#mukokuseki

[peoplediewhentheykilled]

Because in anime the only people who are explicitly not Japanese have blond hair and blue eyes and even then there are exceptions.

[shinynewtoysyndrome]

I mean they're Egyptian, right? Why are they white? And for that matter, aren't we supposed to be Asian? Why are we white?

Seto Kaiba on race lifting, Yu-Gi-Oh The Abridged Series

[mukokuseki]

Je sais que tu as oublié mon nom.... Velingara, Sénégal 2014.

Obviously I was introduced to everyone in the house when I arrived, This is Mas’ youngest sister. Her older sister (of 4 in total) told me about 2 days into my visit that she knew I’d forgotten her name, which was true. I had been waiting for someone else to casually drop it in a conversation so I could pretend I’d remembered it, but faced with that full frontal accusation I had to come clean. I still can’t remember her name though, or this girl here...or so many people I met throughout Sénégal. I’m actually shit-scared I’ll go back one day and face a never ending stream of people who’s names I’ve forgotten. 

[enthusiasun]

more info on mukokuseki here (the title is “why do the japanese draw themselves as white” but the question that gets answered is “why do you think that the people japanese people are drawing are white”

[vachetteschounes]

[silezukuk]

It may surprise many readers to hear [...] that often, from a Japanese perspective, a given product, [...] being perceived as Japanese has historically been considered a liability, and Japanese marketing types have worked hard to disguise the Japanese-ness of their products. [...] Iwabuchi Koichi refers to any lingering cultural specificity in consumer products as “cultural odor,” and for many Japanese companies over the years, the ideal has always been to erase any lingering specificity and thus render the product “odor free” and ready for international markets. He adds: “[...] The characters of Japanese animation and computer games for the most part do not look ‘Japanese.’ Such non-Japanese-ness is called mukokuseki, literally meaning ‘something or someone lacking any nationality,’ but also implying the erasure of racial or ethnic characteristics or a context, which does not imprint a particular culture or country with these features.” [...]

Ba Zi (Nicholas Theisen) ***

"For Iwabuchi [Koichi], the prevalence of mukokuseki is a troubling trend. 'The propensity of Japanese animators to make their products appear non-Japanese,' he argues in an essay on the 'Japanese-ness' of Pokemon, 'is evidence that a Western-dominated cultural hierarchy continues to govern transnational cultural flows.'" [...] [Yet] what makes mukokuseki most interesting as a phenomenon is, in fact, not that it demonstrates Western cultural hierarchy, but that it manages, through the erasure of Japanese racial characteristics, to produce a cultural product that is stamped all the more as intrinsically Japanese. The racially empty style of Japanese anime, even when produced by non-Japanese artists, reads as Japanese—and this despite whatever market localization occurs in its translation for Western distribution. Western children, in other words, get the Japaneseness of mukokuseki. Perhaps academic scholars of Japanese pop culture should follow their lead."

Gregory Steirer