I Am Completely Serious

(repost for technical reasons)

I'm fairly certain that Japanese people in general don't have any idea what the blackface caricatures mean - by which I mean, I think they have no idea that the images hold any sort of emotional charge at all. It doesn't feel to me like the sort of coy pseudo-ignorance of, say, those American Apparel ads, where the designers clearly knew they were playing with fire, and had just decided they weren't going to think about it too hard. I assume the images just got picked up from American animation in the fifties or sixties, and are still hanging around in the lexicon as sort of a vestigial thing.

That's not to say that, you know, Japan has no problem with black people, because obviously it does. It's just that minstrelsy has no cultural currency here, and its imagery carries no meaning.

(Having said this, I'm not entirely sure it's true of the fascination with afros a lot of shounen manga seem to have.)

Yukito Kishiro is the only manga artist I can think of who fairly consistently draws black characters in ways Western readers would find recognizable/acceptable. I'm not really sure about how some of them are characterized, but, hey. The evil genius who conquered the solar system is a black guy and (by shounen-manga standards) a pretty interesting character! This is not a common plot in either Japan or the US.