather than words, but the concept of “marked/unmarked” is every bit as salient. In the case of the U.S., and indeed the entire European-dominated world, the unmarked category in drawn representations would be the face of the European. The European face is, as it were, the default face. Draw a circle, add two dots for eyes and a line for a mouth, and you have, in the European sphere, a European face. (More specifically, you would have a male European face. The addition of eyelashes would make it female.) Non-Europeans, however, must be marked in drawn or painted representations, just as they commonly are in daily conversation (e.g., “I have this Black friend who…”). […]
It should come as no surprise, then, that Japanese readers should have no trouble accepting the stylized characters in manga, with their small jaws, all but nonexistent noses, and famously enormous eyes as “Japanese.” Unless the characters are clearly identified as foreign, Japanese readers see them as Japanese, and it would never occur to most readers that they might be otherwise, regardless of whether non-Japanese observers think the characters look Japanese or not.
This sentence stung me a little:
If an American of Asian descent wants to create a children’s book intended to build self-esteem among Asian American children and educate other children about Asian American experiences, she must first make sure the readers know that the characters represented are Asian, and so, consciously or not, she resorts to stereotyped signifiers that are easily recognizable, such as “slanted” eyes (an exaggerated representation of the epicanthic fold that is often, but not always, more pronounced in East Asians than in Europeans or Africans) or pitch black, straight hair (regardless of the fact that East Asian hair can range from near-black to reddish brown, and is often wavy or even frizzy).
I’m not of Asian decent, but I’ve hit this problem as well: because of the limits of my drawing ability, the only way I can draw recognizably Asian characters is by using slant-eyes and straight, shiny black hair (see this cartoon, for example). I’m a bit embarrassed by this, but I’d be more embarrassed if I were drawing a cartoon in which Asians never appear. (Or, more accurately, a cartoon in which characters my readers will identify as Asian never appear.)
Posted in Comics and cartooning, Race, racism, and related issues 
Being a formalist at heart, I’m not sure how one gets around this if one is drawing for an American audience. If one wants to portray a character as non-white, one must use signaling to show that character is non-white; if there is ambiguity, a reader will fill in the blanks with his or her own preconceptions. (This is also, of course, a problem for writers; if you’re writing for an American or European audience, a character is going to be seen as Caucasian until and unless you demonstrate a difference, whether by name or by description.)
Interestingly, I see stereotypical manga-style characters as Japanese unless it’s obviously indicated otherwise; this can lead me to mentally fill in a character as Japanese who’s actually supposed to be American. Of course, as a formalist, my interpretation is totally valid, so there.
The trouble is that you work with white paper. Try starting with brown paper.
I am the same here. I was surprised to learn that a character in Ouran High School Host Club was actually European, despite his blond hair and outlandish manners, I still assumed he was Japanese. Heck I’m used to see characters in manga with *natural* pink, blue, or green hair, so I’m not really surprised anymore.
Incidentally, I’m curious about the book pictured above the post. The character appearing promeminently on the left side, is the main character of the video Caramell Dansen – from which I have no idea where the clip originated (like, what anime).
The tendency to think of manga characters as white is just another symptom of our privilege. We say that this manga character can’t be Japanese because their hair is blonde, but take unrealistic US characters in stride. I don’t know that I’ve ever met a person with violet eyes, but they sure do seem to star in a lot of books I read! And as another commenter said: in a art style where hair holds amazing shapes and comes in a variety of wacky colors, it’s a bit silly to say that a manga character must be white because it doesn’t have dark hair.
As for eyes, if you actually look at people’s eyes, there really is very little difference in the apparent size of a “white” eye and an “asian” eye. As in everything, it appears there is more variation within each ethnic group than between them. I image googled “asian eyes” and on the very first page we can see an incredible variety of sizes and shapes. Just like white people. So why on earth shouldn’t Japanese artists exaggerate the size of eyes? Artists all over the world exaggerate various features. Huge breasts anyone? Incredibly long limbs? Long, thin necks? Slenderness? Also, not all manga have those huge watery doe-eyed characters anyway.
Count me another person who generally sees manga/anime characters as Japanese unless they’re marked otherwise. At one point a friend (who is white, but has lived in Japan) told me that I was wrong and that the distinctive features of manga/anime character drawing were how Japanese people saw white people.
As to the problem of characters either being stereotypically marked or getting defaulted to white-maleness, maybe one element of a solution would be to conspicuously mark characters who are supposed to be white and male, so at least you’re not reinforcing the problem by leaning on the assumptions about unmarked characters to fill in their identities (*cugh*xkcd*cough*).
In most anime I see, male characters are either nobodies (probably ignored most of the time – Gosunkugi from Ranma ½ for example) or Bishonen. Bishonen is a term meaning more or less “pretty boy” and seems to idealize androgynous beauty and bad-assness. See Sasuke (Naruto) and Sephiroth (FF7 franchise) for example.
So, in a way they are usually marked. They are either losers, potential love interests, or part of the support cast. If the hero of the show is male (Naruto), then it’s most likely a shonen manga. If the hero of the show is female (Sailor Moon), then it’s most likely a shojo manga. There are other distinctions between manga types, but first person perspective usually matters a lot to the target audience.
I know two animes who cross genre lines and aim at both shonen and shojo crowds:
Escaflowne (a 90s anime that had a powerful – if only in personality – tomboyish lead female character and mechas with bishonen, combining both genres).
Futari wa Pretty Cure, and its sequel (a 2000s anime that have two strong female leads, who, while being Magical Girls, still fight physically pretty often – it was aimed at 6-12 boys and girls, and apparently had good success with both).
In Mai HiME, one could say the marked people are the males of the cast, because the show has a huge focus on the main (all-female) cast. The main character (first person perspective) is also female. Even the love interests of the main character occupy a secondary role.
By the way Ampersand, I noticed you cross-posted to a new blog you created just recently (or at least this appears to be the only post so far on it).
I’m curious if your personal blog is to have a certain purpose regarding nature of comments or discussions.
Yes, other than the title character (who admittedly is stuck in a female body part-time), his father, his girlfriend’s father, and a whole bunch of my favorite villains, it’s hard to think of a single male character in Ranma 1/2.
I’m not that familiar with anime, but in manga, the idea that male characters are “marked” because “they are either losers, potential love interests, or part of the support cast” is simply ridiculous. There are literally thousands of manga with male protagonists. (And by the way, there’s nothing wrong with a protagonist being either a loser or a love interest.) I hadn’t gotten the impression that anime was very different; I’ll ask some friends of mine who are more expert on it.
