The problems of White and Western consumption of Manga and Anime

[dhobikikutti]

inkstone said in her post: "My wish for Yuletide is that people who offer to write in anime and manga (and manhwa and manhua, if there are manhua being offered) fandoms, and do write in those fandoms, to please do so with respect to the source's host culture."

She was prompted by wistfuljane's observation:

I've noticed some trends in animanga fanworks that left me rather perplexed:

• the prevalent of historical AUs set in Regency or some other British historical periods and the rather absence of historical AUs set in say Heian, Edo or some other Japanese or Asian periods;
  
• the prevalent of stories based on European fairy tales or folklores and the rather lack of stories based on Japanese or Asian fairy tales or folklores;
  
• the prevalent of stories centering around (party) games or activities that either originated in America or more common there and the rather absence of stories centering around (party) games or activities that originated in Japan/Asia or more common there

Then, of course, there's the rather lack of anime vids set to non-English songs. (And the more nitpicking stuffs like glaringly out-of-place English sayings or phrases in fanfic.)

the_willow made the following post in response which sums up one of the critical problems inherent in Western and White consumption of manga and anime:

Part of the reason the Japanese elements disappear is that the Japanese elements are seen, by a lot of those consuming the animan(ga/hwa/hua) as fantasy elements already; due to them seeing the characters as white[...] Because anime and manga are brought to the US to be consumed, and marketers have determined and actually have a stake in perpetuating 'everyone in the world is just like the US, but with a few quirks'; because it makes things simple and the simpler a thing is, the more easily it can be consumed[...]
Thus essential Asianess, whether it is Japaneseness, Koreaness, Chineseness, and others, etc... is presented as similar to Midwesterness, East Coastness, Southerness etc... a geographic peculiarity with local legends and quirks that is essentially American.

In comments, zephyrprince makes the point:

I do think there would be some level of difference between English-language fans entering something like Bollywood or K-Drama fandoms en mass though I guess in that watching these texts involves focusing your eyes on actual non-white bodies whereas anime, manga, and videogame characters are animated, drawn, or computer generated. I do think that the claims that all manga/anime characters are white are somewhat racist and inaccurate, but it does seem to make a difference when one is seeing actual Of Color features/phenotypes on flesh-and-blood bodies.

To which franzeska responds:

One thing I notice a lot with manga is that there's plenty in Japanese (though probably a low overall percentage) that makes issues of culture and race inescapable. Anything about immigrants in Japan or that's set other places in Asia or outside of Japan in general tends to make some of that stuff explicit in the text and/or art[...] But that's not what gets translated professionally, and it's usually not what gets scanlated."

As oyceter says, there is a problem "with people who use anime/manga as a type of ghetto pass, like it somehow absolves them of racism, or on the flip side, people who are enamoured of Japan and fetishize Japan and Japanese people".

The western consumption of manga and anime should not take away from the place they hold in their source cultures, nor the chromatic nature of their creators and characters. This is the reason they have been included in our list for the most part (with some exceptions). We would like, though, for you to think about the issues involved in consuming and writing for these sources!

ETA (1 Dec 09): troisroyaumes has an excellent post on the political implications of forming opinions based only on exposure to translated manhwa -

I want you to think about who decides what to translate and why, how they market the translation, and what all that says both about the audience receiving the translation and the people making the decision.[...]Are the conclusions we draw about trends in Japanese literature biased by the authors that get translated? Are those authors representative of the tastes of a particular subsection of Japanese readers--young versus old, male versus female, well-educated versus less-educated, etc.--or are they more representative of our tastes as a English-reading audience?

Comments

[thuviaptarth]

Hey, this is going to sound silly, but do you think you could set off large sections of quoted text with "<blockquote> <\blockquote> instead of making them links?

A lot of people use bright colors for links that are good for drawing attention to small amounts of text, but which are painful for long amounts of text. I also find large blocks of closely-spaced underlined text (the way most Web pages display links) difficult to read. If you look at most professionally designed Web pages, links are kept to three words or fewer, five words at maximum. It's a way for designers to improve usability.

[thuviaptarth]

And that should be:

<blockquote> </blockquote>

Sorry!

[dhobikikutti]

Done! And I have learned a new HTML tag for the day!

(Also, FYI, you are an administrator of this comm, so you should be able to edit entries if there's a glaring error or anything.)

[thuviaptarth]

Thank you! (Also I am on Gtalk if you want to talk, but don't worry if you are busy.)

[thuviaptarth]

Hmm, it looks like only entry creators can edit entries. Administrators should be able to delete stuff, but editing is the power of the writer alone. :)

[rachelmanija]

This is not to argue with the main point, but just to discuss the list of excluded manga and some issues that brings up.

I'm personally a little uncomfortable with excluding works by chromatic creators set in non-chromatic locales IF the intent of the comm is partly to promote works by chromatic creators, as the user info suggests. (Wow is that a horrible sentence.) The author is the same author regardless of the setting.

If the intent is to promote chromatic authors only when they write chromatic characters, I think that should be explicit in the user info.

I've read some of the excluded manga. It's a little more complicated than "WTF Cesare Borgia." In that manga alone (Cantarella) there are deliberately anachronistic/fourth wall breaking references to Japanese culture, which I doubt would appear in works by Western authors on the same subject. There's also a lot of tropes that can be seen in fantasy shoujo manga in general which would probably not appear in a Western story about Cesare Borgia unless that author had also been influenced by shoujo manga.

Again, if we're just trying to focus on chromatic characters, that's irrelevant. But I do think that regardless of Western fans' perceptions, works written in (in this case) Japanese by Japanese creators for a Japanese audience are still Japanese, even if they are set in Italy with Italian characters. I'm not trying to make any sort of cultural essentialist argument here, but just to say that things are complicated and that a European setting doesn't mean that the work itself is identical to something written by a European author.

Innocent Bird, which I've also read, does use Christian mythology, but the character names are Japanese and I did read the characters as being Japanese, though maybe I misunderstood the creator's intent. I think it can get very complicated and dicey when trying to exclude certain works on the basis of being insufficiently chromatic.

That being said, obviously if the purpose is to get more fic about chromatic characters Cantarella is not the way to go.

[willow]

I could be wrong, but I think the purpose of the challenge is to get many fan writers to engage with non-white identity in texts.

As it stands, it's hard enough to get many of them to accept that the Japanese characters in Japanese settings (modern or ancient) are actually Japanese and not white. It would be even more difficult to get them to treat possibly Japanese characters in Non-Japanese, possibly European settings as non-white.

I do not think the challenge should yield results where some people can feel they're being sly by writing characters they've always thought of as white and submitting them. I also think it'd confuse the issue that dhobikikutti is trying to bring attention to.

I don't think it's a case of either or; either it's all non white characters by all non white creators, or only non-white characters. It's about bringing attention to non-white identity, in which case it makes perfect sense to exclude those works that are known to blur the issue for the majority that consumes them.