Yeah, they're brief, but you will want to track down any time the creators address Anthy & Akio's foreignness in interviews. For example, in this interview, Saito repeats the common knowledge that her earlier book Magnolia Waltz was set in India and she was partially consciously making use of that drawing experience... but she also muses that her use of Indian characters may have been influenced by Lalah Sune from Mobile Suit Gundam. (She doesn't say that second part with great certainty.)


Besides, that, I don't know about anything that you can't turn up in a five-minute Google search. These ones seem to be the most directly relevent.

Embedded Racism: Japan's Visible Minorities and Racial Discrimination (specifically the seventh essay, From Foreign Fetishization to Fear in Japanese Media)
Perspectives on Race and Culture in Japanese Society: The Mass Media and Ethnicity
Race and Reflexivity: The Black Other in Contemporary Japanese Mass Culture


Good luck!

BunB wrote:

Making Anthy & Akio "Indian" always seemed like a purely stylistic choice to me. Also (as an Indian myself) it always annoyed me how India was represented solely as that exotic country with spicy food and jungles with elephants roaming around. Like it was literally only used as a backdrop for the shitty comedic moments.

Oh, absolutely. That episode is some grade-A orientalist (if that is precisely the right word to describe an East Asian depiction of India) bullshit. It completely waves aside the idea that India might have real geography, culture, or, you know, visible people.

Last edited by Dallbun (01-15-2016 03:27:56 PM)

thank you soooo much for all these replies (and for the re-welcoming) its very helpful for my project.

I suppose the question then is are they being racist for using this coloring and background to create interest and the appearance of the exotic, or is that comparatively forgivable given the depiction doesn't involve any overt stereotyping or implied disliking of the group.

Making Anthy & Akio "Indian" always seemed like a purely stylistic choice to me. Also (as an Indian myself) it always annoyed me how India was represented solely as that exotic country with spicy food and jungles with elephants roaming around. Like it was literally only used as a backdrop for the shitty comedic moments.

I guess these two points are very important. The intention is not immediately the same as the impact the message (or lack of) can have on the public. It's not precisely a matter of judgement, but on how the public reacts to the same material in different decades and different cultures.

Is problematic the use of a minority for exoticism? Is it in Japan? Is it for people from India, or for people of India in Japan? How differently would it be for people from India in Japan or the States, or from the same collective but in the 90's or in the present? What impact does it have on different people in different times?

I'm also interested in the "white savior" trope in the show. Is it deconstructed, criticized or reproduced? Did Saito reproduced it, and Ikuhara attempted to deconstruct it? Did it work for the time, does it still work?

To me it's extremely important to note how, despite how problematic it could be, it's still a rare example of intersectionality. And the other way around; despite how  much of an intersectional rare example it is, how problematic it still can be (or can become with the passing of time).


All insights on the matter are very important to me. Speak your mind

Last edited by pesimistamente (01-18-2016 08:02:45 AM)

Epi, I am so glad to see you again.  You know I always think of you when I see poptarts, right?

Just sayin', you left a big mark here on my heart. I hope life has been good to you.

As far as the topic goes,  I'm not entirely certain of this and I would have to find sources to back it up, but I'd always been told that in Japan, Indian guys are considered to be like... exotically hot. Saito uses them more than once in her works-- and from what I have read, always in a position of sexual power. My completely uneducated opinion is that she wanted something easily differentiated in a visual sense, and something with a reputation for being attractive that she could play on. I'm fairly sure the decision went no further than that-- after all, we are talking about someone who put Akio in plaid pants.

Addressing the representation issue... I guess I really should have seen those episodes as being set in India. I didn't; I basically accepted them as Unnamed Junglespace that didn't have any people in it. Now that I've heard it might be India, I empathize with BunB, but I did want to say that I myself, and probably some other people who've watched the show did not see it as anywhere in particular. Whether that's good or bad I don't know.

As for the white savior thing... mang. That's a total can of worms. Personally I've always felt that was there but offset by the fact that both Anthy and Akio can control reality itself within their realm. They are both shown to be very powerful, certainly more powerful than Utena. I'm not saying it's not there, though.

Ha, I guess I'm just stupid then. I put it in cartoonland in my head and never really registered that I should be thinking of it as a real place. Which is something far less people will do, I'd imagine. That sucks, a lot.

Yasha wrote:

As for the white savior thing... mang. That's a total can of worms. Personally I've always felt that was there but offset by the fact that both Anthy and Akio can control reality itself within their realm. They are both shown to be very powerful, certainly more powerful than Utena. I'm not saying it's not there, though.

But...Utena isn't white...is she?

satyreyes wrote:

rhyaniwyn wrote:

Yasha wrote:

As for the white savior thing... mang. That's a total can of worms. Personally I've always felt that was there but offset by the fact that both Anthy and Akio can control reality itself within their realm. They are both shown to be very powerful, certainly more powerful than Utena. I'm not saying it's not there, though.

But...Utena isn't white...is she?

When I think of the white savior trope, I think of it as being connected to colonial apologism, White Man's Burden-style.  But Japan didn't colonize India.  I don't know that Japan has postcolonial guilt to expunge the way white Westerners might.  The Ainu, maybe?  But Ainu on average have lighter skin than Yamato Japanese.  I don't know where to start deconstructing it.  Which is what Epimista was getting at in the OP: I certainly don't have the intimate cultural knowledge of Japan to know what's going on with race in Utena, but if there's a "white savior" thing happening, then it can't mean the same thing in Japan that it would in America or Europe.

The Japanese did have a go or two on colonizing/conquering other countries but not anywhere near India, however skin-color-wise they were once upon a time titled "the honorary white" as opposed to all those little yellow men from the rest of East Asia. But to my knowlegde as a Japanologist, no such thing as a "white/Japanese saviour" is culturally recognized, neither as a positive or negative trope.

Exotic mysteriousness aside (which perhaps might be likened to how Gypsies are viewed in the West?), I think there's a very different initial feeling about India in Japan vs. in the West. The common Indo-European roots of our cultures and those of the Indian Peninsula is still relatively fresh knowlegde and not widespread so Inda is seen as an exotic faraway thing that is completely foreign to us. The Japanese, however, have absorbed Buddhism at least 1500 years ago and though it was brought to Japan via China it is common knowdledge that it originated in India. So Indian culture might be viewed perhaps similarly as the Roman/Greek cultural heritage that is common to the Western nations.