I don’t think you understand what the o.p. meant by “marked.” Do you really think that in anime, a stick-figure is taken by the audience to be female until some context makes it male?
I’ve been planning the new blog for a couple of months, but this post is the test-run, just to make sure the gears all turn smoothly. It’ll be a place where polite right-wing and anti-feminist comments will be marginally more welcome than they are on “Alas.” I’ll post an official announcement sometime this month, after I finish setting up.
Er… I have no trouble thinking of male characters from Ranma 1/2, and I haven’t seen either the manga or the anime for 10 years. Who could forget poor directionally-challenged Ryouga, or batshit Kuno? Or the two bickering, meddling fathers who started the whole mess? Maybe this signals some internalized sexism on my part, but it’s the female characters I have trouble remembering in that manga. It’s shounen, yes, but it was still created by a woman, and there’s still a certain female sensibility in the manga’s focus on males that apparently resonated with me.
Schala, it may help if you look at manga rather than anime; anime tends to be targeted at the widest audience possible, so IMO it’s more “archetype-marked” (which is what you seem to be talking about) than the source manga usually is.
Ranma ½ is one I know in manga far better than I know in anime, having all 38 volumes translated in French (directly from Japanese, in France). I’ve watched only a few episodes of the anime. Ranma ½ is one of the favorites of transsexual women (I don’t know if it’s the same for transsexual men) because of the ‘perfectness’ of the switch, and eventual semi-acceptance of the ‘other side’ (at least for its benefits, if nothing else).
Ryoga is one of the main characters, as is Akane. Ranma too obviously, in both forms. That’s because they’re present in a lot of chapters (well Ryoga not as much, but he IS Ranma’s rival).
I consider Mousse, Shampoo, Cologne, Happosai, Soun, Kasumi, Nabiki, Genma, Kodachi Kuno, Kuno (male one), Ucchan (against a surname I think),Kuno Principal, Pantyhose Tarou, Herb, Mint, Gosunkugi, classmates at the Furinkan High, Minako teacher, Ranma’s mother (introduced pretty late) etc to be support characters. There’s also that immortal half Phoenix guy, and the source guide, and his daughter.
I probably missed some.
Combatants: Ranma, Ryoga, Mousse, Shampoo, Cologne, Happosai, Kodachi Kuno, Kuno, Ucchan, Kuno Principal, Pantyhose Tarou, Herb, Mint, that other one with Herb, immortal half Phoenix guy…and that guy who passes himself as Ranma once (with that robber technique).
Comic relief: Genma, Soun, Nabiki, Kasumi, Gosunkugi, classmates at school, Minako teacher (never serious after first encounter).
Unclassed: Ranma’s mother, source guide, source guide’s daughter, people you only see once, innocent bystanders to the insanity going on.
———-
What I’m saying is that they are not unmarked. Mousse becomes a duck, Ryoga becomes a piglet, the principal looks Hawaiian and has a tree growing on his head….Kuno siblings are insane, Genma is a coward who invented…techniques of cowardice, Soun is a bystander who coerces Ranma into ‘doing something’ or participates in comic relief (by getting huge demonic heads), Happosai is the biggest pervert on earth and is over 2 centuries old.
I can’t say the characters to me appear unmarked. Also notice my list of characters above, and how many are female. There’s a pretty big bunch.
I could also qualify female characters:
Akane is thought of as uncute by Ranma, and she doesn’t really do anything to alter that perception, being violent and overreacting to everything.
Kasumi is the angel of the Tendo family, and would probably be defended by all as an affront worst than killing any of the others, even for a minor bruise.
Nabiki is greed incarnate and does everything to make money, especially profiting from the insanity, and from Kuno’s stupidity (both of them).
Ranma’s mother (Nodoka) always carries that sheeted katana around with her, which scares the heck out of Ranma and Genma.
Ucchan has a huge spatula and cooks okonimyaki almost everywhere (you’d think a grill like that’d be pretty heavy). She also has a restaurant where characters usually meet to talk (by random chance apparently).
Cologne owns the Cat Café and is a sort of mentor to Ranma, unlike Happosai. She consistently helps him, even if reluctantly or by trials. She wants Shampoo to marry male-Ranma at all costs also, which can make her treacherous.
Shampoo works at the Cat Café, along with Mousse, and does the waittressing there. She has a habit of falling naked with Ranma in his bath (and since its hot, he’s in male form), very often a few seconds before Akane discovers them. She wanted originally to kill female-Ranma and marry male-Ranma, but when she learned they were one and the same, she dropped the ‘kill’ part, and schemes to coerce him to marry her, often with Cologne’s help.
Kodachi Kuno, the Black Rose of St-Ere…something college (girl only school), hates female Ranma and loves male Ranma (complete opposite of her brother). They never ever figure out they are one and the same, even when plainly told. She usually wanders around rooftops in a leotard and likes to spread black rose petals when she leaves somewhere. She is not a fair player and will (try to) use cheats to gain the upper hand, including poison.
There is that skater girl, whom only appears once in manga. She is paired with a guy in a sort of martial arts involving figure skating. She will name random objects (which she usually steals from someone or snatches under their nose), name it, and them try to cram it into the head of the resisting party (sometimes her partner) that she wants it. This happened to “P-Chan”, which is really Ryoga’s black pig form. She fights Ranma in both forms, first partnered with Akane, then with Ryoga.
The Minako teacher is a woman who looks rather childish normally and pretty small, but can gain some size when she absorbs energy, which is a technique she learned from Happosai as a child. She can attack when releasing that energy, through any circle. She usually misunderstands situation and ends up blaming Ranma.
Is that enough on female characters in Ranma ½? This is only from memory.
Does that ninja cross-dresser Konatsu count as male or female, given Konatsu seems to see hirself as female? This is unlike Tsubasa who likes cross-dressing for its own sake.
Schala,
I’m confused. At first you seemed to be shifting from racial markedness (which the article and conversation have been about) to archetypal markedness, and now you’re talking about gender. That’s fine, since gender has a power dynamic to consider too, but it’s hard to keep up. =)
I’m also going to agree with Ampersand here — I’m not sure you understand the point of the article, or maybe you’re just not clearly demonstrating what makes these characters marked (in the linguistic/cultural sense that Thorn has noted). It still seems to me that you’re talking about archetypes, rather than the marking that cultural power dynamics demands. You may have a point in that the Ranma characters who either aren’t cisgendered or defy gender norms of behavior are marked as buffoons, but it’s a comedy manga; all the characters are buffoons. So it’s not a good example. I don’t see that this is consistent across other manga/anime, either; in fact I see the opposite. I’ve often seen dark-skinned characters in anime turn out to be 100% Japanese, while (as Amp noted) the black-haired woman in the kimono might be Chinese-American (parodied beautifully in “Kill Bill”, IMO). And transgendered characters get treated as important/heroic in manga/anime far more than I see in Western animation. It’s gotten to the point that I now expect the transgendered character in a given series to be the pivotal character of the story, around whom all the most moral/existential questions will turn. (Which is problematic too — why can’t they just be there, like everybody else? Why do they have to be the answer to the big question?)
