"Anime characters are white"

It's interesting how the things you take for granted affect your worldview and the things you think about. I always go through culture shock as I travel between Taiwan and the United States - I've done this many times now, but I always learn something new about myself and the world when I do so.

One of the first things I notice in Taiwan (aside from the humidity and heat) is the fact that people here generally look like me! Quite obviously, that isn't always the case. I spent most of my childhood in the American Midwest, which is according to my completely unscientific estimates, maybe 5% East Asian, so I grew up in majority white culture, aside from the Chinese church we attended. You can imagine what a shock it was when my family first moved to Taiwan in 1999, to live in a society where you don't necessarily stand out, at least in terms of physical appearance. I got used to it after awhile. People still stop and stare at my brother and I when we start having conversations with each other in English (we always did, not to "show off" or whatever), though when I speak to friends in Mandarin while in the States this doesn't seem to happen as much. My guess is that it's because I lived in Ann Arbor. Go to South Dakota and you'll get stares.

At any rate, expectations for what is considered "neutral" are shaped largely by society, and that's going to be my topic today.

Expectations and manga/anime style art! This is a subject dear to me because for a while (probably until sophomore year of college), one of my far-fetched career aspirations was to become a manga artist, in the Japanese-style. By that I mean unlike syndicated American comic strip artists where they have their works displayed in newspapers, in black and white six days of the week and full color on Sundays. by Japanese-style I mean the weekly (or monthly, depending on magazine) format, roughly 16-18 pages black and white at a time, with an occasional color splash cover. No need for a punchline every single day, but room to tell a story, though certainly highly sensitive to readership polls.

At one point (maybe high or school or so) I practiced drawing manga all the time. Now, good manga doesn't necessarily require excellent art, just that which helps to tell the story. It helps a lot if you're able to create a believable environment for your protagonists to work with, and so in that regard being able to draw good backgrounds and stuff like that is an important skill, but the majority of storytelling and emotions derived from your work comes from the characters. As such, much of my time practicing was spent drawing people over and over again.

Almost invariably, they were almost always "Asian". Here, I should probably stop and clarify something. I recognize how the term "Asia" can be problematic in many ways. When I said "Asian" in the first sentence of this paragraph I meant black hair, black eyes, the kind that you see generally in Mitsuru Adachi or Takehiko Inoue's works. (I chose these two artists because for the most part, the characters drawn by these two artists tend not to have "odd" hair colors or physical features) I might have said "East Asian" instead, perhaps encompassing Korea, Japan, China, Taiwan... but that would have its problem too. The assumption is that "Taiwanese people look like Steven Chen", which is *generally* true, but there are plenty of non-Han in Taiwan, just as there are ethnic minorities in Japan, and China, etc. Point being, when I use the term "Asian" here (or in general), I am generally referring to East Asian , majorities in those countries. Maybe I'm getting off track. Anyway, my characters tended to have a certain look, and to people looking at my hardwork, it would seem like I had a very hard time drawing people that I tried to portray as "white", or "black", or any other non "Asian" ethnicity. It's very true I had trouble drawing people with or without certain features.

Here's the interesting part - I didn't actually think of the characters I drew or designed as "Asian" per se. However, in Taiwan, unless I gave the drawn characters really obvious ethnic markers such as dark skin or afros, they would assume the characters were Asian, or even Taiwanese. Interestingly enough, in the States, many people assumed they were white. Kind of like people assumed the characters in Dragonball or The Last Airbender were white too, I think.

... dang, it took me this long to actually reach what I actually wanted to talk about today.

Let me backtrack. In order to draw convincing "black" characters, I had to depend primarily on skin and hair color to make my characters "look black". You see many artists do this - in Detective Conan, for example, it's *really* obvious when someone is supposed to look like a non-Japanese. Typically, they'll be white, with blonde hair and blue eyes.

Granted, Conan/Shinichi actually has blue eyes too, but he's obviously supposed to be Japanese, through the culture he's a part of, things he believes, the language he speaks (one could argue that this is simply because the author is Japanese, but many of his deduction tricks utilize kanji, unique to Japan), etc. It's pretty easy to tell what characters in Japanese manga are supposed to be "Japanese" and which characters aren't, regardless of their physical appearance, once you've read enough manga. You see this kind of thing in American comics as well. One of my favorite American comics, "The Boondocks" also relies heavily upon special external racial markers to identify its characters. Why? Because in most parts of the U.S., people of color are seen as "other" rather than default, so unless you mark them obviously in cartoon/stylized drawings, it's quite likely they'll be identified as "white" by the readership.

If you think about it, there isn't anything particularly "white" about anime characters' appearance. They've got big eyes? Granted, people of European descent *tend* to have larger eyes on average than East Asians, but NO ONE has eyes as large as say, Sailor Moon's. Maybe E.T. did. Yeah, you'll see more natural blondes in America than in Japan. Then again, you see characters with blue and green and purple hair etc. As such, it should be obvious that hair color in Japanese manga isn't based on reality. Tiny noses? In Asia, at least, white people are stereotyped as all possessing enormous noses. That's the opposite of the typical anime style. White skin? If you haven't noticed, most Japanese people actually have pretty pale skin, skin that could easily pass as "white", particularly in the black and white manga format.

