ive ALWAYS WONDERED about this question, but why does the drawn characters in animes including both guys and girls, look like white people? like naruto, bleach, death note, dragonball... but ive always wondered, most main characters have like blonde or brown hair and having blue or green eyes... regarding FMA and TRIGUN, since its clear ed is german and vash is american in western times..... like the characters look white, with white skin and colored hair and eyes which only white people possess yet they still got japanese names,,, i always thought the race was suppose to be unknown, but the people's names, the background, culture, and clothings all point towards japan, a good example being rurouni kenshin, a samurai which of course has to be japanese, having red hair and blue eyes.... same with naruto and bleach, naruto has blonde hair and blue eyes while ichigo has somewhat wat you call blonde hair ( though its orange ).... but yet again if i see animes like EXCEL SAGA, FULL METAL PANIC, BLEACH, or TENJOU TENGE.... they draw hispanic people and black people as they are, with their tanned or dark skin, with black hair and black eye, but really muscular, and sometimes i find it racist with the oversized libs and nose...... yet even again white people they show as foreigners are drawn to be buffed and nathan jones type rather than like pretty boy types.... even so than when i see the same asians but yet chinese, they draw them slanty eyed and kung fu types with black hair and black eyed as it is,,, not to be racist, but its just they not drawn anime styled,,,, kinda like ROCK LEE from naruto, not sure if he IS chinese though, and the bodyguards of GANJU'S ELDER SISTER from bleach, not sure about them either but they dress chinese....

so the question comes to is the colors mean they have died hair and colored eye lenses,,,, or is it natural? or sometimes i thought it was some kind of cultural tradition to make anime characters look bizarre... or is it more of media beauty tend to point towards japanese? or its just anime, its been habitually done that way since the 1940s...

i hope im not making enemies here , by this topic... its just something im curious about in the japanese media..... not wanting to piss any race off here......

I've read some detailed explanations for this; here's what I can remember (may not be 100% accurate).

Hair & eye colors are all over the place basically because making all the characters have the natural Japanese hair & eye colors would be pretty limited, and would also make it harder to differentiate the characters from each other. I have also read that red hair is often used to signal something strange or unnatural, & that's why, for example, girl-type Ranma (of Ranma 1/2, of course) has red hair.

The eyes are made larger (in some cases *grotesquely* larger ) to make them "more expressive"; they're not really intended to look like white people's eyes. Plus Asian culture in general does seem to find "wide/round" eyes attractive, so if they're trying to make attractive characters, they'll make the eyes wider/rounder.

Then when they want to have characters that are not Japanese, they have to exaggerate some of their characteristics to differentiate them from the Japanese characters (who don't really look very Japanese at all, at least to Western eyes).

Maybe someone else can expand on this further...?

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"[English] not only borrows words from other languages; it has on occasion chased other languages down dark alley-ways, clubbed them unconscious and rifled their pockets for new vocabulary."
-James Nicoll, can.general, March 21, 1992

i do understand that... i mean anime is the douse of fantasy.... but couldnt they have also at least distinguish by simple clothings and skin colors, and more of just made alternate ways to display them... i mean its just that, they draw other people of different nations kinda ugly in my opinion, i mean you say its to distinguish the differences in people, but all i see is them being drawn hidious ... japanese can draw things beyond all, can draw mechs with human traits, swords with minds that can be expressed through complex colorings and shape, they cant draw people? that doesnt make sense..... i mean i can diverse people just by using stick figures.....

i mean its understandable for every nation to display their people full of smarts, style, beauty, intellect, origins and other strong traits through their media, since america does that significantly.... but still, japan tends to break through the facts in a very exaggerated manner...

u say its to distinguish between people, but drawing them really ugly doesnt really mean distinguishing right the color theory was explained perfectly but the other facts remain enominous...

Hmm well Japan overall is very xenophobic, not that they necessarily hate or look down upon other races/peoples, but they see them as very different & separate (this is a huge generalization, of course) and I think that's part of why they may exaggerate certain traits. Back when non-whites were still considered strange & exotic to white Europeans & Americans, the pictures they drew of Asians, blacks, etc. were also (usually) pretty exaggerated as well.

I've read more than one manga where a "gaijin" character is introduced and I can't really tell any difference in appearance between the gaijin & the Japanese characters, and yet all the Japanese characters are constantly talking about how foreign the gaijin looks.

(And...I have no idea what "enominous" means... O_o )

edit - another *possible* idea - people often tend to draw what they think something looks like, according to some mental picture they have, instead of actually looking at the thing & drawing the lines/shapes/etc. that are really there. If mangaka rarely see black/hispanic/whatever people around, they may (at least partially) just draw their idea of what these people look like, without basing it on any reality..if that makes any sense at all.

