Asian Washing? Is It a Real Thing?

We’ve all heard the term whitewashing before when it comes to movies. Movies such as Ghost in the Shell and Netflix Death Note had this word place upon them, but have you heard of the term asian washing? I’m pretty sure you haven’t since I’m sure it’s not a real term, but it is a thing if we’re going by what the term whitewashing means.

I thought about this concept with another Japanese movie that came out awhile back, but this thought resurface once I saw the Nisekoi movie and learned more about the casting. Nisekoi main character Raku will be played by Japanese actor Kento Nakajima and Chitoge will be played by Japanese actress Ayami Nakajo. Now I thought about the concept of asian washing when I found out that Chitoge was half american and that the actress was Japanese. Now I’m not saying this is a bad thing for this movie, but in the next movie I want to talk about it in, I do think it’s a bad thing.

We have the sweet Japanese version on the left and the savage American version on the right.

This is less me being angry about some fake asian washing concept I came up with and more on the fact that they seem like they didn’t even care. When Japan announced that they were going to produce an Attack on Titan movie, we knew from the start that they were going to fuck it up. Their first fuck up was adding original characters and modern day weapons, and that was just the tip of the iceberg. Attack on Titan has a diverse cast of characters when it come to hight, face, and race (were the black people at though?), so when a Japanese movie studio thought about taking this project on, I knew it wasn’t going to stay true to the source material. Now t be fair, since it’s a Japanese studio I understand more, they have limited budget and limited actors, this isn’t fucking Hollywood okay. But, if there’s one thing I can’t excuse them for, it’d be not giving my boy Armin a blonde fucking wig!

You can't even tell who the fuck is Armin in this shot.