Answerman

Why Are Americans In Anime Always Blonde?

Dana asks:

My question is how Americans are labeled in anime. I have read and seen a lot of anime and manga. In all of them, Americans are all drawn being blonde and blue eyed. This just irks me sometimes. I'm American and I have brown hair and hazel eyes. So why are all Anime Americans blonde?

It's a combination of stereotypes and laziness. One could even say that those two things are the same.

It isn't as common as you might think for your average Japanese person to speak English or to have visited America. As a result, most Japanese people have never had a meaningful interaction with an American, and have no idea what it's really like being here. And yet, America features so prominently in music and movies and TV shows and news and even recent Japanese history that it's hard for them not to think about it, and to try and picture it.

And to do so, they rely on stereotypes. These stereotypes are usually formed from consuming American media (which, as we know, is heavily weighted towards featuring white people, and often of the fair haired and blue eyed variety), and from Japanese depictions of American media (which often tend towards sensationalistic plays towards existing stereotypes). Living in Japan, one gets used to the idea of a country being filled with people that are all of the same race, and so many Japanese who have never been here automatically assume that ours is a country that's just white people.

Of course, when they really think about it, they know that's a mischaracterization. Many of them know prominent black and hispanic sports stars and actors. Unfortunately, the simplistic views on the world often go unchallenged, and so many, many ill-informed Japanese assume all white people come from America or Europe and all black people come from Africa. And they don't mean that in an ethnic heritage sense, they mean physically.

The laziness part comes from the mangaka and anime creators, who often don't (or can't) research what things are really like before they draw them. I've heard point-blank from a famous anime director (who HAS since visited America) that a depiction of New York City in one series was figuratively just pulled from the staff's posterior. Rather than reflect the world as it really is, they play up to existing stereotypes, because the depictions of Americans are almost never the point of the actual story anyway, and the (Japanese) audience simply identifying the characters as being American is all that's necessary. Blond hair and blue eyes is just an easy way of doing that.

Blonde people are pretty exotic in Japan, since they're the caucasians that look most drastically different from an Asian, and their light skin plays into centuries-old Asian preferences for lighter skin tone (which comes from the idea that rich people don't have to work in the fields, and therefore don't get as tanned). Blond exchange students (particularly attractive ones) get doted on, people remark about how beautiful their hair is. Guys daydream about dating a blond girl. Japanese girls were absolutely obsessed with Leonardo DiCaprio back in the Titanic days.

It's unfortunate, but this is simply what happens when you have a homogenous island country that speaks a (drastically) different language from everyone else. They don't interact with America or Americans often enough to really know what it's like here. The stereotypes aren't coming from a malicious place -- it's just the same as many American anime fans' skewed idea of what life in Japan is like. It's simply myth that has been allowed to persist due to lack of actual information. I'm sure we could say the same about virtually any other corner of the world.

The real fun comes in hearing the experiences of Japanese people visiting America for the first time. It's never, ever what they imagined it to be. And conversely, I hear from Japan travel guides that American otaku seeing Japan for the first time are just as amusing.

But even an artist who's been to America can easily slip back into laziness, and the Japanese public almost certainly won't notice or have any problem with that.

Justin Sevakis is the founder of Anime News Network, and owner of the video production company MediaOCD. You can follow him on Twitter at @worldofcrap.