Last edited by TofuQueen at 11:11 pm, Sep 3 2008

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"[English] not only borrows words from other languages; it has on occasion chased other languages down dark alley-ways, clubbed them unconscious and rifled their pockets for new vocabulary."
-James Nicoll, can.general, March 21, 1992

Since you open the can of worms... My partner and I were talking about the lack of "colored" people and by "colored" I mean black (she's black). People from India seems to be the "darkest," not that I haven't read manga & seen anime with people of dark color but there isn't a lot out there. I was wondering why that is. I thought maybe it was because of the problem of showing detail and background setting in manga (anime I have no reasons why not). Does anyone have a idea on the reason for lack of dark skinned people?

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'The 1 thing that can change a person...is meeting another." - xxxHoLiC

ahhh, so from youre theory, the japanese people look at their fellow people and see what you see in animes?

There are manga and anime that buck your statement, like Gokusen and Beck.


But I really don't care if they look Asian or Caucasian.

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http://www.mangaupdates.com/showtopic.php?tid=6722&hl= african



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"Hip-hop was set out in the dark. They used to do it out in the park"

Thanks to you all for your comments! I checked out the link dacbiet thank you for directing me to there.

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'The 1 thing that can change a person...is meeting another." - xxxHoLiC

to answer you question, i'd say it's because it's easier to draw that way when you make a manga/anime.....

for the most part, all characters in the manga's look nearly identical, with the exception of a few thangs, like hair color or hair style.....and you don't want your audience to be confused as to who is who right?, so they give them all these wild hair colors or hair styles, which you dont find in real life when you think japanese people.....

for example, i don't know if you've seen X tv (not sure if they have a manga for it) but it's some clamp show....and anyways, all the people (or majority atleast) looked japanese......and although thats good, i was confused as to who was who half the time, because half the guys looked almost exactly the saw besides minor differences, ya know

that's one of the problems you face when you try to be realistic, it's easier for a artist to have more options, even if you face looking unrealistic in terms of reality

i've only seen realistic looking characters that don't confuse me, in Beck or some of FURUYA Minoru's mangas (not to say that there aren't others, but those are the ones i've come across)

also it works in mangas were the setting or characters aren't limited to just Japan, such as Full Metal Panic, or other manga's were characters from diff. countries are present........

so yeah, basically they do it because they don't want the characters to overlap or come too close to overlapping and cause confusion...... also you have to take note that, alot of manga's aren't set in the real world (naruto, FMA etc.), so they don't look japanese or have to because they'res no such thing as Japan in that manga, ya know

but to be honest, i do see what you were getting at, i used to think the same things alot

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Yea, I guess you're right. I heard many people saying something like "those characters in anime - why the heck are they not Japanese?" Well, actually, it's not true, they ARE Japanese. I haven't seen many Japanese people in real life but those I saw really had some traits in common with the anime characters. In both the way they act and the way they look, it's just that in anime it's somewhat exagerrated and idealised, Maybe many do perceive the result as a western-type appearance, but I really don't see it like that, and also I don't think Japanese anime-fans see any westernness in anime characters.

yeah i always kind of wonderd why sasuke looked more japanese than naruto. a blond japanese?

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Well, if you're looking for realistic looking manga characters, I could suggest Yami no Aegis (and its sequel, Akatsuki no Aegis) or Jesus

All three are drawn by the same person so the art doesn't differ much: the characters are drawn realistically IMHO, with Japanese people looked like Japanese people with black hair, oriental faces and such, and the foreigners are drawn just like the way they are

Of course, you could still find orange-haired delinquent schoolboy, but that's natural for me

I don't look at anime/manga and think that Japanese or anyone sees the same thing I do in anime, there wouldn't be forums talking about anime if they did. I always go with the story because most of the time its not "our" time like Ghost in the Shell, or even "our" world anymore like My-Hime. I have notice for a long time now that the trend for anime/manga, comics, etc has been almost a pushing away of race and just the telling of the story, which is what it should be about. And how anyone would think that now a days is beyond me. I mean have you seen Haibane Renmei, KURAU Phantom Memory, Red Garden? Unless 'they', the characters start pointing out things and tell 'me' the reader/watcher that its Japan I don't even think that the story is in Japan. Even Japanese "true life" focused stories like NANA and Genshiken, if it hadn't been for the locations being in Japan, they (the stories) could have been anywhere.

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'The 1 thing that can change a person...is meeting another." - xxxHoLiC

i knew that, i just being a smartass to that guy, who couldnt give me a clear explanation