Current Events > Why was corporate America of the 90s so opposed to "Asian" content?

(+) Yeah! (+)

Ninjas were cool. Everybody loved ninjas. Everything else that accompanied Japan -- language, culture, attire, etc. -- could be left on the cutting room floor.

I'm mostly talking about video games which never left Japan due to being too foreign for western audiences, but there were other issues as well. Like, the original Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles cartoon (in contrast to the source comic) really downplayed Splinter and Shredder's Japanese identity. And the only time the show delved into the martial arts beyond the "ninja" title was a sacred Cur-Li technique which turned out to be a Three Stooges joke.



I guess it's for the best that video games didn't swap out obviously Japanese protagonists for blond haired White guys, but why couldn't that type of game get released in the US? Why not just say "Oh, he's a ninja"? It worked for Strider!

You could have a Japanese ninja in New York. You could have a White guy in Japan. You couldn't have a Japanese person in Japan. Why not?

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Would it really be too hard for kids to learn about Japanese food? Would calling it a Riceball in Pokemon really have confused kids back then?
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FortuneCookie posted...

You could have a Japanese ninja in New York. You could have a White guy in Japan. You couldn't have a Japanese person in Japan. Why not?

Fairly typical hollywood style whitewashing tbh. Asians are portrayed as mythical samurais or warrior monks or wise mystics and thrown into otherwise western scenarios but that was always about it.

People had a fantastical idea of asian mysticism but didn't really have much interest in the reality of it.

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Beveren_Rabbit posted...

Would it really be too hard for kids to learn about Japanese food? Would calling it a Riceball in Pokemon really have confused kids back then?

I'd forgotten about that. The conversions of Pokemon and Alex Kidd had a real problem with kids eating Japanese foods. Can't let the protagonist eat something I don't regularly eat!



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Subtle racism against asians maybe

Beveren_Rabbit posted...

Would it really be too hard for kids to learn about Japanese food? Would calling it a Riceball in Pokemon really have confused kids back then?

Eat your hamburger, Apollo.

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Why do we still not have a proper Assassin's Creed style ninja game?

Tsushima was a huge success and all they had to do was slap a samurai into a generic open world

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Xenophobia

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Because it doesnt sell

the only reason corporations do anything is to make money.

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Coloradough posted...

Why do we still not have a proper Assassin's Creed style ninja game?

Tsushima was a huge success and all they had to do was slap a samurai into a generic open world

Thank God Sucker Punch did it and not Ubisoft, though.

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In the UK Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles were called Teenage Mutant Hero Turtles and depictions of nunchucks were illegal.

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Eat your jelly donut, TC

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p-m posted...

In the UK Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles were called Teenage Mutant Hero Turtles and depictions of nunchucks were illegal.

Did they just censor Michaelangelo entirely?
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maybe they could only handle one minority as part of their mainstream culture

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It's less about being too Japanese, and more about not being American enough

"Our userbase is too stupid to recognize different things; if it's not familiar, it won't sell!"

And then they realized that was dumb a decade or so later.

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