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NEWS: Live-Action Death Note Film's Producer Responds to Whitewashing Controversy

You can twist the interpretation all you'd like, but they're not going to hire a Japanese actor who can't speak English clearly, particularly for roles that require a degree of eloquence to properly portray the characterizations. Broken Engrish would be a major distraction from the production.

I personally cannot wait for the Live-Action Hollywood adaptations of Attack on Titan and Fullmetal Alchemist,where they will cast the appropriate races in every role (they won't all be Asian) and be accused of White-Washing.

Wait...does that mean the cast of the Japanese live-action films of Attack on Titan and Fullmetal Alchemist mean they are Asian-Washing all the roles?

I think you've seen this firsthand too, but there are other factors in play regarding the lack of Asian actors. The first is that the general sentiment among people who grew up in east Asia and moved to the United States is that they have a pretty low opinion of people in the entertainment business, as they're not universally high-paying jobs.

I am Asian-American too, and I have had my aspirations towards Hollywood (though not in acting, and nowadays, it's more Burbank, but Hollywood gets the point across better). I think you've seen this firsthand too, but there are other factors in play regarding the lack of Asian actors. The first is that the general sentiment among people who grew up in east Asia and moved to the United States is that they have a pretty low opinion of people in the entertainment business, as they're not universally high-paying jobs. Certainly, I had a huge amount of resistance from my parents when I told them I wanted to go into TV production, and when they saw I wouldn't budge, they tried ever harder to stop me, outright sabotaging attempts I made to get my foot in the door. Even now, my mom is deeply against it.

The other factor is that in Hollywood, the squeaky wheel gets the grease. We have a lot of black actors because they were the loudest racial minority during the Civil Rights Movement and have continued to aggressively campaign for greater representation whenever it falters. Asian culture, however, encourages people to keep a low profile, not stand out, keep quiet, not rebel, and ride out and endure any social conflicts rather than fight against them. (I read in a newspaper article a couple of years ago that among racial groups in the United States, Asian-Americans have the lowest percentage of people registered to vote.) Hollywood executives and agents turn their heads to whatever's getting the most attention, and this means for most Asian-Americans, they kind of forget they're there.

In other words, underrepresentation of Asian-Americans is real, and Hollywood is not wholly to blame for it. (It's not completely blame-free, but it's also not 100% their fault.) We currently have Asian-Americans far enough removed from their immigrant ancestors to be comfortable behaving extrovertedly though and can now land acting jobs, with the success of Fresh Off the Boat and that show starring the Asian doctor whose name I've forgotten. These Asian-American actors have managed to establish themselves, and I expect them to get increasingly major Hollywood roles in the future.

I respond to that later in my post: there are plenty of qualified Asian-American actors and you don't have to look far to find them. If I can do it from my room using Google a production company with way more money than they'll ever know what to do with shouldn't have a problem.

Not much precedent for this being a barrier in reality, though. Look at Japanese-American singer-songwriter Utada Hikaru: one of if not the most successful artists in Japanese music history, and according to her a lot of Japanese teens thought she was a foreigner singing in Japanese (because of her slight "American" accent) when she debuted-- which in and of itself did not stop her from demolishing the charts. But when it turned out she was actually Japanese, that increased their sense of identification with her and First Love went on to become one of the highest-selling records of all time in the country. Yes, she's spoken at length about her feeling that as a Japanese person she feels like a foreigner in America and as an American she feels like a foreigner in Japan: that's a really rich kind of personal story which deserves to be explored and that's a great example as to why it's so important that Japanese-American actors (and actors, writers and directors in the Asian community in general) need exposure and recognition. And if the only roles that will ever go to them are consistently rewritten for white people who have no shortage of opportunities, our chances of hearing those stories are diminished.

If your argument is "Japanese people living in Japan won't like it," you're not only wrong, you're missing the point.

Would you call Ryan Potter's English broken? Stop perpetuating false stereotypes.

That's an entirely different discussion so let's not derail, but I will say this: the solution to ending cultural appropriation is not to stop telling the stories of PoC and nobody has ever advocated that: the solution is to tell the stories of PoC in a respectful manner which pays tribute to our actual lived histories, and empowering PoC to tell our own stories. If one's response to being criticized as an artist is to throw one's hands up and whine about being held to a higher standard, maybe such a person has no business creating art.

