CODE IN TOKYO

Are Japanese Anime and Manga “Discriminatory”? Reflections on an Online Debate

A Debate That Made Me Stop and Think

While browsing Reddit, I occasionally come across discussions that make me pause and think, “So that is how it looks from another cultural perspective.”

One recent comment argued that Japanese anime and manga rely on Western values and are discriminatory, citing the scarcity of Black characters as evidence.

This kind of subject can quickly become emotional, so I am not interested in declaring one side right and the other wrong. Still, as someone who grew up in Japan, I felt that some of the argument overlooked the context in which Japanese works are created and understood.

Most Japanese Works Are Made Primarily for Japanese Audiences

It may sound obvious, but most Japanese manga and anime are created by Japanese people primarily for audiences in Japan.

If a story takes place at a high school in Tokyo, it is natural for most of its characters to be Japanese. Calling that fact alone discriminatory seems difficult to justify.

Likewise, if a story set in New York includes few or no Japanese characters, I would not automatically regard it as discriminatory. Fiction reflects the everyday context of the place and culture from which it emerges. If that context is ignored, almost any difference can begin to look like exclusion.

Blond Hair Does Not Automatically Mean a White Character

Another argument sometimes heard overseas is that the prevalence of blond, blue-eyed protagonists shows that Japanese creators regard white people as the ideal.

From a Japanese viewer’s perspective, however, that interpretation often misses how anime’s visual language works. A blond anime character can simply be Japanese. The same is true of characters with brown, pink, or blue hair. These colors are usually design choices, not racial markers.

There is also a practical reason for them: if every character had the same black hair, it would be harder to distinguish the cast at a glance. Manga and anime use variations in color and hairstyle as visual symbols that help readers and viewers identify characters immediately.

K-On!, an anime series about Japanese high school girls who form a band, provides a useful example. Even when its main characters have blond or brown hair, Japanese audiences do not assume they are Westerners. Yet when the characters travel to London in the film, the local people are drawn with noticeably different, more realistic facial features. The creators clearly distinguish between the conventional “Japanese anime face” and their depiction of Western characters.

Why European-Inspired Fantasy Is So Common

It is true that many isekai stories—a Japanese fantasy genre in which a character is transported to or reborn in another world—take place in settings inspired by medieval Europe. But I believe this has less to do with admiration for the West than with the influence of Japanese video game culture.

For generations raised on Dragon Quest and Final Fantasy, a world of swords and magic became a shared visual and narrative language for fantasy. Later works inherited that grammar. Once a cultural convention takes root, it can persist for decades. In that sense, it is not so different from the long-lasting influence Hollywood has had on entertainment around the world.

Standards of Beauty Change Over Time

Ideas of beauty also change from one era to another.

When Japanese people first encountered Westerners in significant numbers during the Meiji era, deeply set facial features were reportedly sometimes perceived as intimidating. Today, many Japanese people consider the features of Hollywood actors attractive, but that preference is relatively recent.

Japan also has a much older tradition of associating pale skin with beauty. Explaining every light-skinned anime character as an expression of admiration for white people therefore feels too simplistic. Japan has its own history of aesthetics, and that history cannot be reduced to a single modern explanation.

Culture Cannot Be Judged by a Single Standard

Western civilization has shaped global culture over the past several centuries, so its influence on contemporary clothing, architecture, and entertainment is undeniable. Today, much of what is considered “modern” is Western—or, more precisely, American—in origin. That influence raises legitimate questions and leaves room for improvement.

Even so, describing Japanese anime and manga as inherently discriminatory seems to impose the assumptions of one cultural debate on a different creative tradition.

Japanese works certainly contain expressions that feel ordinary to domestic audiences but strange to viewers overseas. International works likewise contain countless details that feel unfamiliar or uncomfortable to Japanese audiences. That is not necessarily a failure. Different cultures begin with different assumptions.

The real problem is not that differences exist. It begins when we assume that our own values are universal.

I support diversity and understand many of the concerns behind political correctness. But if diversity comes to mean that every work in the world must follow the same values, casting choices, and creative rules, then it is no longer diversity. It becomes a global template.

Such a world might be equal in one sense. It would also make manga and anime considerably less interesting.

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