Is Japanese Racist?

While I've been having good time in the United States, some serious issue was born in Tokyo, Japan.

First of all, I all want you to see this clip.



This is a TV advertisement of Cellphone company, "E-Moble."
Actually, this style of presentation is based on the speach of President Barack Obama.
And, international news reporters in Japan had found this commercial as "racism against black people by using monkey in the position of Barack Obama." They've been claiming this issue because there is a history that monkey was used to discriminate black people.


Before I start saying anything further, please let me tell you this.
It is true that Japanese people, especially after WWII, do not know about history of the world so much.
Even some hates learning history. I hate to say, but I was one of them.
So, I only know basic history of the world that school in Japan taught me. I was more interested in Chemistry and Biology, and I just focused on them. I don't know any detail of slavery. How whites discriminated black people. I only know about slavery from general idea floating on the Internet and best seller books from Alice Walker, though it really shocked me. There are so many things I don't know. But please let me argue about this issue, monkey in the commercial.


The monkey used in this commercial is Japanese Macaque that is native in Japan and was once reported as endangered animal. As you can see by their name, we respect them. It's really hard to explain how we feel about them, but they are very different from other monkey in Japan. In addition, as the president of E-Moble said on CNN interview, Japanese Macaque is a mascot character of the campany, like the character of Time Warner Cable TV commercial. The company has been using Japanese Macaque in their advertisement many time before. As the fact in the advertisement, characters and products they're selling tend to appear with a impact to catch people's attention so that people remember the products with these characters and thus those memories are not easy to disappear. Do you remember the TV commercial with baby talking like an adult man? Like that. It's the way to make people remember their products.

And even though the producers of this commercial got an idea from the speach of the president Barack Obama, from the fact above, it's very obvious that they did not use monkey to offend those of who felt offended.

Some of these reporters even said that Japanese poeple need to respect the history and the culture of other countries.
And I agree with them. The producers of the commercial should have thought how their commercial affects people, not only in Japan, but also outside the country because we are living in Globalization.

And, I want to say same thing to them. I'm sorry that we did not know it was going to offend people in the other countries. But please understand and respect our history and culture too.


It is not Japanese' fault that black people feel offended by like this monkey issue.
And Japanese has a history of being called monkey too. From whom? Europe and the United States. We don't know about how black people were humiliated by the term of monkey, but We do know how do we feel when people use monkey to represent our identity.
But this is not what happened this time.

This was just an advertisement with monkey, Japanese Macaque, as a main character.