Now I know I said I was going to do a new post on Long Distance Relationships, but as of now..I don't want to talk about my relationship struggles(its boring)...and wanted to focus on this instead(Being bold and bringing up controversial topics so early on..bad ass me,yeah!)
So I was browsing thru my tumblr, when a person I
follow and seriously thinking of de-following* ranted about how people complain about anime and when western viewers(actually POC) complain that there is not enough varierty of POC(Hispanics/Black/South Asian/SE Asian/ other East Asians) in anime its stupid because anime is not made for them and not all POC are dark.
Now she has a point(But POC is not about being dark-skinned..it just means not white, but it seems like she's saying dark ppl need to stfu). And Japanese people are POC too and can vary in the color spectrum(I have seen Japanese people dark as myself or even darker..SHOCKING!)I figure when a manga/anime artist creates an anime, they're doing it to make money in their home country of Japan and are pandering to their demographics from the humor to their etiquette
(FMA takes place in a fictional European setting but they can still be decked out for Japanese New Years. Totally pandering to their demographics ).
And even though random people of European and European American descent turn up in anime(
You can always find a random Mr.Smith or John, Rebecca,Sasha,
Annie, in an Anime, I guess it's okay to ignore that huh? uh huh uh huh?!?
Random Western Foreigner from Shinryaku!? Ika Musume(They do have this
black guy in it too apparently)
Western Otaku in Japan(Anime is Genshiken)
One of the female bakers from Team America...and Team America was Team white america (Yakitake Japan)
but this is my argument...
If a said anime/manga has scenes, arcs, that take place in America, why are POC missing or stereotyped?
So I asked my fiancé(who happens to be Japanese)
and for psychological research reasons is not the best source or resounding answer to go by, but he is from the same culture with limited contact of people from different backgrounds of life, and I needed someone's opinion who didn't grow up in a totally ethnic diverse country(which is still not a full answer to my question)
We were on the same page...we so COMPLETE EACH OTHER!! ...pshh
to which turned into a full debate that went alil something like this
So why don't they draw characters like
me, or Hispanic people?Asian/etc when they go to America?
"Lemme google it..Okay, here's some answers from the anime community in Japan"
"It's too much ink to shade in characters?"-
"If they can ink clothes they can ink someone's skin color!"
"They don't know a lot or any black person to draw them or give them a personality?"
"Yet they know a couple of Mr.Smiths and Becky's, so they can always have white people?!"
"Well how many black people have you seen when we were in Japan?"
"Its not about Anime that takes place in Japan, its about when the anime transports so and so character to America!! And where we lived, it was remote as hell, ofcourse there weren't many black girls, but we did see them! And we indeed see a lot of other ethnicities in our old town too! But when we were in Tokyo, there was more! We even saw more couples like us! But then again everyone thought I was Brazillian(and the Black Brazillian too)! So yeah, why no Brazillians then?!(*Mitchiko to Hatchin yeah!!) What happens to them! Look At Uchu kyoudai! we live in Houston, TX, Tell me, is this anime accurate of where we live!?"
This lead into a lil mini debate on what he would then tell our future children(
Give me 3 more years..when I'am emotionally and financially ready..2 years if I hit the lotto) if they asked the same question because they're going to grow up in a country when they're the minority, which still had him perplexed but then I had to go into detail some more and I guess let you as readers know my frustration.
Why do I care that anime doesn't have a lot of POC and if they do include someone of a different race, the default character is white?
Because........
Representation matters!! A LOT!
A lot of people like to believe little kids are just immune to racism/colorism and are so innocent to notice it. To an extent, kids are innocent, but they're not ignorant either. When I was 4 years old, I started to realize people looked different early on and was already exposed to racism shattering any innocence I was supposed to have and likewise to friends of mine. My mother did her best to make me feel like there was nothing wrong with my skin color and would always buy me black barbie dolls. I only had one white barbie doll growing up and that was Stacy. I think I did ask her one time if I could have a white barbie doll, but then she questioned why I didn't want the black Barbie doll and bragged up and down about how the black barbie doll was so much cooler.
