There’s a lot of English bleedover in Japan.
I take it back, I think they were deliberately trying to draw a parallel with Obama, but I can’t see that they were intending a racist message.
And Japanese would be puzzled by that connection – it’s just not something that would ever occur to them.
Right. It’s just those crazy PC liberals who think that ad is talking about Barack Obama. Because it could be referring to anyone who happens to be running for President of the United States in 2008 on a platform promising “change”.
You’re right. Racism is dead, and the big problem with society is people who try to figure out what stuff means.
Since the monkey is part of their ad campaign I would agree. But it clearly looks like they are lampooning our elections.
If James Clavell’s novel Shogun is to be believed, it was not unusual for Europeans to refer to the Japanese as “monkeys”.
Agreed. If black people don’t have a history of being compared to “monkeys” in Japanese culture, then there’s nothing racist about the ad. It may be a reference to Obama (I’m sure the Japanese are aware of Obama, his platform of “change” and his popularity in the US; most people here are as well) but without any racial subtext. Especially given that the company was already using a macaque mascot.
Oh, 9/11 changed everything. 
I’m just saying why do some people have to read some racist intent into EVERYTHING? Do they think they’re actually helping anyone by reminding us all that there are some people who think black people look like monkeys?
I don’t know. But I don’t know that anyone’s actually out there doing that.
I think they’re just wondering (maybe a little paranoid-ly in some cases) if people are trying to get away with anything.
I don’t think anyone here is doing that. I, for one, said that I don’t think racism is the case here.
But why do some people have to deny racist intent in EVERYTHING? Do they think they’re actually helping anyone by denying that racism exists and some people are racist?
My attitude towards race in our society can be summed up by a story my mom once told me when I was a little kid. The story was about a guy who learned of a buried treasure from an old man. The old man said, “Whatever you do, when you’re digging up the treasure, DON’T think about a white elephant! If you think about a white elephant while you’re digging up the treasure, the treasure chest will be empty when you open it!” The poor guy tried and tried to not think about a white elephant while he was digging but - naturally - because he was trying to not think about a white elephant…he was thinking about a white elephant.
The treasure chest was, of course, empty.
This is the way it is with racial issues in America. I feel like on the one hand, the message that we all get is, “don’t think about race! don’t think about race! don’t think about race! don’t think about race!” What does that make people do? Why, it makes them think about race.
I think the media should just shut up about race. People should stop looking for racism in everything they see. Maybe, just maybe, if people stopped making race such a huge issue, acting like the whole world is going to explode if there’s something that’s racially insensitive, we would gradually forget about these race-politics in our society.
This is just my humble opinion - there is, of course, no way of testing this or proving that my theory has any truth at all. It’s just sort of my gut instinct.
It’s not like Obama is unique in promising change. Most politicans claim to want change–they all say that.
Anyway, while the ad looks like it’s riffing on the election, I don’t think there was any racist intent in using a (pale) monkey that they’ve been using for a long time. The same ad could have played in 2000 and people would have thought it was humorously lampooning Bush, who’s been portrayed as a monkey once a week for the past 8 or 9 years.
“Monkey = black person” is a pretty far stretch in most of the US these days. I mean, most people don’t make that connection right away, it has to be explained to them. In Japan, it isn’t even part of the culture anyway. I see no reason to accuse the company of having racist motivations for the ad.
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My opinion of Japan is that the people there don’t care about anything outside of their country. They seem to have a self-contained culture that takes whatever they like and assimilated it (and over-dramatising them at the same time). Eg. They just pronounce English words the same way they read romanised Japanese
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It’s an ad campaign that started at least a year ago and has taken on a life of its own.
It started with an office setting, where several business people were arguing over ridiculous random things. They would finish with the one foreign board member giving a final absurd comment in complete deadpan. The black guy was the most popular and became the recurring character. In a later ad his name was given as Goro Noguchi, with the joke being how badly this threw Japanese people off their stride.
When Softbank started pitching their family calling plans, they decided to run with the absurdist approach and created this family. The Mom is a regular housewife, the Dad is a dog who works as a high school teacher. Sister (played by model Aya Ueto) is a sales clerk in a Softbank shop, and the Brother (the black guy) is a regular office worker. In one ad Sister goes to see Grandpa, who’s a whale living in an aquarium.
Sublight, that campaign sounds so wonderfully surreal.
The US election is big news here, so I think that aspect was definitely intentional.
FWIW, Obama seems to be the favorite by a wide margin in Japan.
In some of the recent episodes, we learn that the mother is the principal at the school where the father teaches. Interestingly enough, E-mobile did a particularly poor parody of this series:
The white dog is a very obvious reference to Softbank. The monkey crying has nothing to do with political rallies, it’s an image they use in every one of their commercials. It’s tears of joy.
Another example of inflammatory, unbalanced reporting from a cable news station. Why are we surprised?
In the group of mostly blacks living in Japan who were shown on CNN objecting to the commercial, one man said that he couldn’t believe how anyone who deals internationally couldn’t understand how blacks have been portrayed as monkeys, but I can’t see how the average Japanese could.
You claim everyone is saying “don’t think about race”. You then claim that the media talks too much about race and should shut up on the subject. Huh?
And I don’t see how ignoring racism is going to stop it. Racism has historically thrived quite well when society as a whole looked the other way. That allowed the racists to get away with it. We’re better off confronting the racists and exposing them. The only ones who benefit from ignoring racism are the racists.
The funny thing is that many, if not most Japanese are convinced that westerners, in particular Americans, use the slur “yellow monkey” to refer to them. I’d never heard the expression before coming here, but if anything “racism” and “monkey” would only bring up images of racist attitudes towards Japanese people. (Plus, the monkey is a Japanese macaque, which most Japanese would instantly recognize.)