as anyone who has followed me from @pxkemonmaster-moved to here to any of my other blogs know, i have almost always been a loud voice against whitewashing the POKéMON characters who are from the regions kantō, jōto, hōen, and shin’ō / kanto, johto, hoenn, and sinnoh, as these four regions are based on japan. ( from now on, the kantō region will refer to the one in japan, while the kanto region will refer to the one in the games ).
i know that the english dub of these four regions are more prevalent than the original japanese episodes, and since the english dub westernised a lot about the four regions, especially the kanto region ( jelly filled doughnuts instead of onigiri, anyone ? ), it can be confusing to anyone who grew up with any of the dubs to see how strong of an influence that the japanese region of kantō and chūbu has on the kanto region in the POKéMON games and anime. ( and i’m specifically focusing on the kanto region because some of the strongest japanese influence can be found there, especially in the anime ).
WARNING, IMAGE HEAVY. I didn’t put this under a read-more because this is pretty important to me and this also needs to be read and understood. I would like to preface this that while I am half-asian, I am not half-japanese, so there might be some things that are pretty obvious to a japanese person in regards to the influence japan has on the POKéMON world that i might have missed.
here is the wiki page that lists all of the real world places each of the regions are based on. the kanto region wiki page also has a paragraph of information based on the influence the kantō region has on the kanto region, as shown below:
the first wiki page even has places in the kantō region compared to places in the kanto region.
this is mainly based around the games, but in the anime, the kantō region is also shown to have a strong influence on the kanto region.
in the regions based on japan, we can see that japanese is the language of these regions:
this is in episode nine, and it has the japanese katakana for a few POKéMON on the cup.
this is from episode six, and the second image is the infamous note of “gary was here, ash is a loser!” english dub translation. ( which is pretty much the same as it is in japanese ). the text from these signs, as we can see, are purely japanese. compare these signs to later on in the anime:
starting from unova onward, the POKéMON anime creators started to use a made-up language for any of their writing needs. perhaps it was easier for them to make up a language than to use english for unova, and then later on french for kalos, but, either way, the language warps from a language we’re familiar with in the real world ( japanese for the regions based on japan ) to made-up languages. ( more information here ).
the food is also japanese, as anyone who is fond of the old dub should know, from takeshi’s “jelly filled doughnuts” that are actually onigiri to ōkido-hakase’s apparent miso soup ( from episode 13 ) and yakisoba, the cuisine seems to be japanese in the original anime.
next comes the pretty famous episode 20, which has a festival. the booths and stalls are pretty typical for a japanese festival, as shown below:
and the plot is essentially given to us by a shintō priest wearing a jōe in front of a shrine.
there’s even o-fuda that they use to try to make sure that the spirit cannot enter the shrine.
after the plot is finished, we’re then shown the festival, which seems to be pretty traditional, with the taiko kojiro strikes to the yukata the characters wear to even the dance.
even if the characters’ hair colours or eye colours aren’t “natural” for a japanese person and more “natural” for a western person, over the years, other anime creators have given their characters unnatural coloured eyes and hair and yet still retained the fact that they are japanese, same as with the POKéMON anime ( as shown by the above blue haired woman wearing the yukata and joy-san ).
all in all, no matter what kind of dub you grew up with, the characters from the original series and those four regions ( even if i did focus mainly on the kanto region here ) are japanese and it is never okay to whitewash either by lightening skin in art/photoediting ( i’ve seen gifsets where iris’s, takeshi’s, and even satoshi’s skin are super pale ) or by treating them as white through the use of faceclaims or any other erasure.
if you’ve made it to the end, thanks for making it this far ! i hope you’ve learnt something from reading this post.
most images on this post came from here, and others came from google.
This is a really good post!!
Oh, but, slight correction! The use of made-up languages started before BW!, but was never standardized. You’ll see corrupted kana in DP and a lot of untranslatable pseudo-text the fans lovingly dubbed Tajirian after Satoshi Tajiri, before the BW! anime started using ciphers which fans have since cracked and can even translate scenes.
(Advanced Generation, Houen/Hoenn based on Kyushu)
(Diamond & Pearl, Shinnou/Sinnoh based on Hokkaido)
(Best Wishes!, Isshu/Unova based on New York in the United States of America – use of simple substitution ciphers, listed here)
It’s not just about avoiding English, that’s not the point, as it began from the later Japanese regions! It most likely started when 4Kids kept erasing Japanese text. But it didn’t quite work out, because they’d even sometimes erase made-up languages for… looking… too Japanese, I guess???
The animators were trying to make the rest of the anime look more “universal” AKA push all the visibly Japanese out of it [except when it comes to festivals, ghost stories, and all those things where they’d only write them the way they’re used to], so it’s easier to localize to every culture/language that airs it.
Which would be kinda sweet in an equal sort of way, if a bit sad too because they were so visibly Japanese before, BUT the Pokemon dub in 4Kids era was pretty aggressive about other places redubbing from it and not changing too much from it, ironically… so other places still got a show that felt culturally different, but just. Americanized instead of the original Japanese. Unfortunate. Especially when it meant the puns would be untranslatable English ones instead of Japanese ones, like… what’s the point…
BUT YEAH.
Censorship and cultural changes were so rampant in 4Kids’ era that the original used to self-censor for a long time and try its hardest to conform–oooor they’d do something very, very joke-y like “it’s a bar, but like, it’s totally milk, look, we even wrote it in English for you, so nothing questionable here, no sirree.”
After TPCi showed it wasn’t so averse to Japanese culture (likely because, y’know, anime made it big in the States, so it’d make more sense to cash in on it, now…), they started slowly letting Japanese back in.
(XY, Kalos based on France!)
Thanks for the correction! :D I’m reblogging this to update the post if that’s okay! ^^