"Default" is the key word of the day here.

Since a fair amount of Japanese have relatively pale skin and many (white) Americans have dark hair (at least, brown maybe, which can be pretty ambiguous particularly in black and white manga), the most recognizable distinguishing racial marker in a drawing would be slanted eyes. We see this a lot in WWII propaganda posters and on. Hell, we still see the slanted eyes feature, though at least they've gotten rid of the buck teeth.

At any rate though, without slanted eyes, Son Goku is missing a key racial marker (for many White Americans, at least). Now in Japan, this doesn't really matter, because characters are pretty much assumed to be Japanese unless clearly marked otherwise. Just like in America, comic book characters are assumed to be white unless their race is clearly marked otherwise. He's got huge eyes? Interesting story. Most Japanese manga features characters with large eyes - one of the most influential artists in the early Japanese manga industry, Tezuka Osamu, loved to use big eyes because it made it easier to show a character's internal feelings. Add some shading, reflection... even more versatile! Eventually, it pretty became an integral part of anime style. If Toriyama Akira (artist of Dragonball) had originally published in America, it's quite possible that he may have had to mark the race of his characters as people of color, if their ethnicity was deemed to be important to the story.

On an interesting side note, I grew up with many Chinese-language pictures books that were actually originally *Japanese*, but I didn't know that for a very long time, because the publishers took great care in editing out obvious references to Japan in the drawings, by removing hiragana from road signs, changing character's names, and so forth. "Doraemon" is a great example. It worked though, because many of us Asian kids identified with those characters anyway. I guess there's a grain of truth in the feeling that "all Asians look alike", though personally I think it's more of a "meh, close enough" kind of thing rather than anything grounded in reality. But I digress.

To White Americans, Japanese people (and Asians in general) have "slanted eyes". Of course, Asians generally don't think they have "slanted" eyes. Most White people don't think of themselves as "blond hair blue eyed big nosed gun loving cowboys" which is a rather common type of stereotype seen in Japanese anime. Starting to get the point?

To refer to the title of this post - it isn't that anime characters are white. Rather, they are *interpreted* as white, generally by white people. (Similarly, many Asians will interpret anime characters as Asian.) Why?

Because to them, white is the "default" human being.

Here's an example. If I draw a stick figure, most White Americans will assume it's a white man. That's because the stick figure is considered default. If I'm drawing a woman, then I have to add a dress or long hair. If that stick figure is supposed to be Black, then I need to darken the face, or maybe give it kinky hair. If that figure is supposed to be Asian, then I need to give it slanted eyes. And of course, Japan does something similar. If a character is not Japanese, then it needs to be obvious, and the image above from Detective Conan is a good example.

The other has to be marked! If not, then the "default" is assumed.

Now of course, this is why it gets interesting - people apply this everywhere, and Japanese drawings are no exception. But to Japanese manga artists, the default human being is Japanese! There's no need to make the characters look "obviously Japanese" by giving them slanted eyes or some other stereotypical racial marker. Just make the characters look like people, and the Japanese reader will assume they're Japanese, regardless of their physical appearance.

Where was I?

Uh...

My point is that characters' ethnicities are whatever they're intended to be, it doesn't matter what they look like externally. The context generally provides a more accurate framework. There are many characters in the anime "Suzumiya Haruhi" that have purple or orange hair or whatever. Why can I state with confidence that the story is set or at least based on Japan? The format of their high school, mostly. The way in which people interact with each other. The type of "club culture". Stuff like that. It's easily recognizable once you've lived in Japan for awhile, and that's why there's no need for the creator to make it visually obvious that the characters themselves are Japanese, or Japanese-inspired. They just are.

Some series are a bit more ambiguous, but I would argue that it's *not* because of character's physical appearance. In Naruto, our hero has yellow hair and blue eyes. I would argue though, that Naruto is actually *very* culturally Japanese. That's not to say that the story is set in Japan (as far as I know, there aren't any ninja villages. Then again even if there were, I wouldn't know about them anyway, because... well, they're NINJA villages, right?), but the cultural setting is clearly Japan, as opposed to say, Midwest Indiana. You don't really see the type of Ramen shop that Naruto loves to frequent in the States, but it's pretty easy to find that kind of place in Asia. Shikamaru plays Shogi, not chess or checkers. The explosive tags used as weapons are based on Japanese spirit/demon tradition - a Western equivalent would be garlic and wooden stakes. Hot springs? SO JAPANESE. Characters spewing blood from their noses when sexually aroused? Japanese. Emphasis on blood type? Not exclusively Japanese, but certainly a bigger deal in East Asia than in America. Hell, many people in the States don't even know what their blood type is. The swastika on Neji's forehead? Not inspired by its Nazi meaning, but rather its Buddhist symbolism. The concept of chakra?

... yeah, I could go on and on.

I don't actually have a point, now that I've said everything I want to say. Just that anime is fascinating, and careful discernment is crucial in identifying, labeling, and interpreting things.