Which, if that were true, only goes to show that Hollywood does not cast films according an actual understanding of demographics and if you think that's how casting should be determined, well, that's a racist practice. Should Asian-American people expect to be hired less than white people for jobs they're equally qualified to work in any other field simply because there are less of them in the U.S.? Why should the film industry be especially adverse to hiring Asian-American folks? That's fundamentally racist.

OK, but understand that the two main roles were white and no, shoehorning white people into a movie does not constitute diversity when the industry standard is whiteness and white representation. It's not an even playing field.

Oh irony. I'm not saying any of those things, the producer made a statement specifically citing L's "blackness" as a shield against criticism and I simply investigated his comment on its own merit. Don't shoot the messenger dude (but thanks for inadvertently proving my point!).

No, because as I stated before, PoC and minorities in film are not interchangeable groups you can just swap around at will.

Uh, maybe never, and that's as it should be. White people have plenty of opportunities outside of stealing roles from Asian-American performers, the idea that Nat Wolff really needed to play this part is just a knee-jerk defense mechanism entitled film insiders like these producers invoke when they don't know how else to rationalize their position. I guarantee you absolutely nobody in the intended audience for this Death Note adaptation ever once thought, yeah, Nat Wolff, he would be the best choice ever to play Light Yagami.

OK two things here that make this false outrage so great:
1) That is the exact argument you have been making against casting Asian-American people: focusing on their "Asianness" and those stereotypical features associated with it, like the myth of broken Engrish;
2) That is the exact argument people have been making in favor of casting white people for these movies, including the producers themselves! Focusing on the "whiteness" of white actors as a selling point to other white people. I haven't seen a cogent argument as to Nat Wolff's abilities or even his qualifications as an actor once, because I think you and I both know that would be a tenuous position at best.

Yeah, it sure is! Maybe we should stop casting white actors just because they're white!

Again, I am absolutely 100% convinced that the producers and casting team for this movie could have found a Japanese-American actor who is just as talented if not more talented than Nat Wolff. The problem is that they are using a racist, outdated model of marketing which skews the casting process in favor of white people.

Which does not mean that there are no Japanese-American actors or actresses, or even that there is a material shortage of them.

Casting a part is always a process of going out of your way to find the right person to fill the role, if you're doing your job right.

I do have realistic expectations. I think it is perfectly reasonable to expect a character from a Japanese property who is ethnically Japanese in that property to be cast as a Japanese person. Maybe we should consider the fact that traditionally white characters like Captain America, James Bond, and Batman are never rewritten for PoC; hell, in the comic book universe there is a canonically black and chicano Spiderman, but Marvel stubbornly demanded that Sony give them the rights to Peter Parker so they could make damn sure their on-screen Spiderman is white! And you want to pretend it's an even playing field.

To add on to this, I also think another factor is that Asian actors are deterred by Hollywood's closed gates. You hear a lot of stories about Asian American stars in Asia having tried their hand in Hollywood to no avail and so they move abroad and become super successful. I have friends and their parents say things like, "If you want to be an actor/singer and you have the talent, go to Asia. Asians are at a disadvantage in America."

It's sort of a toxic cycle of Hollywood not creating opportunities for Asian actors to shine, causing Asian actors to be deterred, and then saying things like, "We can't cast Asian actors because there aren't a lot of [talented enough] actors to choose from". And I think this is what is frustrating most people.

Man, I empathize with your experience. I'm a first generation myself, and had aspirations for comics and animation growing up, but my parents pigeonholed my learning towards the sciences/medicine, threatening that they would only support me if I became a doctor, a lawyer, a scientist, etc. In their minds, they didn't sacrifice their lives just so their children could waste the opportunities they fought for. Unfortunately for me, I wound up sheepishly going into the sciences, which pays well enough, though I've intermittently quit working every so many years and focused on my art to try and keep the dream alive (it's incredibly difficult and frustrating though). Good luck with your aspirations in TV production, it's tough as it is trying to succeed in creative fields of work without having your loved ones undermining your passions too.

TBH, I don't think it's an entirely different discussion. White people are being put into an odd position right now, where it seems to be okay for other cultures to draw from their 'collective' accomplishments, but not okay for them in turn to draw from other cultures as well. As a result, it seems to hollow out a sense that White people can even have a shared identity, a situation where it's okay for other races/ethnicities to remain culturally insular, while White people have to forego any sense of community. When you have a situation where people can be proud to be Black, or proud to be Asian, but can't be proud to be White, that seems like a weird double standard.