To answer your side question:
Because Japanese people are curious about it. While American people are just (in general) condemning of it. Japanese society is very patriarchal and hung up on gender roles. And though laws protecting transsexual people over there are not really out there yet, still people are fine with transsexual people who have rigid gender norms (so that screws over people in between). The Japanese argument is more based on conformism than religion. It doesn’t perceive it as a sin to transition. Most Japanese are Buddhists as well.
———–
As to your main argument:
I was responding to post #5 by Stentor with my two previous related posts.
About white-male unmarkedness.
I’m saying that if a character isn’t marked in an anime or manga, relative to gender, he or she”s bound to only appear once, or have abyssmal character development (be comic-relief and nothing more, with maybe 1 or 2 lines).
Like the innocent bystander people who are in the wrong place at the wrong time, or shots of civilians walking around their business normally – those are unmarked.
If you want extreme markedness, just watch Ouran High School Host Club. It’s a parody that goes to South Park lengths of humor (while remaining somewhat decent, as opposed to SP). There’s even female supremacist lesbian feminists in there, who want to “steal” the main character to have hir in their girl-only school (the main character, as is revealed in ep #1, is a female cross-dressed to appear as a cute male – and only the main cast knows that – said supremacists are just good with a girl-dar or something).
All characters are a parody of themselves. Heck, there’s a loli-shota 17 years old guy who looks 8, loves sweets and plushies…but can break you in two because he’s one of the top martial artists of Japan.
Only one of the characters looks distinctly Japanese – yet I consider all those characters to be Japanese, unless told otherwise (the King of the Host Club, is European, and emigrated in childhood – the Manager was in France when we first see her…and flies to Japan for pretty weird reasons).
All the characters except the main (and family) are filthy rich, and its a lot of what is parodied in the anime. Rich people who somehow want to learn about so-called “commoner” things, and it’s done in such a humorous way that it’s hard to object to.
It’s never said HOW rich they are. But it’s assumed by their means, and mansions, and having a couple of extra residences (each) that they’ve got at least a couple dozen millions, each.
Jesus, I feel stupid. I’ve wondered about this for years. I’ve even talked about it with Japanese acquaintances, and didn’t understand why some got mad. And I KNOW this shit about signifiers and backgrounding and whatnot …
Thank you, Ampersand (and Matt Thorn).
I find this an interesting topic (and I certainly never expected to end up at a blog discussing it via a Crooks and Liars link, even indirectly). I’m white and male myself, but what default “unmarked” race I perceive anime/manga characters as has far more to do with context than anything else.
For example, if the series obviously takes place in Japan, I will automatically assume any character is Japanese unless there’s a major reason to assume otherwise. Sometimes this is obvious (say, Boogiepop Phantom, in which all the characters look distinctively “real” from a Japanese perspective, with varying shades of dark hair), other times not nearly as (plenty of series have protagonists with green or pink hair that I still assume to be Japanese if it takes place in Japan; even more so if they have Japanese names).
Heck, there’s actually some marking necessary to point out that a character’s hair is supposed to be an unusual color if they’re Japanese; for example, the protagonist in GTO has dyed blonde hair, which needed to be noted for you to assume it wasn’t “just like that.” Same goes for the red hair of Yohko in Twelve Kingdoms; had they not specifically mentioned it was unnatural for a Japanese, you’d assume she just looked like that, and was nonetheless Japanese.
On the flip side are series that very clearly do NOT take place in Japan (or another obviously identifiable country); say, Cowboy Bebop, the recent anime-styled game Valkyria Chronicle, or non-real-world ones like Wings of Honneamise or Alllison and Lilia. The first of the three I might well assume a character with non-dark hair wasn’t asian unless the name denoted otherwise, since it takes place in a very definitely racially mixed setting, and we can also assume that the characters are not actually speaking Japanese (that’s of course often required, just as we can assume that in many US-made films the characters aren’t actually supposed to be speaking English).
Valkyria Story takes place in a sort of alternate Europe, so I would further very specifically assume none of the characters are asian unless explicitly noted otherwise, since there’s no reason for an asian to be in that location and time period.
The third category is the tough one; Allison and Lillia is very European-looking, and based on the vaguely Greek-like writing system and French-sounding names, I would assume the setting to be European, and as such that the characters are probably European unless denoted otherwise. The blondes from Soux Beil, for example, one would presume look somewhat like natural blondes from Earth, despite no requirement otherwise.
Honneamise is the best example I can think of for something with no point of reference; the setting is clearly nowhere familiar, and the culture has very distinctive aspects of both Japanese and European cultures. Since the written language offers no hints, you’re left pretty much assuming whatever you want; if they “look” white to you, then I suppose they might as well be. If not, no reason they can’t be.
In a way, it’s not really important; the only point is that they look familiar, whatever that means to you, such that the world appears “real” to you from your perspective.
Interesting stuff, though, however you approach it.
I’ve noticed a similar issue with gay characters and Jewish characters, particularly the former. It’s next to impossible to have a character be gay without (accidentally or otherwise) calling attention to it in a way that makes it seem important even when it isn’t; even when it’s noted idiomatically in passing it sounds like the hammer being drawn back on Chekhov’s gun.
I grew up watching Americanized anime (Robotech, Sabre Riders and the Star Sherrifs, etc) so I got used to thinking of the anime characters as being racially white. My mind sticks to that convention in cases where the anime is not noticably framed in Japanese culture – so in most military or fantasy settings my mind sticks in “white”, but most domestic settings I think Japanese. As soon as non black/red hair comes in, I think white. Evangelion is a notable case, since the character Ritsuko was white in my mind, because of her blond hair… but of course, in the flashbacks she hasn’t bleached it so it’s dark, and she has an obviously Japanese name, so I’m obviously wrong, but it’s hard to get over that first impression.
Part of the problem is that they don’t use any variation in skin colour other than Ganguro girls and black folks – Asians and Europeans are drawn in the same shade of pale in most anime… which seems strange when the setting is multicultural.
Question: Is Japan one of those cultures where pasty is sexy? Could that be a reason for the fact that Asian characters and white characters get the same skin tone?
