Does BLACKFACE automatically = RACISM? Or would this performance only be considered offensive if impersonator Koichi Yamadera was a white European or American?

Kelly O—formerly a Stranger staff photographer, music writer, Drunk of the Week columnist, and more!—finished art school and a soul-crushing internship at a corporate advertising agency in Detroit,...

12 replies on “Lunchtime Quickie”

  4. Kelly,
    It isn’t too surprising that it is coming from Japan. When I was there ten years ago, I noticed blatant discrimination. It’s essentially a monoculture. They wouldn’t worry about a backlash from African Americans.

  6. Forest Whitaker wore blackface in Last Kind of Scotland and nobody seemed to have a problem with that, so I think the rules are flexible, depending on the participants’ race and intention.

  8. I don’t think it’s racist. I don’t really know what to think about it. But I agree with #1 that’s it’s an impression of an individual, not a generalized, negative stereotype being portrayed. My kid dressed up as a lion for a school play – is that speciesist?

  9. That’s a terrible comparison, #8. I think it is racist, in a way. It’s not “only imitating people,” but also relying on a number of physical embodiments of “other races” and also sets a standard for “regular (in this case, Japanese) traits” while handily mocking these outsider phenotypes.

    In comment #1, I think it’s a pretty nifty turn, but as a person with some chest hair, and the use of chest hair as a comic device, again is a somewhat racist performance. Blah blah blah context.

    Not to be “oversensitive” or anything, to us it is racism, to the performers and their intended audience it is not. I guess it depends on whose perspective you choose to acknowledge. I think I also saw a video of a japanese comedian on a variety show pretending to be Richard Pryor doing his impression of “jive talk.” Taking the context of seventies and early-eighties black american urban vernacular out of context is inappropriate. I fail to see how blackface (or whiteface) is not, in some way, racist.

    But really, is Slog going to be a place to discuss the multiple layers of race enactment by using these layers with so little discussion?

  10. No, Pookie, it is racist to the Japanese, but they don’t care. Racism – and sexism, and ableism for that matter, are par for the course and considered human nature in my experience of the Japanese. It’s perfectly legal here too; job listings often specify race and age and even attractiveness.

    That doesn’t make it okay though. It’s not the blackface that bothers me most about this clip, though, it’s the rest of it: the broken trumpet, the vacant eye movements, etc. Ugh.

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