Is a Dumb Question thread ok?

missesdash said:

I think "some Japanese people are mixed" goes without saying. Obviously if they're mixed with a more Aryan ethnicity they can have the features of that ethnicity. But I meant ethnically Japanese.

Your friend isn't an exception to the rule because her "white" features don't come from her Japanese heritage. Someone who is half Japanese and half black can have dark brown skin. The possibilities are endless when people mix.

But then they're mixed.

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Yes, but I just figured I'd throw it in the air. Like I said, I can't remember what all she is. I'd have to ask her again. Though, I will admit, I did misread into what you said a bit, so I edited my post, but I should've taken it out instead.

As someone who has lived in Japan and been friends with many Japanese people, I can say that there is a very common idea that Western features are more beautiful than Japanese features. I've had many, many people tell me that Americans are more beautiful. They actively try to imitate Western features--to the point that they buy items that are designed to give eyes the extra fold that Americans have.

Mannequins in stores are often white, white people are often used in advertisements, etc. It's similar to the study mentioned before in which minority children called the white dolls prettier. Many Japanese do consider the non-Asian look to be prettier, thus setting up an unattainable ideal of beauty. It's sad, but it's also one of the reasons why anime and manga characters often have Western looking features.

I'm not trying to step on toes here, but this is something I've often discussed with my Japanese friends, and I'm repeating what they've told me.

Maybe part of it is the 'exotic' thing? It is fun to see something very different. I usually find a great deal of beauty due to differences. I love unusual things.

Of course, this is also an obvious problem when it comes to races. Skin color is not nearly the best indicator of a good match between people. Finding the 'Other' fascinating automatically is just as shallow as finding them bad, when you get right down to it. We're all just people. Nobody is more fascinating than the next based on looks alone.

Looks-wise, is it a bad idea? I think so. I'm a pale white girl who would do better embracing that look than wishing I could be so tan, or darker, or more exotic. Wanting to look exotic discounts the amazing beauty right there at home. The grass is always greener, though, eh?

kaitie said:

As someone who has lived in Japan and been friends with many Japanese people, I can say that there is a very common idea that Western features are more beautiful than Japanese features. I've had many, many people tell me that Americans are more beautiful. They actively try to imitate Western features--to the point that they buy items that are designed to give eyes the extra fold that Americans have.

Mannequins in stores are often white, white people are often used in advertisements, etc. It's similar to the study mentioned before in which minority children called the white dolls prettier. Many Japanese do consider the non-Asian look to be prettier, thus setting up an unattainable ideal of beauty. It's sad, but it's also one of the reasons why anime and manga characters often have Western looking features.

I'm not trying to step on toes here, but this is something I've often discussed with my Japanese friends, and I'm repeating what they've told me.

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Interesting, I've never lived in Japan, but I'm repeating what I've heard from Japanese and other people living in Japan on anime and manga forums I frequent.

I know there is certainly a strong subculture among the youth that is rather obsessed with everything American and trying to mirror American fashions, styles, and standards of beauty, but I kind of consider that a separate phenomenon.

*shrug*

And I still don't really buy the idea that the characters have Western features. Certainly there is more variation in hair color and eye color than you would typically see, but Westerners tend to be drawn with different facial features.

kaitie said:

As someone who has lived in Japan and been friends with many Japanese people, I can say that there is a very common idea that Western features are more beautiful than Japanese features. I've had many, many people tell me that Americans are more beautiful. They actively try to imitate Western features--to the point that they buy items that are designed to give eyes the extra fold that Americans have.

Mannequins in stores are often white, white people are often used in advertisements, etc. It's similar to the study mentioned before in which minority children called the white dolls prettier. Many Japanese do consider the non-Asian look to be prettier, thus setting up an unattainable ideal of beauty. It's sad, but it's also one of the reasons why anime and manga characters often have Western looking features.