Noir takes place in France/Spain/Italy with very few exceptions. Only the nicknamed Kirika Yuumura seems to be Japanese (her alleged fake name, and looks). All others allegedly have past histories in Europe, and are currently in Europe on top. It cannot be known for the 3rd assassin named Chloe, because few details of her past are revealed. Mireille Bouquet seems obvious to me – especially as she says (and we see that) she was part of a mafia family involved with Sicily as neighbors, even as a child.
I think Japan is one of the only cultures putting so much emphasis on cuteness, so it may be sexyness, or cuteness…or none of those.
In manga and anime: Unless the theme is yaoi or yuri, or sometimes, even if it is, it is implicit that Japanese culture vows almost a cult to conformity, including gender roles. While homosociality is tolerated, even encouraged, homosexuality is extremely shunned on.
It’s relative, and of course not uniform, but basically yes. Pale skin has been generally considered attractive in Japan for a very long time (I cite both the exaggeration of makeup on geisha and less blunt forms of idealized beauty in description and depiction since long before Tezuka established the anime style).
There are of course ganguro and other exceptions in standards of beauty, and despite its comparitive uniformity Japan has a fair amount of internal racial diversity when it comes to skin tone, but on average “pale equals pretty.” This is I’m quite sure one of the reasons that the average anime character is quite pale in absolute terms.
On a more direct note, I find it a bit amusing that at one point my wife (who’s Japanese) and I (a very pale white guy of mostly northern european heritage) were comparing skin tones, and she commented “I guess when you really look at it Japanese people are kind of yellow.” I also know Japanese people who are sensitive about how dark (relatively) their skin is.
Nonsequitor, but I do find it mildly amusing that in some cases Chinese characters in anime/manga are portrayed in every bit as much of an exaggerated stereotype as in western-produced media. Many are not, of course, and in some cases you have both in the same series–say, the Spring Guide guy in Ranma 1/2, who is a walking stereotype, compared to Shampoo, who is only half of a walking stereotype–visually she looks more or less the same as the other characters. Elsewhere there’s, say, several characters in 3×3 Eyes, who are more reasonable depictions (Hayashibara Megumi even manages a relatively believable accent for Pai, rather than the exaggerations of the characters in Ranma 1/2).
This could probably be blamed on a lot of things, but at least one would be the same sort of “marking”–all else being equal, you need to add something distinctive before it’s clear a character is Chinese when you have nothing else to rely on.
For those of you who are confused by why the dark-skinned characters in anime still turn out to be Japanese, it’s because Japan(especially Tokyo) has a population of Japanese-born Brazilians. They started migrating there after World War II, working cheap to help rebuild the war-torn cities, and a lot of them just stayed. At the same time, a lot of Japanese people wound up moving to Brazil and staying. I believe Brazil has the highest population of Japanese people outside of Japan, easily dwarfing the U.S.
I think Neil Gaiman worked around this reasonably well in Anansi Boys; he only signifies the race of characters when they’re white, because it differentiates them from the protagonists. There are other cues as well–some of them are West Indian; some of them are related to Anansi–but they’re much more subtle than “and he was a black guy”.
Also, TV Tropes has this one kinda covered. The trope wherein anime and manga characters are drawn as “westernized” is mukokuseki, previously “Caucasian Asian”.
Yes, there is even a word, irojiro written with the kanji for “color” and “white” that frequently appears in a description of how attractive some character is.
The character pictured twice with the yellow hair ribbon is Suzumiya Haruhi from the show The Melancholy of Suzumiya Haruhi. It is very popular, but I gave up on it almost immediately because they have a major character who seems to exist for no reason but to be sexually harassed all the time, plus the disparity of eye-size by gender bugs me.
In my experience (and I watch and read way, way too much of this stuff) this is very true about series targeted at younger audiences. But as the audience gets older, the protagonist is just as likely to be an attractive member of the opposite sex. This is particularly apparent when I read manga magazines for girls of various ages. In, say, Ciao, the protagonists are all little girls (or at least, I can’t recall an exception). In Hana to Yume, they are mostly girls but there is the occasional boy. In Wings, Avarus, or G Fantasy there are both male and female protagonists and I would have to go count them to say which is dominant. In young boys’ comics Shounen Sunday or Shounen Jump, I can’t recall a female protagonist (well, except Yako from Majin Tantei Nougami Neuro, which is a whole new can of worms). I don’t read really male-only audience comics for older people, but I read some fairly any-gender-audience (which defaults to male-audience as far as where you find them in the bookstore and probably also who the editors think of as their audience, particularly since they seem to have split all the more female-audience comics out of Blade into a separate, new magazine) geeky fantasy type comics and they also have a mix of cute cute girls and spiky-haired boys as protagonists. I wouldn’t rely on a female protagonist as an indicator that a series is geared to a female audience, especially if she is surrounded by other attractive girls.
Schala, the magazine cover drawing is of the titular character from “The Melancholy of Suzumiya Haruhi”, probably the purest example of Genki Girl in existence.
It’s still usually true.
Futari wa Pretty Cure is essentially a mahou shojo that they tried to make a bit more tomboy to appeal more to boys, by removing the combat-by-proxy-only element present in say, Sailor Moon, where no one really fights physically (even Jupiter never does as a Sailot Scout) and making both ally and enemy character (but mostly ally) likely to really get “hit for real”. Although it also has this “like nothing ever happened” trope, that the ‘decor’ of the battle will shift back to its before-state immediately after the vilain is defeated, even if buildings were outright destroyed.
Although I certainly can recognize the appeal of that…I can hardly see what a boy would think positively of the extremely girly derived merchandise (oversized pink bracelet anyone?). Personally, I found it weird that one of the character fought into what is more or less a lolita fashion dress (being an adept myself), but I liked it regardless of the unrealisticness of the thing.
Mai HiME’s anime, as different from the manga, is based on the story of more than a dozen girls and women, with a few male characters thrown in. Said male characters have absolutely no power (save for one who is an antagonist-in-disguise and a right-hand man of said antagonist). Takumi, the main character’s brother, is very feminine, weak due to a heart disease from childhood, and can’t participate in combat as other than victim. Tatewaki Uichi (not sure I pronounce it right) is a love interest of the main character whom she denies having any interest in. He is worried about the state of things, and eventually, her (when he knows she is involved), but can’t do a thing except put them in more danger.