Now growing up watching cartoons on tv, I did start to realize which character I identified as the most. A trip down memory lane, in the cartoon "Rainbowbrite"
I loved Rainbow and Stormy the most, but I was curious about Indigo just the same. In Beverly Hills Teens I was all over The main cast of girls, but was happy that
Shanelle(the only official black girl in it) was very independent,smart and brave. I also thought Bianca
was basically a light skinned black girl and I still believe she is. She was Creole like Beyoncé haha XD
In Princess gwenevere and the jewel riders
I liked Fallon the best (it helped since I was into Sailor Moon at the same time so I felt she was an extended Sailor Scout), and in Sky Dancers
I identified with Camille but also liked Jade (*Worth noting in the cartoon, S
lam was Caucasian but in the board game he was Asian and Camille was ambigulously white or hispanic..)Pirates of Dark Water
had nothing but brown skin characters so I was able to be Tula, Ioz sister,etc. X-men, I cared for all the girls(except Jean greay) But I was able to rotate between Storm or Jubilee (I didn't realize she was Asian till later, once again I thought she was light skinned..lol) . Captain Planet there was Gaia but I always shipped Gi and Kwame and had a crush on Mati. And ofcourse with Disney I was happy to see princesses in general, but I did like Pocahanatas, Jasmine, Esmerelda, the most because the women were dark like me (and in turn I wanted my hair to be long and straight like there's, and that ended up horribly when I walked around with a fake ponytail and had these girls heckle me saying my real hair could never be that long and pretty).
Now when Sailor Moon rolled around, I didn't care, I just thought all of the Sailor Scouts were amazing since it was a new concept I never saw before. And when I started getting into cosplay, I felt I could only do the dark skinned characters..(not that we should be restricted to, but a part of me felt I should have more characters to choose from).
So enough of I touting my America's racial issues, and go back to Japan who pretty much doesn't owe me a damn thing (my future unborn hellions are a different story) and why I am side-eyeing them as well. True, during my stay in Japan, I did not see a lot of black people. Other East Asians/South asians/ and SE asians is a diff story, but yeah..black people..not so much. In my company there was only two black people..myself, and my ex-coworker who was a male. Everyone else was white, 1 pnay and 1 south asian. Sadly I could only stay in Japan for a year, but I did my best to let my students know about diversity since they are the future (
God help us all...). Now don't feed me that bull that Japan doesn't know a thing about POC. Because they do..or better yet, they know every stereotypical thing that has been misspoken about us, and in turn some people for some unspoken but known reason can't use the gears in their brain to think we can be more than what we have been portrayed in the media to be which is sad. You see, history shows that Black people have been in Japan long long long..before the internet. In the 16th century Oda Nobunaga met a black man before named Yasufe(who could probably be my kin)
*This is not an actual picture of Yasuke, this is from a play depicting him, who was given the Japanese name
Yasuke. Funny background story, he thought Yasuke was dirty and quickly told him to strip so he can bathe him clean. Yasuke being in Japan was all due to slavery no less, but none the less, the Black man who was called Yasuke ended up becoming the first foreign Samurai.
So suck that Tom Cruise, the first foreign samurai was BLACK! But not good enough for Hollywood ofcourse . Oda Nobunaga was very fond of Yasuke, and Yasuke fought for the Nobunaga family till their fall. There was a couple of us roaming around back in the day due to the Portuguese trading with Japan so, not willingly according to history due to wonderful circumstances, I know some mating must've happened with the locals and ofcourse if we had no one to intermingle with in the same race aspect, we faded out.
And back in 1935, its still kind a half truth half rumor, but apparently Japan wanted to form an allegiance with Ethiopia because unlike other well known non-European countries, it did not fall to European rule and Japan saw that as a good thing both admirably as well as economically and wanted to do this through means of marriage between the royalties of both countries, but that fell when Italy decided to kick some butt over there. So when WWII was over, America had fully introduced their racial views to Japan, and here we are with myself writing this blog post..<-- This information was found in John Russell's book
"Japan's Minorities: The Illusion of Homogeneity"
Now for some odd reason, and not just America, but it's like...the whole entertainment industry lately has been getting lazy,sloppy, and ignorant in terms of how they Portray POC as well as including them in their stories.
Back in the late 60s-80s, Anime would feature POC. Very Rarely..but they did. Examples that come to mind was
Jun hono from Mazinger Z * She was half black/half Japanese, but I read somewhere in the manga she was half white but they changed it for the anime.
Lisa Vanette and Daley Wong from Bubble Gum Crisis(black for Lisa and Chinese for Daley)
Claudia Grant from Robotech/Macross (black)
Naria,Mukara and Luna and Kento's uncle(workers + family who I can't find a pic of) from Yoroiden Samurai Troopers/Ronin Warriors ( For Mukara and Naria they were from some made up tribe in South Africa. Ima say they're from the same tribe as Storm cause Mukara looked like he could be Ororo's cousin. As for Luna, I once read she was black but then someone said she was south east Asian, so let's leave her ambiguosly brown and ima say she was Dominican). Then Kento who was Japanese and Chinese, they showed a brief screen shot of NYC chinatown and his uncle..who yeah..looked comically Asian.