I'm not trying to step on toes here, but this is something I've often discussed with my Japanese friends, and I'm repeating what they've told me.

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I've heard this as well. I have a rather "plain" friend who lived in Japan and she was totally shocked at how many people stopped to comment on her looks. Even little girls told her she was pretty. She admitted it was mostly because she has blue eyes, fair skin and is very tall. But I've met tons of white guys who exotify Asian girls. My Asian friends constantly complain about "yellow fever" lol.

Yeah, a lot of the exotification stuff goes very strongly both ways.

My male friends tend to think Asian women are the most beautiful. My Japanese friends were always shocked to hear it.

As for anime characters having distinctively (meaning not just eye/hair color) American looks, unless the artist is someone like Naoki Urasawa I don't usually see it myself. I remember thinking of how odd the style was the first time I saw it.

mirandashell said:

Ahhhh.... I see her as white, from that one photo.

But I guess it depends on the mix of races!

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I'll admit that I've had difficultly with this more than once.

I think it's hard sometimes to really tell with some people what ethnic origins they have, and honestly, sometimes physical appearance can be misleading.

mirandashell said:

You know how white people often see MCs as white people by default. Do people of colour do the same? Or is your default your own colour? Or do you not have a default?

I'm interested in how this works.

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I grew up in a country where whites were a tiny minority, and yet I grew up reading books with all-white characters, and this remains the default for me if the setting is USA or Europe.

In other parts of the world, I assume the characters look like the majority of people in that country, ie, in Africa, they are by default black, in India by default South Asian, in China Chinese, etc. Pretty obvious and I guess we all do this.

The difficult comes if you are writing about a country like Guyana, which is a total mixup of races. I read a novel set in Guyana, the only clue to a person's race, if I am not told, is their name. So a charcter named Krishna Narain is Indian, Jennifer Wong is Chinese, and so on. The trouble is that blacks have normal English names; but I would default a "Peter Clark" to black unless I was told he is white.

The society I grew up in was very very racist, and still is; and since in those days we all took for granted that "white was better" that was the attitude I grew up with and I accepted until into my teens. It caused in me very deep feelings of inferiority, which I still struggle with to a small extent, the differenc ebeing that I now immediately recognise it when it arises and can immediately correct myself.

There was a very blatant and unapologetic preference for "white" in my youth. People would congratulate a girl who "got" a white boyfriend, or the other way around. It was seen as a step upwards. Everybody compared their skin colour, their hair texture, their lip and nose size, trying to be white. That was quite normal behaviour. Totally cringeworthy! And the adults did not correct us; they felt the same way.

For a very long time as a child, I assumed that Africa was full of black people who lived in mud huts. This was a direct result of geography lessons, in which we were taught about a little boy called Bombo who lived in a mud hut in Africa. (We had such examples of kids from all over the world.)

When I was ten I was sent to boarding school in England. A group of us were collected from the station in a taxi, and we all introduced ourselves. There was a white girl called Angela Relton who said she was from Africa. My jaw dropped to the ground; I did not know that white people, too, lived in Africa!

kaitie said:

Many Japanese do consider the non-Asian look to be prettier, thus setting up an unattainable ideal of beauty. It's sad, but it's also one of the reasons why anime and manga characters often have Western looking features.
e.

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One of the biggest events in the Guyanese year was the Miss Guyana contest. Year after year, only white or Portuguese (Portuguese was not classed as white in Guyana) girls ever entered that contest, and so Miss Guyana was always white (or Portuguese). Even though both these groups were a very small minority.

The revolution came when an Indian girl won it; and then she went to Miss World and came third. I was about 14 at the time. And then, to boost the morale of girls of colour even more, that girl married Michael Caine; yes, THE Michael Caine. At that point the Miss Guyana contest became multiracial. And then we had a black Miss Guyana who came 15th in Miss World.

aruna said:

For a very long time as a child, I assumed that Africa was full of black people who lived in mud huts. This was a direct result of geography lessons, in which we were taught about a little boy called Bombo who lived in a mud hut in Africa. (We had such examples of kids from all over the world.)