13 female characters have “super powers”, innately gained for some reasons unexplained in the anime (the how, not the why). Their ways of approaching conflicts, and of fighting, differ a lot. The main character feeling numb over the surrounding events, one character using her powers in revenge for a bad childhood, robbing men after promising them sex, one taking a Power Rangers like approach to fighting efficiently and in teams and another taking a “I will use your power better for your own sake, you are not worthy” character. What starts of as comedic, becomes quickly dramatic at half the length of the anime.
What sets the tone for the drama is the quote from Nagi: “If you fight, you will have to put what’s most important to you on the line.” and his later correction: “What you put on the line isn’t your life. It’s the life of the one whom you care about the most.”
Another shojo, whom I also only know as anime, is Princess Tutu (and well, ballet is not conveyed as good on paper anyways I think). It uses well-known ballet songs, is a mahou shojo with a single female hero, and is heavily dramatic. It has comedic undertones…but sometimes one wonders who designed the sadistic female classmate of the main character (who is overjoyed at anything bad happening to her, even trying to worsen things), or the main antagonist, an author, thought to be dead, who makes stories he writes come to life (incidentally, he was killed because people feared his power). Said author is also quite sadistic, but with the actual power and foresight to make his predictions come true. What starts off as a children’s story quickly becomes complex enough for an adult interested in drama to be drawn in.
Naruto however is quite evidently a shonen manga. Most of its central characters, including the main one, are male. Most of the female ones are comparatively weak (save Tsunade who is not weak at the least) and are stereotypically put in as medics (RPG healer anyone?). Kabuto, a medic himself, is a rebuttal since he is mostly seen using his powers offensively. Even most of the antagonists are male. From Orochimaru to all of Akatsuki’s main members. The only character who can be said to evade this trope is male, but doesn’t look or sound male at all (voiced by a female voice actor although being 15 – and with a definite feminine tone, unlike Naruto’s voice actor who uses a masculine one – although Naruto was 12). This character is Haku, and dies off fairly early in the series. Fanfics sometimes “save” this character.
One of Pain’s 6 bodies is female, but Pain himself is obviously male. Naruto’s father (whom he still doesn’t know the identity of…after 430 chapters) is important, his wife, not much at all. Off the combatant main cast who have parents, only one (Kiba’s mother, and sister) has females fighting directly.
I’m not sure if the older audience ones are actually seinnen or shonen (adult men or boy target audience).
Ah yes, an ambiguous one where the cast is about half and half might be Inuyasha. Written by Rumiko Takahashi, same author as Ranma ½, it has a male protagonist, but an important mixed cast of support characters, including Kaede, Kikyo, Kagome and Sango.
Although we mostly see things from Kagome’s point of view, it’s still considered a shonen.
from http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/PhenotypeStereotype
So apparently, it’s not unique to Americans.
Ironically, I have light brown hair, which compared to the rather dark hair colors of Japanese, would probably seem blonde. And have blue eyes. I’m not that tall, but compared to the average Japanese woman, I probably am significantly.
Just a fly-by — I’m looking at the clock and wincing right now — which I hope to come back to later, with the caveat that I haven’t yet read Thorn’s whole essay. On the manga reference, however:
There is a much broader range of character portrayals in manga than Thorn admits in the paragraph quoted, including a number of artists who habitually draw characters with strong-featured faces — prominent noses, wide mouths, and “normal” eyes — and a wide range of body types. I won’t presume to speculate on how these characters are perceived by Japanese readers or any other readers — my guess is that they fit them into their own frames of reference, which is what people tend to do.
And I don’t want to comment on how this relates to the idea of “markedness” until I’ve read Thorn’s piece.
Apologies if anyone has already made this point.
OK — having read Thorn’s essay, I do have some problems with it. I’d feel better about the whole thing if he had brought in some specific examples, because I can think of a number that undercut his argument. I’m not at all convinced that the idea of “marked” and “unmarked” characters works here, and while I don’t dispute the validity of the idea, I don’t think manga representations are a good example — I can easily come up with half a dozen artists whose typical character designs are very “Western,” including jutting jaws and prominent noses, and even a couple of examples in which “foreigners” are drawn within the same parameters as “Japanese.” Given that the single biggest influence in the early days of manga was Western comics, it’s no surprise that Western conventions in representation are still prominent, if no longer completely dominant. I don’t doubt for a moment that Japanese readers will read these characters as Japanese, because that’s the cultural context being presented. (I have to admit that for me as a Westerner, seeing a Caucasian-looking young man sitting in a school cafeteria eating udon is kind of fun.)
I think this goes back to what I said in my previous comment: people will automatically fit things into their own frames of reference unless cued otherwise — which, I suppose, is just another way of stating the “marking” idea, but I think it’s a substantially less political take on what is, after all, a perfectly normal psychological mechanism: you can assign meaning much more readily if you can provide a context from previous experiences. Sometimes you need cues to make the appropriate associations.
I’m another person that assumes characters are Japanese unless stated otherwise. One show that made it a bit easier to discern who was Japanese and who wasn’t was Sayonara Zetsubou Sensei – in which all of the Japanese characters had black hair, and the only character who was white, or had a “Western personality” was Kaere Kimura – the tall, blonde, large-breasted student who was the focus of pantyshots and was the one who shouted, “I’ll sue you!” at every moment. The other character in the series, Maria, was darker skinned, (I’m taking it that she was Brazilian-Japanese) but they also pushed that she was an illegal immigrant and often went to school without shoes and didn’t wear the red scarf on her uniform.
With a series like Sailormoon, what initially gave me the biggest issue up until recently was the ethnicity of Setsuna Meiou. I eventually figured out after a while that she was just a tanned Japanese woman, but for a long time, I was always curious what exactly she was.
I also say the it depends on the animator. Naoko Takeuchi’s characters are often mistaken as white largely because of how she draws, but by comparison, you have someone like Satoshi Kon where you can tell someone who is foriegn. An even better example is Blood+.
But yeah, generally, the Japanese will draw White Americans as being tall, having large noses, being blonde and generally being loud, obnoxious and clueless.
This may seem a bit out of left field, but what makes it for me is the color work and, sometimes more importantly, the voice acting. In these respects, I think your post is a bit accusatory, while at the same time, a bit short-sighted.
Allow me, if you will, a moment to elaborate…
When I watch anime with american voice acting and pale skin tones, well, duh, I’m going to think of them as white american, because you’ve established both the visual and auditory stereotypes. It’s not that I want them that way, or that I’m somehow programmed by culture to make the assumption, it’s a matter of the actual representation.
Example: when I watch Robotech, or nearly any Macross, I definitely think caucasians, because they’re rendered that way and and sound american.
(Save for Macross Zero, where it seemed like a mix of races and ethnicities, along with a mix of English and Japanese sounding character names.)
