jenlog:

greater-than-colon-capital-c:

fearfield:

“anime is racially ambiguous” aka “these Asian characters with Asian names and Asian cultural markers made by Asian people don’t look like the hideously caricaturized narrow stereotypes of Asians that I’ve been used to seeing.”

Actually, a lot of times characters in anime /are/ drawn in a racially ambiguous way. The practice of doing so is generally termed “mukokuseki”. 

It basically works as a way for them to have more visually diverse and interesting characters. They don’t need to draw all their characters as being obviously Japanese because in Japan - a historically ethnic and culturally homogenous country - the vast majority of people… are Japanese (Shocking, I know). So, they only use “stereotypical” (in other words, excessively averaged) racial/ethnic depictions when representing foreigners (Like how they excessively represent Americans as having blond hair, for instance.)

Interestingly, the same effect can be seen in other cultures as well - the Simpsons are generally assumed to represent white people even though they’re a completely unnatural shade of yellow. (White people, making up ~72% of the US’ population, are the statistical average there).

tl;dr version: Animation tends to show the greatest degree of racial ambiguity when representing members of the majority population of its country of origin, while using stereotypical depictions of foreigners to clearly mark them as being such.

why is OP saying “asian” instead of “japanese” though?

there are probably more american and european characters in anime than non-japanese asians