Japanese Characters Are Not Trying to Look Western

[Fintan Monaghan]

The New Face of Japanese Games

The facial features of many anime characters can appear ethnically Western, a process that is spreading to Japanese-made videogame plots and content. Fintan Monaghan does not believe that this is a healthy development.

Read Full Article

 

[wooty]

Hmmmm, interesting read there.

In terms of the anime though, I generally dont notice any, shall we say, ethnic neutrality. If they live in Japan, speak Japanese and generally do Japanese things, I just assume they're Japanese. Anime is easily identifyable as a Japanese medium to me, even though the characters may look western, you instantly know that it hails from Japan and is probably intended that way.

The western style of character design is easily identifiable too, its either biiiiig muscular guys who never shut the hell up, biiiiig muscular guys in power armour who never shut the hell up or biiiiig muscular guys who.........dont say a word, but whos companions never shut the hell up.

 

[swytchblayd]

>.>
<.<

I've always found it interesting (ever since I found out myself) with people who claim that Japanese manga/anime is distinctly Japanese, for the reasons stated in this article. As well, people who say that they hate manga/anime because of the style make me giggle; does that mean they hate Disney? Most of the time, they don't - I've even heard a few claim that Disney was influenced by Japanese manga/anime It only makes sense for them to do so, having been a large influence in the manners themselves. Not that I like everything about it, but still...

However, I think it's more interesting when a Japanese game has actual Japanese characters in it, such as the Fatal Frame games. Makes for more perspective; projecting your race, self, and whatnot onto characters is nice and all, but sometimes one just wishes to be someone else. One thing I still don't get though is the white kids in the Persona games.....seriously, what the hell?! If they're native-born in Japan, going to a Japanese school, they should be Japanese, not white kids! Just saying... it doesn't make sense to me :\

Awyhow, the article was definitely an interesting study on Japan's gaming industry as a whole. I thought Dead Rising was made by an American company... until I saw Capcom's label on it. Still, if you removed that, you could probably convince me and about a million other people that it was made by someone in the US or Europe. Likewise for the Resident Evil games, if the translations were so god-awful in the early games XDD

 

[Fensfield]

Well it's nice to see someone take a mature, considered perspective on the subject. In my opinion, bang on the money - thanks for the nice read.

 

[Dectilon]

Hmmmm, interesting read there.

In terms of the anime though, I generally dont notice any, shall we say, ethnic neutrality. If they live in Japan, speak Japanese and generally do Japanese things, I just assume they're Japanese. Anime is easily identifiable as a Japanese medium to me, even though the characters may look western, you instantly know that it hails from Japan and is probably intended that way.

To be fair, if a character is supposed to be foreign in for example an anime the differences are usually tiny. If a character is chinese they have an accent and say "aiiia" a lot. If they're american they have blond hair etc.

It's usually not that hard to identify japanese games intended to look western though. The simplest things to look for are strange speech patterns and that special brand of sexism that's prevalent throughout japanese culture as a whole.

It's hard to imagine how a Final Fantasy game might be improved by characters conspicuously eating hamburgers and playing basketball

That'd be Final Fantasy 8, if you replace hamburgers with hotdogs. Hot dogs was probably originally lunch bread or something, but there is basketball in there (in possibly the dumbest scene in the game no less).

 

[p3t3r]

good read i always kinda wondered why the anime characters looked like they weren't Asian and i figured people just made them out to be whatever race they saw the most

 

[AboveUp]

Capcom trying for an American look isn't really anything new though. I've always felt it was something they did in order to make their games feel cool, especially in Japan. A good example of their earlier attempts at doing something overly American is Resident Evil. That horrible voice acting in the game? Also present in the Japanese version. The game is subtitled there.

Even Mega Man had something overly American to it in Japan. Back there it's still called Rock Man. With his partner being named Roll you've got a duo called Rock and Roll. Not to mention that his original rival was called Blues instead of Proto Man. I'm not entirely sure why it got changed to Mega here. Possibly to get that same effect of coolness in the westernized version where we don't look at Rock n Roll as an exotic feature. That and it had robots, so it has to be big and Mega somehow.

Capcom's Americanized ways might have something to do with their earlier Disney titles as well. They made all the big Disney titles for the 8 and 16 bit generations. For some reason most Japanese people don't know about those titles at all, which just feels odd. A lot of the more Americanized games by Japanese companies don't get that much recognition there. I know a lot of Japanese people in real life, and none of them had even heard of the Ducktales game. Or even worse, Nintendo's own Metroid series.

 

[wooty]

Hmmmm, interesting read there.