On the other hand, when I watch FLCL, oh, I definitely assume they’re Japanese (regardless of the language version).
Now, and this may strike someone as really odd, when I watch any anime with Japanese voice overs and subtitles, race and ethnicity go out the window -it’s completely ambiguous to me (unless I’m familiar with character names), I can’t even characterize them, unless, again, like with FLCL, the visual representation makes it fairly obvious.
“For those of you who are confused by why the dark-skinned characters in anime still turn out to be Japanese, it’s because Japan(especially Tokyo) has a population of Japanese-born Brazilians”
iirc, Okinawans are also sometimes depicted as dark-skinned/tanned (like Mutsumi’s family in the Love Hina manga).
“Naruto’s father (whom he still doesn’t know the identity of…after 430 chapters) is important, his wife, not much at all.”
We know very little about Kushina at the moment (and from what little we do know, she had a personality a lot like her son’s…), to be fair. Hell, we don’t even know if she’s alive or dead iirc…
Depends on your sample size. All the anime that plays in the daytime tends to be targeted at a relatively young audience (because if you watch anime as an adult you are a horrible geek) and a lot of the older-audience shows that are on in the middle of the night might be hard to pin as male or female audience oriented without benefit of knowing the audience of the magazine the original comic was published in. But this isn’t really the final word in deciding which category something should go in, although it will determine where you should look in a Japanese book store because it is all done by publisher. Sometimes things are published in magazines that don’t seem to fit. I think Princess Tutu was in a male-audience magazine, but the anime certainly feels like a shoujo anime to me. Tsubasa Reservoir Chronicle is published in Shounen Magazine, but it’s not a departure from Clamp’s usual shoujo-ness like Chobits was. Anyway, I am going to have to disagree that the gender of the protagonist is a good indicator of the gender of the audience across all age groups, because my impression (which is based on a wider sampling than average, I think I can say) is that while this is, as you say, “usually true” of comics aimed at a younger audience, it is much more like 50/50 in comics aimed at an older audience. If you average across all ages, it follows that it ought to be a same-gender protagonist more often than not, so I guess we are just quibbling over how often it has to be true to be “usually true.”
In any case, I am always suspicious of shows that have a predominantly female cast and are not magical girl shows like Sailor Moon, because most of them are heavy on male-oriented fan service. To be fair, a lot of these are harem shows and the actual protagonist is male, but it’s still a red flag. Mai-Hime does not strike me as a shoujo anime, but neither has what I’ve seen of it horrified me with its fanservice, so I don’t have any hard evidence to argue that it can’t be.
Inuyasha is indeed an example of a shounen series with a female protagonist.
That tendency of the female Naruto characters to be healers really bothered me when I found out that girl who is hanging out with Sasuke lately is also a healer. Gah! Sakura didn’t get out of the boys’ shadows until she became a healer, and Tsunade’s summoning power is slugs that heal people. That, and Shikamaru is a sexist jerk, which I totally skimmed over the first time I saw those scenes because it was before I read about feminism on the internet.
A footnote to Antonio’s comment above (#29), which is sort of implicit, although he doesn’t state it explicitly: when anime are dubbed or subtitled, they are dubbed or subtitled for a particular audience: if it’s dubbed in English with American voices, it’s quite obvious to me that the distributor/translators/whatever are targeting an American audience and want that audience to identify with the characters as much as possible. The same thing happens in manga in English translation, particularly when the characters use American slang. I can’t see this as other than deliberate.
I saw a couple of clips of an anime (and I’ve forgotten which one) with Japanese soundtrack, subtitled in Spanish. Any guesses on how the audience perceived the characters? And why? (Even I, who don’t understand Japanese and don’t read Spanish, had a very different take on the scenes than I think I would have if the titles had been in American English — and I might point out that the character representations were a very generalized Western type with no specific markers in features or skin tone noting ethnicity.)
For an illustration of just how aware both artists and translators are of these issues, check out Satoru Ishihara’s God of Dogs — takes place in America, includes a wide range of ethnic and racial types with some markers denoting race, but the main variations are, at least the way I’m reading them, very much individual within the types. The translation is full of American slang. And Ishihara does include one wry parody of a “typical” Japanese. (Interestingly enough, in a story involving a Chinese crime family, the Chinese characters lack the markers that Thorn mentions — they are differentiated much more by behavior and diction than by appearance.)
One thing that doesn’t seem to have been brought up here in regard to Thorn’s contentions on marking that I think puts a serious hole in his argument: go back and look at the work of Utamaro or any of the other great ukiyo-e woodcut artists of the 18th and 19th centuries:– pre-Meiji, in most cases — you’re going to find small mouths and eyes with a pronounced epicanthic fold set in oval faces, with pale skin tones. These are images created by Japanese artists for a Japanese audience: are these portrayals being marked as “different”? Not at all — they are a representation of a particular ideal of beauty. Given that, I wonder again how relevant Thorn’s example of “typical manga characters” is.
All of which is by way of saying that the more I think on it, the less compelling I find Thorn’s comments.
Reminds me of the issue going on with the Avatar live action movie cast. This subject keeps getting brought up…
Anyhoo, I think shati makes a nice statement with images here regarding representations …
Strangely: My eyes are not perfect circles
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I think its bs ^^ not the essay but the notion of it all.
why I think a lot of manga characters look ‘white’ is blue eyes and light hair. Asians are not born like that unless they are heavily mixed.
as for highly stylized/over simplified works I dont care for ethic identifying cause drawings like Haruhi is so simple. the point of the drawing is to represent ‘human’.
Styles like Ghost in the Shell or Family Complex gather from life and make their own ‘set’ of identifiers for different groups. Family Complex uses rounder faces and GinS has everyone with individual looks. neither one of them uses ‘blue eyes’ with ‘bright green hair’ for ‘asian’ so the drawings represent individuals not just “human”.
Im also guessing that the japanese have no problem of ‘white-looking’ character because that is their mood of beauty. They get surgery for the eyes, blacks straighten hair, others lighten their skin. Its why its ‘default’ and not noticed unless its by caucasian or those of dark skin cause you’ll notice as it being you (white) or completely not you (dark skin, not straight hair).