Actually, the MAIN difference between what the US is doing with Death Note compared to what Japan did with Black Butler and all of their other non-Asian themed live action adaptations is that Japan doesn't have the same diversity as the US. They don't have a significant population of European-descendent actors who can speak perfect Japanese; probably next to zero, actually.

But as far as the US Death Note movie goes, I have these feelings every time the subject comes up: I really wish they would have just made this into an entirely new Death Note story, a spin-off of the original series, so they didn't have to carry over any of the Japanese and Light vs. L baggage. Pretty much Ryuk would have been the only character coming back from the original and dropped the Death Note on to some new kid in America and they'd even have some references to the original Kira from Japan. But whatever, I'll check this out eventually anyway for curiosity's sake.

Casting is more complex than just finding a list of actors. They have to be the right age, live in the right area, have the right schedule, the right experience, and most importantly, the right ability that fits the spirit of the production that they're trying to make.

I should point out too, Roy Lee (the producer speaking in this interview) is a Korean American. So, unless you think both Masi Oka and Roy Lee are discriminating against their own race/ethnicity,

it's already been explained that they tried to find a good Asian American fit, and weren't able to.

My broader point was more towards how the sense of identity that manifests in Japan is more cultural than it is racial. Odd as it may sound, a Japanese American born and culturally raised in the United States isn't considered to be "true" Japanese to the nativist mentality in Japan, particularly if the person is of mixed blood. Utada Hikaru was a first-generation Japanese-American born to Japanese parents, who were also known figures in Japan's music industry, so I think that helped with Japanese people being able to identify with her on a certain level, although as you mentioned, she still has the sense of being a foreigner regardless of her race.

In any case, for this discussion, if you try to broaden the potential acting pool wider to include Asian Americans in general, the casting becomes incongruous with Japanese identity. In my experience speaking with Japanese people while learning the language in college, having done a homestay in Japan and studied at a Japanese University, many feel a bit ways uncomfortable speaking with other Asians, largely because of Japan's terrible imperialist history during WWII. The reality is that Japanese people get along much better with White Westerners than with many of their Asian neighbors (hence the prominence of White people in Japanese media and even anime). So in some ways, they would actually be more comfortable having a White person portray a role in an adaptation, than they would with non-Japanese Asian Americans. That's part of why I feel it's odd to push for Asian Americans to try and lay claim to Japanese roles, when Japanese people don't really view themselves as being "the same" just because they're Asian.

I'm not perpetuating false stereotypes --- many people suggested Rinko Kikuchi for the role of The Major in Ghost in the Shell, because she looked the part and was the right age. Unfortunately, her English is very choppy, which was the case for some other suggestions for performers that people were making at the time.

Japanese people in general speak English fairly poorly (despite "learning" it growing up), so when people point out actual Japanese actors/actresses for taking on these roles, it doesn't always seem to take their language ability into consideration.

TBH, I don't think it's an entirely different discussion. White people are being put into an odd position right now, where it seems to be okay for other cultures to draw from their 'collective' accomplishments, but not okay for them in turn to draw from other cultures as well.

As a result, it seems to hollow out a sense that White people can even have a shared identity, a situation where it's okay for other races/ethnicities to remain culturally insular, while White people have to forego any sense of community.

When you have a situation where people can be proud to be Black, or proud to be Asian, but can't be proud to be White, that seems like a weird double standard.

Now I'm not saying that people should be proud to be White --- quite the opposite actually.

Personally speaking (coming from an incredibly mixed racial and ethnic background) I view the solution to ending cultural appropriation in a much broader context: for all groups to mingle and share their cultures openly with one another, instead of continuing with separatist identities.

I'm egalitarian --- I think we're all equal, and the longer we divide ourselves into groups saying "this group owns this" or "that group can only do that", the longer we continue unnecessary cultural schisms.

Actually, not quite. I saw a chart a few years ago that actually showed a breakdown of actors in Hollywood, and it did seem to suggest that the overall demographics in recent years seem to align with national statistics. Now, I'm not saying that that's how actors/actresses should be hired --- I'm just saying that you can't escape population realities affecting overall representation in Hollywood.

You can push for having equal representation in film, but if there isn't an equal population to actually fill the roles, then you just have to face the reality that that's a natural consequence of the population numbers.

Again, you can't have an even playing field when the population numbers are inherently uneven.