When I was ten I was sent to boarding school in England. A group of us were collected from the station in a taxi, and we all introduced ourselves. There was a white girl called Angela Relton who said she was from Africa. My jaw dropped to the ground; I did not know that white people, too, lived in Africa!

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I think you've hit on a key point here, and that's how we are exposed, or not exposed as the case may be, to other cultures and races, especially as children.

For a lot of people the only exposure they have to, to use your example, African people, are Save the Children ads on TV, and books like the one you describe. If that is all we are exposed to about African people as children, then that is what we believe that ALL African people are like.

Same could be said for practially every race - growing up our only exposure to anyone from India were Bollywood movies on a Sunday morning. As a child India seemed a wonderfully exotic place, full of beautiful people and endless wealth. I had no concept of the extent of poverty in some areas until I was much older.

aruna said:

The revolution came when an Indian girl won it; and then she went to Miss World and came third. I was about 14 at the time. And then, to boost the morale of girls of colour even more, that girl married Michael Caine; yes, THE Michael Caine. At that point the Miss Guyana contest became multiracial. And then we had a black Miss Guyana who came 15th in Miss World.

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Shakira Caine! As a side note, he saw her in a coffee ad and became obsessed with finding her, so he tracked her down. They've been married forever too.

Yep -- formerly Shakira Baksch!

aruna said:

I grew up in a country where whites were a tiny minority, and yet I grew up reading books with all-white characters, and this remains the default for me if the setting is USA or Europe.

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I had a friend with a similar experience going to school in India (in what was definitely not a slum area) for a while. She said it was so strange to see Indian kids be assigned writing projects and have them all write about little white girls with names like Anna or Sarah or little white boys with names like Joseph and Timothy. No one wrote their assignments about Indian children. Almost all of their assigned reading was Euro-centric.

She's Indian herself, but had been raised abroad, and found this such a strange phenomenon because it would never have occurred to her not to use the names and places she was personally familiar with (as opposed to just book people/places) when doing those sorts of assignments. But the kids in that school didn't think stories could be written any other way; they'd never seen them.

Cyia said:

I had a friend with a similar experience going to school in India (in what was definitely not a slum area) for a while. She said it was so strange to see Indian kids be assigned writing projects and have them all write about little white girls with names like Anna or Sarah or little white boys with names like Joseph and Timothy. No one wrote their assignments about Indian children. Almost all of their assigned reading was Euro-centric.

She's Indian herself, but had been raised abroad, and found this such a strange phenomenon because it would never have occurred to her not to use the names and places she was personally familiar with (as opposed to just book people/places) when doing those sorts of assignments. But the kids in that school didn't think stories could be written any other way; they'd never seen them.

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That totally rings a bell -- that's the way it was. And the stories I read had daffodils and oak trees and the childtren in them ate stawberries and cream -- and none of us had any experience of these things.

When I started writing stories as an 8 year old, I too peopled my tales with white, blonde haired, blue eyed children who ate strawberries and cream for tea. I had never in my life eaten a fresh strawberry. But I could imagine one!!!

As weird as all this sounds, in retrospect I think it works to my advantage as a writer; because in the end it helped me to be able to feel and think like people outside my own culture. I can write white people very easily and naturally, whereas those who grow up thinking Eurocentric by default need helpful threads like this!

missesdash said:

Eh this video doesn't really address what I meant. Not all Asians look alike. But japanese people have much more homogeneous features than other, more mixed ethnic groups.

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Uh...

You know a lot of white people say exactly the same thing about black and Asian people. And a lot of Asian people say exactly the same thing about white and black people.

This happens whenever people are dealing with an ethnicity they haven't spent much time associating with: they tend to see them as being very homogeneous, not like "us."