In Cooking Papa there was a chapter when they went to New York, Harlem, and ate at Sylvia's resturant.
Ushiro and Tora showed people of Chinese and Indian descent(if I give away the characters I would spoil the story for you guys)
I know I could be missing plenty more, but all of these characters had a personality that was believeable. But just the same,
there were characters who were stereotypical casted.
Sadly I think this will be the only time in my life when I see an anime take place in my father's land of Trinidad&Tobago(its from 1960s astro boy...and they did get the partying trini right..but their excuseable use of calypso in the bgm was crap..AND THE CACTUS!? WHAT KINDA MAS COSTUME IS A CACTUS!? Tezuka had issues back in the day..*THe natives of trinidad only show up for a couple of seconds if one wants to see )
Now there has been some famous anime titles that has featured some POC as well, in fact the heroine in Nadia:Secret of Blue Water happens to be a POC and I am in no way dismissing them(Even if sometimes we're demons hence the dark skin element..)
but once again, my main argument that I want to remind everyone in this blog is that I'am focusing on when we go to
America
I guess my main pissed off moment to see regression was in Uchuu kyoudai.
Its all about Nasa and two brothers wanting to fulfill their dream to become astronauts, and this anime hit close home to me since I now live in Houston, TX and was excited to see more POC, but alas....out of the whole damn series
this is as POC(minus the Japanese cast)
as one can get in America. Now I know the creator started making his work in 2008 but I doubht Nasa is lacking in the POC department...
But I guess the author made sure not to make Ozzy, the dude who cuts the grass at Nasa, hispanic, and the robber not to be black...so I give him that much.
Going back to the internet source of Japanese fans on anime boards,
A response I read was how they thought a mangaka would be afraid of getting shut down by the 黒人差別をなくす会(Society to Eliminate Jim Crow)
and looking at it, they shut down Little Sambo productions in Japan (that doesn't explain how I saw this big ass billboard of
Sambo's cousins in Tokyo via 2011), and other anime characters who were protested about.
Another arguement that came up was that there were not enough Black people in Japan for a mangaka to know how to make them act, and of course stereotypical crap about how we're not good looking enough to draw + dark skin is not sexy or appealing to the mas fans of anime
and one poster brought up how even Disney doesn't have a lot of black princesses..UH HUH DISNEY!. But this still didn't answer my question fully on why we just dissappear when one goes to America?
Who knows, maybe my question was already answered in the various threads I just read, the Jim Crow anti society from Osaka..but then I remembered
UFUMUFU was up in lights when I went to Tokyo 
and stuff like this still happens in anime!! So who exactly are they afraid of again?
But there have been shining moments in Anime to show that once again, this is a lazy cop out.
In
Eyeshield 21, there is a black football player named Panther and it is shown in the manga how his coach is racist towards him.
In
IGPX the main female lead is an American Hispanic (Dominican/Puerto Rican?Who knows but she's latin American) Named Elizabeth Ricardo! She is awesome first of all, a total tomboy who kicks ass but is also a model + racer. She has so much personality!!
And in this anime called Motto Ojamajo Doremi
*Episode 14, there's a character named Beth who is African American from Nyc (
FINALLY! You guys dunno how many times I had to remind people in Japan or ppl were shocked I was an Black girl from Nyc)and her friend calls out this other girl for making a comment on how she could be friends with a black girl because she assumed Beth was a white girl
There are video game characters I am leaving out, however it is also worth noting in the Sakura Wars game series, it takes place in NYC and has two people of color being a Sagitta Weinberg from Harlem and Rikaritta Aries from Mexico. Also one of the villians appears to be King Tut...and he's not crippled and looking inbred, woo hoo! And in this game "No more heroes" one of the female fighters is black named Shinobu Jackson, and this story takes place in California.
This is out of the Anime/Manga genre in regards of Japan, but I also wanted to bring up two titles if manhwa(south korean manga) that I commend greatly for being different.
This manhwa was called Soul to Seoul.
It took place in New York City and was told in a typical Korean Soap Drama way(the storyline was...meh, its like twilight meets gangsters), but it did have POC in it! Even one of the leads was half black/Korean and I have to say he was the sanest, well grounded one of them all compared to the other lead(who was half white half korean who was pretty messed up...)Granted the main black cast in the story were gangsters(but so was everyone, the S.Koreans/The Chinese/ all gangsters) but in that regard, no one was stereotyped outside of the gangster light. In fact the artist was realistic in portraying how many foreigners feel that if you go into a black neighborhood, you might be in trouble, but she also did not ignore NYC East Asian community which I felt was very good and is often overlooked.
