Forrest Wickman of Slate Magazine recently wrote an article about how people in countries besides the US view blackface in response to reports of an Israeli soldier posing in black makeup in a picture he posted on Facebook, saying it was "Obama style." Here's the original article on Slate.
Of course most people realize how offensive this kind of shit is, but even nowadays you see people doing blackface "for fun" again and again. Here's a list of instances in the media in several varieties. It's just sad.
One thing, though, in the article Wickman was a bit off in his comments about Japan. He mentions the late 90s-2000's trend called ganguro, where young girls would dress in blonde whigs and apply mountainous amounts of dark makeup to appear "black." Yes, the idea was to appear dark, but this style had nothing to do with blackface. Here the goal was to appear very very tan; some confusion may come from the fact that in common Japanese expression people who are very tan claim to be "black," but there is never a connection between this use of the color black and people of African heritage.
Of course, this isn't to say there's no racism like this in Japan. Far from it. Racist images in Japan, while rarely used with blatant evil intent, show up all over the place in the name of comedy. And sadly enough you see Japanese people laughing at these performances, hence why they continue. And you see them on everything from variety shows to places around you in the city.
I've seen a restaurant called the Japanese equivalent of "blacky." It had a sign out front that looked exactly like something from one of the old American blackface minstrel shows.
The most obvious examples in daily life , though, come from comedy on TV. And it's almost always the same: Japanese people wearing whigs and big fake noses to look like a caricature of a "typical foreigner" and speaking in a sing-songey way that's supposed to emulate how gaijin talk. Of course it's always super exaggerated in almost exactly the same way as the ching chong bits white people did (or still do) in the US to make fun of Asians.
I hope that Japanese people in the audience see these segments and cringe. This kind of humor is racism, plain and simple.
And you know, to the people out there who'd say get over it, it's just comedy, I say tell that to a kid who happens to be white/black/any other race besides Japanese or is of mixed background when they come home crying to their parents because another kid at school was talking to them in a "gaijin voice." It happens. Kids see stuff on TV and emulate it. I've had the gaijin voice thrown at me and it's very demeaning, and I'm not a kid. And no, I don't sound like that. No one does.
Update: If you think it can't be bad, take a look at a post on debito.org about the notorious Mr. James campaign Mc Donald's did in Japan a few years back.
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