Don’t worry anime fans, the title is a convenient play on words. This has nothing to do with the actual anime, Welcome To The N.H.K. Now for you fans of the actual broadcasting station NHK in Japan (careful, don’t all of you yell out at once), we have some news to discuss. Recently the primary public broadcasting network has come under fire in Japan for their covering of the Black Lives Matter movement. A special segment aired on June 7th attempting to address the issue and spread knowledge of events surrounding it in Japan, and even the current head of the U.S. embassy in Tokyo, Joseph Young, said this was a dumpster fire. Today we’ll take a look at what people are upset about and see how we’re feeling.
The backlash seems to focus on two main points. The first is that the news station did not properly draw attention to the impact George Floyd’s death had on sparking these protests. A Variety article claims that in fact the segment made no mention of his death whatsoever. Instead, they claim the broadcast focused on income inequality between blacks and whites and how this equality was exaggerated by the coronavirus(???) and how that was a big source of the protests. In a statement, NHK said that they did in fact talk about George Floyd and why his death was a much more central factor and how the movement is more focused on police brutality. NHK has been taking down clips of this segment like madmen for obvious reasons and I haven’t found anywhere to verify whether or not they did or didn’t mention Floyd, but it was probably a bad idea to talk about income inequality a bunch anyway considering that’s not a main point of the protests. Still, I don’t know if this is quite something to be SUPER upset about…
What the fuck is that? What is that abomination? Well, this is the second main point people aren’t happy about. First of all, putting the stereotypes aside, this shit is the ugliest artstyle I’ve seen in a minute. The black people in these drawings look like what the KKK sees when they see a black person on the street. I even put the cover image for this article AGAIN above this paragraph because I couldn’t believe it the first time. I don’t know what I hate the most. The stupid fucking wallet with the little sad face almost does as much damage as the depictions of the people to make the drawing feel like its trivializing the issues. Then we got my man playing some Jimmy Hendrix on guitar for some reason. Fair enough I guess, but why did they have to make the guy on the far right look like a damn raging zombie yelling for brains? Regardless of whether you classify the drawings as containing stereotypical racism or not, they’re so fucking unappealing and childish that I can’t help but agree with the backlash that this art was an awful choice for such a sensitive topic.
Maybe if the art was clean like this, people wouldn't be so mad.
Honestly, I doubt the station was actually trying to attack black people with this broadcast or trivialize the movement. But in a time like this, holy shit what a blunder. These days you can say shit like “Guys I don’t know if rioting is the best solution” and still get your ass blasted on social media for that opinion somehow, so it was no wonder that a broadcast like this was going to come under fire. Anyone from America would have seen it coming a mile away, but I guess they didn’t have a foreign affairs advisor in the studio that day. Needless to say, I bet NHK will probably be careful from now on… and hopefully hire a new damn artist.
Are the drawings racist, or just ugly? Did NHK fuck this up on purpose to attack the movement, or were they just ignorant? Broadcast your comment to the world by typing it below!
