![]() ![]() ![]() and I think it's giving the writers too much credit to count them as "representation". And if I'm entirely honest, I don't consider the "brown" characters of yore to really be "representation" in most cases? These characters rarely came from any concrete country, and they typically got bundled up with other character tropes like "feisty" "sexy" "kansai-ben" "yaeba" etc. The difference you're seeing between the 80s-90s and now is probably more down to the number of manga taking place outside of Japan "foreign countries" were more exotic and cool up until the 80s and early 90s, while this trend has subsided a lot since then (with foreign travel and foreign media becoming more common) and media is much more likely to take place in Japan or in a fantasy country these days. I'm not saying this to imply that only the "top" ethnicities "deserve" to be represented in media, and therefore black and brown people should not be I'm only trying to illustrate that Japanese media hardly ever even represents its top minorities or acknowledges that they exist, which indicates at what level Japanese media is.Īnother topic is Japanese media which does not take place in Japan, which is what I think you're talking about with Swan and Cipher. That's the level of minority representation in Japanese media. ![]() If we exclude Chinese stereotypes who run Chinese restaurants and end their sentences with -aru (look, I like a lot of the Chinese characters in Ranma 1/2 too, but they are racist), as well as exclude Hikaru no Go (probably the only truly mainstream manga I've read with several Koran characters in Japan), the most likely answer is "never". If you ask any anime or manga fan if they have ever seen a Chinese Japanese, Korean Japanese, Vietnamese Japanese, or Philipino Japanese character in Japanese media, the answer would likely be "hardly ever". ![]() Although this is not a list of ethnicities and does not include naturalized citizens nor illegal immigrants, it aligns fairly well with the "big" ethnic minorities of Japan. If you look at a list of foreign citizens of Japan, you will notice that the top four source countries are South East Asian. ![]()
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