In terms of the anime though, I generally dont notice any, shall we say, ethnic neutrality. If they live in Japan, speak Japanese and generally do Japanese things, I just assume they're Japanese. Anime is easily identifiable as a Japanese medium to me, even though the characters may look western, you instantly know that it hails from Japan and is probably intended that way.

To be fair, if a character is supposed to be foreign in for example an anime the differences are usually tiny. If a character is chinese they have an accent and say "aiiia" a lot. If they're american they have blond hair etc.

I'd have to agree with you to an extent on this, speech and accent are easy to pick up I guess, such as Kagura in Gintama having a distinct "aru" in her speech.

But I guess the hair colour is a bit of a grey area, while you and the article mentions blonde hair for american/western characters, there can be exception to the rules, such as Ms Kuroi in Lucky Star. But taking that into account, I guess the often mad selction of hair colours in anime could also be a contributing factor into making anime hard to regionalise aswell. Just look at C2 in Code Geass, her back story would have us believe that she's European. But bright green hair........

 

[MrPop]

That was a very interesting read. Took me a long time to get through it since I had to look up what a lot of the terms mean and that 'Charisma Man' link was interesting too.

All I know is that I like to watch anime (watching Code Geass: Lelouch of the Rebellion at the mo) and that nobody looks attractive when they dress up as an anime character with bright green hair.

 

[TWEWER]

Because most of us Westerners have spiky blue hair and saucer plate eyes.

 

[HentMas]

this reminds me a lot of an episode of pokemon that had the "rice balls" replaced with "sandwiches", and i find it funny how it works

here in MX, we dont care all that much about "stereotypes" or "etnic background", but i feel thats because we have our own, and looking at other backgrounds is easy, in U.S of A you cant say the same, unless you are native american, your background is in another country, and so the differences of culture are more noticeable because you are surrounded by them, if you are in an italian community, chances are you have clashed with "greek, afrian, asian, hispanic, misc." cultures, and the last thing you want is to be reminded how different each culture is against each other, wich in turn makes the companies unclear as to what to "portray" in their video games

but recently things are different because you are getting history, the differences in culture are "washing" out in the mix of races, when you stand in the middle of a city and look around to see only "Americans" i think that issue will be gone, and THEN video games will be "politically correct", because no one would care what the main guy/girl looks like.

and just to point it out, we here in MX dont feel left out because there are no hispanic characters in every game, after all, we understand we are playing a video game from the United States, where such kind of "race" difference is obviously passed in liew of better story writhing and such, and the voice acting of an "hispanic american" has always being TERRIBLE, so please, don´t do us any favors, haha.

 

[BloodSquirrel]

There is no clear reason as to why this process occurs.

Yes, there is.

Early manga and anime was heavily influenced by Disney, which was THE big name in animation when Japan's industry was just getting started. Yes, the famous 'anime look' is actually western in origin. That art style has evolved, but many elements (particularly the eyes) are still persistent.

 

[Dectilon]

Hell, Sakura is Japanese AND a NINJA. And just look at her hair

I thought they came from make-believe land.

 

[twm1709]

Thing is characters in japanese games may or may not look anime-like but they BEHAVE japanese most of the time. Combine that with the normally awkward way they depict western behaviour and you've got some strange (for the rest of the world) game characters and developments too.

 

[Remzer]

Very very interesting read.

And I went back to nostalgia land with that bit about Alex Kidd in Miracle World. Didn't know Jenkan (R-P-S) was such a cultural phenomenon in Japan...

On Alex Kidd: The second "edition" of Sega Master Systems (the smaller one) had Alex Kidd as a default game in the console, that you could play without a cartridge, much like the snail-maze game from the first "edition". In the American version, Alex Kidd's trademark riceball was replaced with a hamburger... HAH! I c wut u did thar...

 

[Giftmacher]

On the subject of skin shades, are we sure even "white" characters are an aspect of westernisation? I'm pretty sure I've seen a fair few older Japanese works of art where the people depicted are quite pale. So for all we know this could be a long running cultural aesthetic. There must be more research, that you haven't mentioned, on this sort of art history...

Gift.

 

[KEM10]

It's hard to imagine how a Final Fantasy game might be improved by characters conspicuously eating hamburgers and playing basketball

That'd be Final Fantasy 8, if you replace hamburgers with hotdogs. Hot dogs was probably originally lunch bread or something, but there is basketball in there (in possibly the dumbest scene in the game no less).

I was thinking that exact same thing when I read it. But there were worse scenes in VIII than the basketball one.