When I was in Korea, I found that many Koreans think that white people pretty much all look alike. Foreigners get used to being compared to some random movie star (because those are the only white people a lot of Koreans have seen) who has a vaguely similar build and hair color.

kaitie said:

As someone who has lived in Japan and been friends with many Japanese people, I can say that there is a very common idea that Western features are more beautiful than Japanese features. I've had many, many people tell me that Americans are more beautiful. They actively try to imitate Western features--to the point that they buy items that are designed to give eyes the extra fold that Americans have.

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Exoticism. Just like a lot of white dudes will say they think Asian women are hot. But if you look at the Asian women they think are "hot," they mean the Asian women who conform to an archetype (young, petite, smiling and deferential, long black hair, etc.), not the full spectrum of typical Asian women -- just like the Asians who think Westerners are more attractive don't mean fat, balding, or wrinkled Westerners.

missesdash said:

I don't know if miyazaki movies count as "anime" but a lot of his characters are definitely european. And I'm sure there's some context here to explain why his characters are obviously european and the other aren't. But if you hold them up side to side

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They are anime. And that's because a lot of his characters are European.

Spirited Away, Princess Mononoke, My Neighbor Totoro, Grave of the Fireflies, Pom Poko, Whisper of the Heart, The Cat Returns, Only Yesterday, I Can Hear the Sea, and Ponyo on the Cliff by the Sea, all take place in Japan and feature Japanese characters.

Kiki's Delivery Service, Porco Rosso, Howl's Moving Castle, and Castle in the Sky take place in various European countries and feature European casts.

As for Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind, I'm unsure.

Geek that I am, I've seen all of them, and I've read Howl's Moving Castle. The reason that the latter are European is because they take place in European countries (ie, Italy, or fictional England). They also have European names. But the link Kuwidelu provided explains their appearances. And even in Porco Rosso, the American in the movie (the stereotypical Western cowboy) has a very foreign appearance.

In the former, especially the movies that feature a bunch of Japanese culture and history, ie Grave of the Fireflies (saddest movie ever), it becomes obvious what race they're supposed to be.

I mean, even in really flashy animes like Clannad, it's obvious that they're Japanese. They say they're in a school to learn English. And the singular blonde on the cast says he uses hair die. When he stops, his hair is jet black. The hair colors are also used to indicate personality types. Naruto (as much as I hate it) is a big example of that.

Anyway, I've tried explaining this to my parents, but they don't understand. It's frustrating. They think the Japanese want to be white because of WW2, when, in reality, most of them don't even know about WW2 and have seen very little people who don't look like them. *sigh* My parents think everyone self hates.

Amadan said:

Uh...

You know a lot of white people say exactly the same thing about black and Asian people. And a lot of Asian people say exactly the same thing about white and black people.

This happens whenever people are dealing with an ethnicity they haven't spent much time associating with: they tend to see them as being very homogeneous, not like "us."

When I was in Korea, I found that many Koreans think that white people pretty much all look alike. Foreigners get used to being compared to some random movie star (because those are the only white people a lot of Koreans have seen)

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I did know this. But from a strictly objective standpoint, they have less ethnic variation than "white" people because "white" isn't an ethnicity and niether is "black." But Japanese is something very specific and racially they are less likely to be mixed than an American or anyone else living in a country where the indigenous are a minority.

I'm just here to say when I was living in Japan I was often mistaken for Japanese even though I'm half Irish, half Chinese and have freckles and was with my blond, blue-eyed girlfriend.

So maybe Asians do look all the same... even to Asians.

Another thing about the anime/manga - from a conventional standpoint - most manga is published in black and white and there are limited screentones used, so unless the manga-ka is making a specific statement about how "dark" someone is (I think someone already mentioned that paler skin is considered more beautiful in Japanese culture), all the characters will have paper-colored (i.e. white usually) skin.