Another manhwa I just started reading, recommended from tumblr, also stars a West African woman as well as other POC and I have to say it is very surreal called Westwood Vibrato.
She covers other cultures as well, like the holocaust in Nazi Germany, and I actually felt relieved when I saw her depictions of other African ethnicities in her story. All the "It's hard to draw black people, they're features are too hard, they all look the same
They do in the people who created Young Justice, I give them that much lol I was confused at first with Rocket and Bumblebee"
Dissappeared when I saw this scene. I saw women who looked like my mom and aunts(yes the 3 black women haha my mother would be the one with the most hair)
, men who looks like my uncles,father, and people before hand, and a lil girl who I could identify with. It also showed me that the author was determined to do her homework, and study the people she wanted to represent in her story.
Was it hard? Well google is one's friend, so I want to say no...
They're personalities was relatable..you didn't have to meet someone black to see that they're human just like everybody else.
So when I see new anime/manga like Uchuu Kyoudai, Beezlebub, Kuroko no Basket(if you google WNBA...im sorry but as cool as it is that woman played a part in teaching one of the characters basketball, POC outnumber the random White Hispanic Alexander Garcia they decided to us) etc going to America and POC just magically disappear or we're just background character, than we have an issue! True, I can lay the blame on Western Media on a whole and I really do! I know how it started..and for that I want America first and foremost to fix their POC representation on tv...but then I'am stuck cause I don't know what to do..
Make my own Manga? hah...
Should I write to some Japanese authors who have America in their works and lack of POC? Who knows,
Rick Riordan gladly listened when his audience complained about not having POC in his popular series *Percy Jackson and the Olympians, and in return added more of a diverse cast in his new works. And
Bryan Lee O'Malley of Scot Pilgrim had an excellent response and even called out himself when asked why there was not many POC in his comic book, which once again brings me to my orginal rant. Representation matters...
If we don't see ourselves in the media,
it can and
does have an effect on someone in a negative way.
My fiance grew up in a country where Japanese people were always on Tv, they had so many sides let it be evil or strong and in turn, could think positively about themselves. When I see some comments in these forums about how black people are ugly, I wonder if they know if they were to go to America they would be seen as one dimensional beings as well...something no one should have to feel.
So in conclusion..
If there is no use for people of color in a mangaka's story, then yes we won't be in it, especially if they don't take place in foreign country (We all know we can have hobbits but no POC in fantasy *and shut up about Harry Potter and Star Wars). But if it does, I see no excuse for why we can not be included,
why we can not be shown the same amount of decency and detail as other characters? And most of all..
PLEASE SHOW WE EXIST WHEN YOU GO TO AMERICA/BRITAIN/FRANCE/CANADA...and I guess Australia..!!!
And I would like to thank these diectors, manga/manhwa artists on this blog for including POC in their anime and showing them in
a positive light(or any light at all, but enough light to not make me want to rip my hair out...and that goes for Soul to Seoul)
Kim Jea-eun R.I.P. (Soul to Seoul)
Masashi Kisimoto (Naruto)
Atsuhi Okubo (Soul Eater: Takes place in America..so there are POC!)
Eiichiro Oda (One Piece..
supposedly Usopp is black)
Daisuke Chiba ( Lemon Angel Project)
Masahiko Otsuka ( Petite Princess Yucie)
Youn In-wan (WestWood Vibroto)
Kentaro Miura (Berserk)
Sayo Yamamoto(Michiko to Hat-chin)
Crying Freeman(...Yes..and No!)
Kenichi Sonoda (Gunsmith cats once again in America..and only 1 POC but its the lead and its a female)
Hideako Anno(Nadia: Secret of Blue water)
Yu Watase(Alice 19th the American is Black)
Terraformers( Yu Sasuga..once again Yes and No..)
Ai Yazawa (Gokinjo Monotogari, it was brief but when a certain character goes to England they do show POC)
Princess Jellyfish(the main herorine*technically hero* is bi-racial White & Japanese and they do have south asian characters later on)
There's more I'am possibly leaving out...but..for now this is what I was able to google.
Japanese website comments page 1
*If you guys want you can google this アニメ+黒人キャラ
and see the comments I gathered for my entry.
List of Dark skinned characters in anime, I think it needs an update
Posts
Pa*n*do*ra
*looks like the website is gone, but if you click the stop button in time, you can sorta read it?
You guys just saw a comic artist work evolve in the span of 10 years!!
So to anyone reading this blog, please give these web-comics a go! =)
They deserve it!
In other news, I did start drawing again since I was bit by the creative bug
