Forum - View topicNEWS: Subaru Kimura to Take Over as Franky in One Piece
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YackDe
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Good thing they picked a replacement that nobody will have any discourse about.
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Ming Yi
Posts: 218 |
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Genuinely wondering if this is sarcasm because a few years ago his agency was selling some cosplay bromides and the one with him as a “rapper” in blackface got so much heat internationally that the post ended up being deleted. |
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Vapewi
Posts: 34 |
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Thank you Kazuki Yao for everything, and good luck to Subaru Kimura.
Welcome aboard. |
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2BNier
Posts: 28 |
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Wasn't Wataru Takagi?
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Matros
Posts: 336 |
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No, that's Jango. He was already Jango in Jango's dance carnival many years ago. |
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Juno016
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Japan's relationship with face paint in entertainment is long and revering (and there's also a history of ganguro, which combines tanning and black makeup, and has nothing to do with emulating black peopleーout of fashion now, but still fresh in peoples' minds), and there is a decently long list of actors and musicians now who have walked on stage in black face, thinking they were showing appreciation for black culture, only to either go largely ignored because not enough black people cared about it or saw it to make a well-deserved stink about it in Japan, or they did and it just confused the Japanese population. I can think of only 3 other cases where it garnered public backlash (Momoiro Clover Z, Rats and Star, and a comedian impersonating Eddie Murphie), and they're all very recent, only visible thanks to social media in the last decade or so exposing it to the outside world. To be VERY clear, no depiction of black face in any way for any reason, innocent or otherwise, is okay. These moments deserve the attention they've gotten, and if we don't call them out, they will continue to go unnoticed and continue to happen. But in all honesty, the history of black face is a very specifically Western history and Japan's ignorance of it amounts more likely to the way global history (which I had the "delight" to experience as a student for a nearly 3 years on and off) is taught there. It's... not great. I'm far more likely to be forgiving of a Japanese person who does it once, hears that it's racist, and decides to wash their face and apologize and/or remove their posts and learn from their mistake. It's really hard to blame an individual for the ignorant failings of an entire society, and I would reserve my grudges for those who get defensive in response or think they know better than the group they are mocking. I did try looking up the incident with Kimura, and unless I'm missing something, it seems to boil down to "he did a cosplay of a rapper he liked in black face, got called out for it, took the posts down, the end". I can't speak personally on his behalf, but if that's all that happened, I would be hesitant to treat him special. I also learned that VA Ono Kenshu did black face once, too, and it went unnoticed because it was in a magazine or something? MomoClo got backlash and they silently removed their performance from an event's documentary video release after a change.org petition from a journalist living in Japan who used it as an opportunity to try and inform people of why it's considered racist. |
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cyberdraco
Posts: 647 |
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For you Toku fans, Kimura was also Vice in Kamen Rider Revice.
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Juno016
Posts: 2436 |
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It's also a weird clash of issues where we typically celebrate black actors getting traditionally white roles for obvious margainalization reasons, we rightfully criticize removing Japanese representation in media for the same reason, questions of whether that applies to anime itself (in which Japanese people are hardly margainalized, but black people certainly areーbut would that only apply to black people living in Japan?), and... well, it's a lot of stuff. Not really the exact question being brought up in this thread, but it does reach into the same general bag of questions around handling margainalization differently in different cultures. At least in this particular case with Kimura, I think we can unequivalently point to the black face stunt as worthy of its criticism, but it gets really weird when people start demanding career cuts over what, imo, appears to have been a cultural difference and general ignorance rather than malice.
But I also just learned that Kimura may have, on a separate occasion, mocked an African with a lip disk using a pizza. That one, if true, complicates my original post quiiiiiite a bit. Big yikes. Last edited by Juno016 on Sun Dec 22, 2024 1:54 pm; edited 1 time in total |
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MFrontier
Posts: 14245 |
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Not who I would have expected, but if Yao chose his own replacement...
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Divineking
 Posts: 1300 |
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Alright, for one thing there was some public backlash to Subaru Kimura's blackface incident when it happened, and while it clearly wasn't enough to impact his career, it was at least bad enough for his agency to have him take it down, so to say "no one cared" is a bit of a stretch Also let's not get cute here: The things with AJ Beckles posting black renditions of Okarun was extremely harmless and while I'm sure there were probably a few posts from Japanese fans who don't understand the culture behind those renditions, the "backlash" here was overwhelmingly from racists mad about someone daring to show one of their favorite anime characters as black. Trying to pretend there's any equivalence between making black renditions of existing characters, which is pretty much always done for fun and is generally done because black people dont often see themselves represented in media like anime, and whitewashing and/or blackface which are always directly tied to racism is extremely disingenuous |
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2BNier
Posts: 28 |
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Ah, ok, thanks. |
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Ming Yi
Posts: 218 |
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Ganguro is a different case because contextually the whole concept of it is based on rebelling against traditional Japanese beauty standards. This situation is a whole different case and while Kimura's agency took down the post, he and his agency never apologized for it and would go on to block anyone on his social media accounts who bring it up. Which, I mean, I can see it as them trying not to draw more attention to it but his choice, I guess? It also looks really bad that he went on Instagram later to post a photo of himself joking about African lip plates and never apologized for it either.
For Ono's case, I think it was when he tried cosplaying the "murderer silhouette" from Detective Conan.
I feel Japanese social media users are more upset that he reposted edited art. They feel strongly about editing any sort of art, even official art. If the art had been drawn himself, I don't think they would have been as upset. Since he was involved in the official production, it would look like he's endorsing editing existing art. Last edited by Ming Yi on Sun Dec 22, 2024 7:44 pm; edited 1 time in total |
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ANN_Lynzee
ANN Executive Editor
 Posts: 3052 Location: Email for assistance only |
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Removed posts that were flat-out racist, insinuated that caring about race issues is a minority point of view, attempted to be cute about it, or engaged in false equivalencies in order to criticize Black people.
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FinalVentCard
ANN Reviewer
 Posts: 656 |
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And that's why I never watched ReVice.
Very much this. There is no such thing as "blackwashing", and the connotation between "characters of color being turned white in an adaptation" versus "fans reimagining characters as being black" are worlds apart. Let's also not forget that folks were in such a hurry to harass the artist who did it that they even claimed their art was traced. |
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seoulman1985
 Posts: 113 |
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He has double duty in Marvel, dubbing M'baku in Black Panther, and Hoby Brown/SpiderPunk in the Spiderverse.
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