If a manga-ka has to go out of their way to screentone someone darker - even though most Japanese people are NOT as pale as "white" people - it's for the specific purpose of calling it out.

On the other hand, not screentoning/inking a character's hair just saves resources, so some manga-ka might not even fill in a character's hair - even if it's supposed to be black.

My fiancée was just on a rant about the blond haired Japanese thing earlier this week. She's been watching some anime-turned-live-action where one of the characters is French, but he's played by a Japanese guy, but instead of bleaching his hair blond (the character is supposed to be BLOND blond) they just lightened it.

Relevant? y/n

People often thought I was half even though I don't have a bit of Asian in me. Something about the eyes, I think. It was odd.

I'm not quite sure I believe Japanese people are more homogenous than other groups. Yes, I can tell the difference between Japanese or Vietnamese or Korean or Chinese, but Japanese people have very distinctive features that come in a huge variety. When I first arrived I had a hard time telling people apart. When I left, I had a hard time telling someone was Japanese. That might sound strange, but it didn't occur to me anymore that a person was Japanese.

The longer you are exposed to a group, the more you start to see the individual differences rather than the overall general picture. Yes, Japanese people often said I looked like any random white person they had seen (and I'd think they were nuts lol), but it was just a lack of exposure. It didn't mean that white people were more homogenous.

I'm not sure if I'm misreading the statements above, though. I might be.

jmlee said:

Another thing about the anime/manga - from a conventional standpoint - most manga is published in black and white and there are limited screentones used, so unless the manga-ka is making a specific statement about how "dark" someone is (I think someone already mentioned that paler skin is considered more beautiful in Japanese culture), all the characters will have paper-colored (i.e. white usually) skin.

If a manga-ka has to go out of their way to screentone someone darker - even though most Japanese people are NOT as pale as "white" people - it's for the specific purpose of calling it out.

On the other hand, not screentoning/inking a character's hair just saves resources, so some manga-ka might not even fill in a character's hair - even if it's supposed to be black.

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I'm not sure if this relates to what you're thinking, but you reminded me of something else. Traditionally in Japan whiter skin is seen as more beautiful. This has nothing to do with trying to look "white", but is related to the fact that the upper class didn't have to work outside in the fields and were thus paler, whereas the lower class and poor were often workers out in the sun who were dark skinned.

While the younger generation has a tendency toward tanning, it's still very common for people to consider themselves pale and to strive to be pale. It was funny because in the summer I'd go to wushu practice and I'd be so pale by comparison. I was always a bit embarrassed by it (I think a little sun looks nicer), but I'd constantly be complimented on my pale skin.

It makes sense, from that perspective, that manga characters aren't often a wide range of shades. Often when you do have a Japanese character drawn as tan, it's because they're a sports player.

I didn't mean Japanese people were more homogoneous than other distinct ethnic groups. I just meant Japanese as an ethnicity versus something as nebulous as "white" or "black."

missesdash said:

I didn't mean Japanese people were more homogoneous than other distinct ethnic groups. I just meant Japanese as an ethnicity versus something as nebulous as "white" or "black."

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So, are French people or Nigerians homogeneous?

Amadan said:

So, are French people or Nigerians homogeneous?

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I don't know much about ethnic groups in Nigeria. But when you break up France into it's natural ethnic groups, they do look a lot alike. People from Bretagne, for example, are tan and have thick, curly blond hair. People from northern France tend to have a very specific look. And then of course the south of France is different as well.

"French" isn't a very clean cut ethnicity since the borders of the country basically squeeze a ton of historically different groups into one. A good example of homogenous "white" people would be the polish since it's one of the most ethnically homogenous countries in the world. But in general, most European countries have a lot of mixing.

The top three ethnically homogenous countries are north korea, south Korea and Japan. Hence the reason there's less variation.


This is getting boring, though haha. It's turning into a lecture on diaspora.

Well, my default is definitely white, not my own colour.

Ah, I see what you mean. I get you.