81–90 of 147 posts
Man, have we some issues to work through!
What struck me as odd in Asia were all the skin whitening products. Even regular cosmetics had "Whitening" plastered over it.
When I lived in Korea it was explained to me that farmers and peasants had darker complexions because they were out in the sun all day. Having lighter skin was a matter of class distinction, and it had nothing to do with Western influence.
I have to admit, I always wondered why Naruto was a blue-eyed blonde white kid. This article helped me consider some of my own reasoning. I had just assumed Naruto had characters that reflected a mix of races instead of one race. The last sentence of this article is offensive though. It's a derogatory generalization. Personally it doesn't matter to me what the characters look like and I don't see why someone relating…
When you have 10 or 20 characters, and want them to be recognizable at a glance (for brand ownership), even when appearing completely out-of-context alongside characters of similar ages and styles from other series, and even when drawn minimally and potentially badly by a subcontracted art studio--it's logical to make them whatever race has the widest "visual range." It's also logical, for the same reasons, to give them technicolor hair.
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Those characters have big eyes and foreheads for two reasons. Firstly, to make them cuter... like babies. All baby humans have proportionally big heads/eyes to the rest of their bodies and we're hardwired to think of those characteristics as simpler, cuter, and deserving of our attention. Secondly, to give the animator a face that is both simpler and larger which makes it much easier to draw expressions These two thi…
I once took a Psychology course which had another explanation for the large eyes. Apparently, when humans are sexually aroused, their pupils get larger. This makes people with larger pupils more sexually appealing, leading to all kinds of tricks to making your pupils larger (for example, candlelit dinners; also, in some older civilizations, women used to use eyedrops to make their pupils larger). All of this leads to…
The intro from the Wikipedia entry ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atropa_belladonna ) says:
"It has a long history of use as a medicine, cosmetic, and poison. Before the Middle Ages, it was used as an anesthetic for surgery, the ancient Romans used it as a poison (the wife of Emperor Augustus and the wife of Claudius both used it to murder contemporaries) and predating this it was used to make poison tipped arrows."
and
"Drops prepared from the belladonna plant were used to dilate women's pupils, an effect considered attractive."
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When I lived in Korea it was explained to me that farmers and peasants had darker complexions because they were out in the sun all day. Having lighter skin was a matter of class distinction, and it had nothing to do with Western influence.
That argument strikes me as disingenuous. Being fat used to be a class distinction (poor people couldn't afford to be fat) but it's not popular today. I suspect preference for lighter skin color is more self-racist than people like to portray (even to themselves).
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I had initially assumed that whitening creams were used to create a caucasian look - an idea which I found quite repulsive. When a friend explained that it was to mimic the appearance of the upperclass, whose skin colour contrasted with a labourer's, it began to make sense. When thought of as a status enhancer, it doesn't seem that disimilar to tanning..
It's funny, a friend of mine asked me why "all Japanese people want to look white" as I am from japan (I don't look even a little bit white, let alone Japanese). The fact is that paleness has been associated with beauty there since before they knew that Caucasians even existed. So I don't particularly have an answer, but it's clear that it's not that they want to be white because Caucasians are white.
A former hostel-mate of mine was Japanese and we would hangout with the Japanese expats in Shanghai. 100% of the time, Japanese people would speak English to him. I forgot where exactly in Japan he is from, but he said everyone in his home town looked like him, but Japanese people elsewhere would assume he is something else; 6.4 tall, full beard, and looked a lot like Tarkan, the Turkish singer:
http://www.frogview.com/uploadimages101/476366f66b4d62.07061...
A year later when I went to Japan I found out how unusual looking he was.
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You are right. edanm asked for some evidence that there are idiots who think Japanese worship white people. It seems there are many, so the article really targets an existing problem. That's the point.
I was specifically looking for evidence that scholars believe this. I don't doubt there are idiots who believe all kinds of things! And by the way, what's up with the people posting that Yahoo! question? If it's not a joke, I'm seriously worried about the state of humanity.
"The ultimate reason for the lower Japanese body esteem may perhaps concern broader cultural and historical perspectives. Being part of the West, but non-Caucasians, Japanese people seem collectively to experience high incongruence between their Western-oriented bodily ideals and the perceptions of their own body. "
Japanese body image: Structure and esteem scores in a cross-cultural perspective by Rotem Kowner, University of Haifa, Israel, in: INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF PSYCHOLOGY, 2002, 37 (3), 149–159
http://www.sjsu.edu/people/jennifer.anderson/courses/c5/s1/K...
The more a stylized a cartoon character is, thee more it look like you . E.g what ethnicity does this character have: ☺ ? I bet it has the same ethnicity as you!
It has no ethnic origin beyond unicode. Just like it has no eye colour, no skin colour (no skin), etc.. Am I weird about this?
I really can't say I've ever thought of a stick figure as coming from a particular place or having a particular identity. But then I don't really identify with a particular location, I'm just happy to be in it in preference to other places.
