H-JAPAN (E): representations of blacknesS, Japanese & Korean Cinema

[Michael Craig]

A quick addendum to the Barret Wallace observation: much of the
controversy surrounding him in the U.S. (and global Anglophone?) fan
community had to do with the way his speech was translated.  In the
English release of FF7, Barret speaks in an over-the-top jive/ebonics
dialect and swears copiously (though the swearing was perhaps less purely
race-coded than it was a symptom of the English localization's broader
effort to court controversy with the American fandom; Cid Highwind, a
caucasian pilot in the game, swears much more than Barret.)  This is
certainly not the only way in which Barret evokes black stereotypes--other
examples include his character model's exaggerated body language and, most
famously, the fact that he has a gatling gun grafted onto his right arm,
which he fires into the air when he loses his temper (which happens
often))--but his speech probably played a significant role, for the
U.S./Anglophone audience, in making those other qualities seem less like
ubiquitous anime/game genre tropes (where they otherwise would've fit
quite neatly) and more actively racist than the portrayal of Barret might
have seemed in other languages.  I do not know how, if at all, his speech
was marked in the original Japanese, but I'll look into it.

It's perhaps also worth considering, from a media politics/methodology
standpoint, whether his speech would have been translated that way had
Final Fantasy VII been made after the advent of voice acting in Japanese
Role-Playing Games.  I personally can't imagine any U.S.-based
localization studio making a black actor talk like that in 1997; and
Barret's speech has been toned down considerably in more recent iterations
of the franchise as well as in films such as Advent Children (though he
typically plays very minor roles in these spinoffs.)

One other note: perhaps the most racially complex aspect of Barret's
character is the fact that he is the adoptive father of a white daughter,
and that his devotion to the girl--his copious references to how much he
has sacrificed for her--arguably humanizes the more violent aspects of his
personality, making them seem more like fatherly neurosis/impatience
(Barret's temper is most often roused when the other characters take too
long to get ready for the next part of the journey) than stereotypical
black hedonism.  I'm not entirely sure if the biracial aspect of Barret's
family was significant to the developers (the game itself never explicitly
mentions it, and the U.S. fan community, perhaps following that lead, has
seldom raised Barret's family life in its debates about the game's racism)
or was meant simply as one more evocation of motley crew/sekai-kei
conventions in JRPG storytelling, but it may be worth asking: within the
game's iconography, is Barret's blackness marked when he fires his gun-arm
at enemy helicopters, or only when he fires it because he's pissed off?


One other, unrelated observation about anime: there's a fairly persistent
undercurrent of black characters in anime whose blackness, despite the
fact that there is almost never more than one black character in these
series, is not marked in any obvious way beyond the skin itself and is
never acknowledged at all in the anime's diegesis.  Perhaps the best-known
example of this is Bear Walken in Gungrave, a hitman who is portrayed as
vaguely more "honourable" (often in a stereotypically samurai/yakuza
fashion--he believes in single combat, respects his rivals, looks out for
his daughter (again with the daughters!), etc.) than the other Mafiosi in
the series.

I really have no clue what to make of this trend--a kind of sekai-kei
quota system, maybe?  Since the settings of these anime are often not
explicitly Japanese (or even "of this world") it may not illuminate much
about this thread's main topic, but, still, it seems worth considering.

Michael Craig
Ph.D. Candidate
Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures / Center for New Media
University of California, Berkeley


> I've been away for a few days and the discussion seems to have
> covered a lot of ground, but if video games and the movies made from
> them belong in this discussion, then Final Fantasy VII and the
> accompanying movie, Final Fantasy VII Advent Children feature a black
> character, Barret Wallace, who was apparently modeled after Mr. T.
> There has already been some discussion of whether the depiction is
> racist.  See:
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barret_Wallace
>
> In addition, again from the anime realm, Samurai Champloo features
> Tokugawa-era characters who are ethnically coded  (at least in so far
> as their names are concerned) as Japanese/Ryukuan, but the show
> features anachronistic use of hip hop or funk culture such as rap
> music, break dancing, graffiti, so it may provide an interesting look
> into depictions of blackness despite the lack of any black characters
> per se.
>
>
>
> Bruce Baird
> Assistant Professor
> Asian Languages and Literatures
> University of Massachusetts Amherst
> Butô, Japanese Theater, Intellectual History
>
> 717 Herter Hall
> 161 Presidents Drive
> University of Massachusetts Amherst
> Amherst, MA 01003-9312
> Phone: 413-577-4992
> Fax: 413-545-4975
> baird at asianlan.umass.edu
>
>
>
>
>