*I also think there is so much straight hair characters cause the artists dont know how to draw non straight hair. *
Wow. This is the most detailed and interesting analysis my essay has ever received. I’m not going to bother responding to particular criticisms or questions here, except to say that I wrote that essay for an audience that is apparently very different from this audience now in 2009. There was a great deal I wanted to say about the variety of drawing styles among artists, not to mention changes over time, but at the time I just wanted to address what I perceived as a very common misconception at the time, and I felt I needed to do it succinctly and in a way that would be easily understood by someone with only a cursory familiarity with manga–which, at the time, was just about everyone in the Anglophone world. This blog post and the many thoughtful, well-informed responses makes me think that that may no longer be the case. Reading this made me wonder if I should revise my essay for a more sophisticated audience, but I don’t think I will. There’s a date on the page, so I hope people will take it as a snapshot in time, and not as something necessarily timeless. As I’m always saying in my work and in my lectures, historical context is everything, and that goes for my own writing, as well. Besides, revising the essay for a more sophisticated audience would require a great deal of thought, and about ten times the current number of words, and it may be moot at this point. If the comments here are any indication, it sounds like most Anglophone manga fans would simply roll their eyes and dismiss as “clueless” someone who claimed today that “all manga characters look white.”
I will say this about some of the comments, though: before you boldly make such declarations as “Japanese are extremely conformist,” you should spend a few years living in the country and speaking the language. And, no, it doesn’t matter if you have a Japanese friend/acquaintance/partner who has said it his/herself. That’s one particular statement by one particular Japanese made in one particular context. Japanese are as diverse and individual as any other group of homo sapiens. The idea that Japanese are “conformist” is just as true, and as false, as the idea that Americans are “arrogant.” There may be a kernel of truth to the stereotype, but it is nonetheless a stereotype that is as misleading and dangerous as any stereotype.
Anyway, thanks to Ampersand for noting my essay, and thanks to all of you who read it, gave it serious thought, and contributed to this conversation. You’ve made my day.
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If you are talking about Tamaki, he is half-Japanese.
Actually, little boys are not part of the intended target for Pretty Cure at all.
The main target is girls 4-12 years old.
And there is secondary target, which is (otaku/nerds) males 20 years old and older…
Which makes sense, really, targetting little boys for a magical girls series is nearly useless, because even if they watch the show, 99% of them won’t ask their parents to buy them merchandise from the show. As for male otakus, they are often very fond of anime and manga targeted to little girls… They buy overpriced DVD sets.
Japanese anime series don’t make money the same way than in the US, where a show that has just high ratings can go on. In Japan, it is the sales of licensed merchandise which makes money. A succesfull show is not a show with a high audience but a show which sells a lot of merchandise.
So Pretty Cure does not cross genre crowds, it targets little girls and male otakus. Which is pretty standard for (normal) magical girl shows, except that here Toei is honest and they announced themselves they also add in elements to target male anime fans (euphemism for otaku)
As for Mai HiME, it’s typical bishoujo series. Many shows for otakus feature female characters as main characters, but that doesn’t mean the show targets females too. It’s because traditionally male otakus have been watching and reading manga and anime for girls, until bishoujo series started to appear. So male otaku culture is heavily influenced by works aimed to girls and is unsurprisingly very feminine, which can make works aimed at otaku men seem like they are aimed at girls to a non familiar person.
According to Takahashi, there were more female readers than males of Ranma 1/2. Shounen manga is ongoingly targetting female readers more and more since the 80’s, and becoming unisex manga, while shoujo stays more girls only. For example, Angelic Layer is technically a shounen manga, because it was published in a shounen magazine, but the series was conceived to attract more female readers to the magazine Shounen Ace.
Like I said before, little boys are not part of the Pretty Cure target audience. This series, or meta-series is really popular among small girls, so obviously they don’t think it’s tomboyish. The only targeted males are 20-35 years old otaku.
It has nothing to do with with Brazilians. Also, most of the Brazilians in Japan have at least partial Japanese ancestry. Japanese people can usually tan more easily and darker than white people. If you go to the beach in Japan, you can see Japanese surfer dudes, they can be really dark. Japanese can tan as dark as South-East Asians.
Only Westerners debate about whether a series should be considered shounen or shoujo. For Japanese people it is obvious. Shounen manga are published in shounen manga magazines. And shoujo manga are published in shoujo manga magazines. The imprints under which the collected volumes are published are also different, the shounen manga imprint from Shuueisha is called JUMP Comics, while shoujo manga are under Ribon Mascot Comics, or Margaret Comics. The covers have also specific designs, for example shoujo manga from Hakusensha have an easily recognizable cover design even from non shoujo manga readers.
In bookstores, there are separate shounen and shoujo aisles. So Japanese never wonder whether a manga is shounen or shoujo manga.
Shounen and shoujo is the targeted demographics, that’s all.
She is half-Japanese (why do you think she has a Japanese name otherwise? and she’s a parody of a famous British-Japanese model turned singer called Kimura Kaela).
That is not accurate, it depends on what kind of anime you watch. American anime is free from that stigma (anime refers to all animation regardless of country of origin in Japan) nobody will think you are otaku if you say you watched Wall-E. Also Ghibli films. There is one series that is even watched by old people called Sazae-san, and it is the longest animated series in the world with several thousands episodes. Daytime series like Detective Conan, Doraemon, Chibi Maruko-chan and Crayon Shin-Chan are not otaku series at all. But yes, if you watch anime that few people have heard of, they will think you are otaku.
The magazine in question was Champion RED from Akita Shoten I think. For a reverse example, there is Cowboy Bebop, the manga was published in a shoujo magazine (Asuka or G-Fantasy). However, both Princess Tutu and Cowboy Bebop are anime original, the manga is not the original work, so judging target audience of the anime from the manga is not appropriate.
At least in Aichi prefecture, Princess Tutu was aired in morning, which is not a usual timeslot for shows aimed at male otakus. I think simply they want a crossover audience. By putting a manga adaptation in a magazine for males, they want to get males to watch and buy DVD’s from the show, fearing that otherwise they might not look at the show because of the timeslot.
Recent magical girl anime Shugo Chara has unashamedly targeted male otakus wallets by being broadcast twice, once in daytime then a rerun during night.
I got the 6-12 boys/girls info from the official site. They probably don’t know their own target audience I guess. Or have very bad translators.
In general, I’m picky about anime. I’ll have it referred from someone to me. Then I’ll look it up. If it appeals to me, I might download it in torrents (I hate watching it on TV). As for mangas, there’s way too many overall, and way too few that are translated, so I stopped buying them 5 years ago.