But the producer's point was in regards to white-washing. L is a black actor. So how is that white-washing?

How can the complaint only apply to Light, but not to L?

Why is it only a problem when White actors are cast into Asian roles, but not when Black actors are?

Your explanation almost seemed to suggest that his presence in the cast was as a token Black character to help in shielding against such criticism, but I personally doubt they would cast him in such an important role if he didn't have the ability to properly realize it.

So would you then complain about "Black-washing" if Light and L were both Black?

I think here is where we really start to see into the foundation of your perspective --- almost a sort of vindictive vendetta against White people.

First, by saying that White people should never be allowed to take on adaptation roles.

And two, for suggesting that they're stealing roles from Asian Americans.

Speaking fluent English....has nothing to do with race.

2) I don't know much about Nat Wolff, though he does seem to have been in a number of TV series and movies over the last decade.

And I'm not sure where you're reading that the Producers favored casting white people for the role

--- again, look at the producers for Death Note that we've seen so far. Roy Lee is a Korean American, and Masi Oka is a Japanese American. Are you saying that they're both working against their own race?

But that's assuming that that's what's happening here.

make it more appealing to the US or to the English-language market

Again, why would two of the Producers, who are both Asian American, use a racist model against their own ethnicity?

No, but it does mean that the talent pool for White and Black people is going to skew about 20 times larger in comparison. The chances of finding a good fit for the role naturally leans towards White people just on sheer numbers alone.

Right. But in this case, the most important aspect for the role was acting ability, not race.

What about Nick Fury? Or Cat Woman? Or Johnny Storm? It's not as one-sided as you're painting it out to be

and the fact that we've gotten more diversity in comics of late too, what with Amadeus Cho, Simon Baz, Jessica Cruz and Miles Morales, things have been changing a lot in recent years. You shouldn't take these movements entirely for granted.

That's nice but my spirituality, my medicine and my ceremony are private, and they are sacred because they are private and practiced specifically within that framework. When your idealism encroaches upon my spiritual, cultural, and social sovereignty and right to self-determination that's theft, not sharing.

...

The longer white society continues to interact with culture-specific symbols using entitled, assimilationist models the more important it becomes to close the cultural circle in order to prevent the total destruction of its integrity.

I love this new world we live in, where everyone is evil. Enjoy.

This topic is a fool's errand.

Do you mean that you are a proponent of cultural isolationism, for people of various cultures to remain where they are and not pick up traits of other people's cultures?

When comic book movies do changes, people are like "They are their own thing" or "They are their own movies set in their own world". So why is it okay for Marvel & DC to do things differently, but not a live action movie based on a Anime & Manga? They are comics too.

Not to mention with movie settings, people get upset if the movie is not set in Japan. However people are okay with movies like The Ring, The Grudge and the last two American Godzilla movies not set in Japan.

I have no investment in how other cultural communities manage and maintain their social boundaries, so not really: when a relationship has been established which permits cross-cultural influence to occur organically and without threatening the independent right of any participating agent to keep certain elements of their society closed, I think that this sort of interaction can be really healthy. That's why I felt compelled to cite my own cultural boundaries when confronted with Kikaioh's vaguely colorblind philosophy, which is in and of itself a product of a great mistake of Eurocentric worldviews, this idea that everything not central to white society (i.e. foreign) somehow orbits white society in anticipation of becoming involved with it: the mistake is in not recognizing or not acknowledging that in the vast majority of cases, these cultural transactions with the dominant culture are just an extended function of the one-way street known as imperialism, that is to say involuntary and with little benefit to such "foreign" peoples. So while I can't speak for any other group, as an Indigenous person, I can reference those elements of my religion which are essential to me both as an individual and in understanding my place in community: they draw their meaning and their significance from this manner of selective attribution because they draw from a well of lived cultural experience which doesn't extend to outside peoples. As far as I'm concerned, that is one of the only ways for marginalized groups of people (particularly if we understand people not in the sense of "individual" but as members of community, where that community is the people) to successfully survive in an occupied, hostile landscape.

So yeah, thank you for sharing your own experience and perspective: I don't think it's an all-or-nothing question, but I'm determined to defy this unfortunately careless theory of solving society's woes by simply deciding to make friendly with our abusers, especially as it pertains to abandoning our only power to self-identify and resist through established cultural markers. As with any human relationship lacking equivalent status and agency, that's not friendship, it's exploitation.