I don’t really care about its target audience. I have Hime-chan no Ribon, and Kiddy Grade, they are very contrasting.
orz
I just checked JP wikipedia, actually Kimura Kaele is a
full Japanese, I got confused because of Kimura Kaela, she is kikokusijyo (returnee from abroad). It is not the first time that a full Japanese character is depicted in anime with a foreign appearance to signify that they are foreign culturally. Like Momoko in Ojyamajyo Doremi. Or half Japanese are drawn with blonde hair and blue eyes often like Tamaki in Ouran, but in real life half Japanese-half white children are very rarely blonde. It’s just a visual shorthand to signify foreigness, like a fiery character is often represented with red hair etc.No Japanese viewer would think Pretty Cure targets boys too. It sounds very strange, Pretty Cure has the image of being a little girls’ anime. I am not saying boys don’t watch Pretty Cure, there are quite a lot of boys who watched the series, at least the first, because of the action scenes like in sentai series, they just aren’t part of the target audience because they don’t buy the toys.
You say you don’t care about the target audience but you said you were confused how the pink Pretty Cure toys could appeal to boys, since you thought Pretty Cure aims at boys too. Well, it doesn’t.
There is no Pretty Cure marchandise targeted to boys, they are not the targeted audience, and Pretty Cure doesn’t target tomboys but average little girls. Everytime they release a Pretty Cure movie, the audience is more than 90% girls and their parents. I think the fight scenes are to make the series more distinctive and to try new things in the magical girl genre. Or maybe to appeal to the other, hidden target audience (male otakus). But little boys aren’t targeted.
Japanese anime for children make money by selling toys, it’s not like in the US where there are cartoons which run without being turned into merchandise as long as the ratings are OK, Japanese anime for children depends on selling character goods and merchandise, most of the revenue from Pretty Cure is toys.
The Card Commune and Pretty Commune were the n.1 and 2 bestsellers of all toys in 2004, selling respectively 600.000 and 200.000 units. These are not extra pocket money, Pretty Cure is a giant advertisement. Just Bandai made more than $100 million in toys, and it is just during the 1st year.
Also, Pretty Cure targets girls in kindergarten too. Maybe they thought Pretty Cure is too violent for foreign 4 years old, so that’s whey they say in the US the target is 6-12, but in Japan the core Pretty Cure girl audience is under 9 or 10. As for why they added boys I don’t know, but to a Japanese it seems strange.
I found a Japanese blog which talks about how overseas Toei labels the audience as 6-12 years old boys and girls, and the owner says it seems surprising from a Japanese viewpoint.
http://d.hatena.ne.jp/osito/20070106/p1
Here is an automatic translation.
Here is the exact target audiences:
core target: females 4-9 (kindergarten to lower elementary years)/19-30 males (students/general)
subtarget: 10-12 females (upper elementary years)/16-18 males (High School)・31-35 general males.
There is an official picture showing the target audiences here: http://pya.cc/pyaimg/pimg.php?imgid=6984
Well, I don’t buy toys, figurines etc because they came from a certain show, movie, anime what-have-you. And never did. So the marketing thingy doesn’t really touch me. I wouldn’t buy Pretty Cure merchandise because it’s probably not available here, and probably not as cute as Hello Kitty (or as recognizeable either).
I buy Hello Kitty stuff because its cute, primarily. Usually not a fan of brands, but if I’m to have one at all, it would be this one. Oh and Hello Kitty stuff has some uses, like bed sheets and covers, TVs, pens, books, bags, clothes-as-cute (but not outlandish), socks. Show-specific merchandise is usually limited to a few recognizeable items (the cards, bracelets and the cellphone-look-alike where Meeple and Mipple are kept mostly I bet).
Target audiences are fine and great for marketing departments, but they don’t determine who will watch/read and be interested in it. My demographic (intersex women who transition to female, but considered as male a good portion of life) isn’t necessarily keen on what is seen as childish stuff (cute, frilly, overly pink, sweet etc), but I am. I wouldn’t hold it against anyone for liking anime or mangas that targeted way outside their demographics.
I’m not a fan of Chobits, but I wouldn’t say a girl or woman was “bad” because she liked seinnen.
My demographic is never targeted anyways, not even by the pope, he says we don’t exist, simply.
Oh and as for my interest in Pretty Cure: only season 1 and 2, according to sites I visited, other seasons are just spin-offs of the same concept (I like the story continuity of the first 2).
I would say that even for a dubbed show with Americanized names, the clothes characters wear and the places they inhabit should strike viewers as not being something they’d run across. If you go solely on physical features, sure, http://zacefroniskira.com/
That said, physical differences tend to be highlighted in dialogue- particularly concerning Western ancestry or the appearance thereof. Yuki from Gravitation is often mistaken for white. The whole deal about Bleach’s Ichigo and his red hair… His classmates assume he’s a punk who dyes his hair but it’s actually natural and he doesn’t care to dye his hair black just to fit in. FAKE was silly throughout, but nowhere more so than when a character drawn with the same eyes as the other characters is described as obviously being half-Japanese because his eyes were smaller.
In Peach Girl, a girl who tanned easily was teased at school because people thought she went to tanning salons[and was thus a ‘playgirl’]
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I think a lot of people are being a slight bit disingenuous. Because I am familiar with Japanese anime I expect that the majority of anime or manga characters I see may indeed be Japanese, but I don’t know that for certain unless I read or watch the manga/anime. The style in which something is drawn is not in and of itself an indication of anything other than likely country of origin. Look at Otomo’s character designs for Akira, and his designs for Steamboy. One story takes place in Japan and the other in Britain, but the character designs are practically identical!
I can say that I have trained myself not to make assumptions about the race of characters in manga, as I have seen the manga style used to portray classic books such as Heidi or Daddy Long Legs, or tell stories that take place in non Japanese countries as in Rose of Versailles. It may sound at first listen, to appear super enlightened to say “I see anime characters as Japanese,” but that attitude is really just as biased an opinion as thinking that anime characters look white. You’ve all heard the axiom about “Assume”.
As I read manga and watch anime, I tend to perceived them as japanese. The skin color was yellowist rather than reddist. The eyes, cosmetic, fashion, hair style, act, design, sound fx also represent them as japanese even if they designed as western character.
eg:
1. Candy Candy
2. Slamdunk
3. Hokuto No Ken
4. Saint Seiya (greek mythology)
5. Hello Kitty
There maybe some people who watch anime which intended for international market. So it can be totally different when people look at character intended for international market eg:
1. Mimi Candy
http://youtu.be/SFPUUs9viYA
http://youtu.be/Ptp0y-pGNxc
2. Usavich
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uk_MGaCSRVQ
3. Mario Bros
http://youtu.be/qwlRXYSpOpw
4. Transformers (old cartoon)
http://youtu.be/fA-M0tLJjTU
http://youtu.be/SSgTns6iidE
So I think it’s all depends on the design and style. I don’t think people will interpret Candy Candy or Hello Kitty as white european people, don’t you?