...And @Ghostly wins the thread with the odd tactic of using facts and psychology tenants to remove racial confusion.

Yeah, sorry guys. Anime characters are Japanese unless drawn as American or British 'white'. Stories about Japan, set in Japan, with Japanese characters being played by white people is whitewashing. The fact that her character is now renamed "Major" should tell you something.

Major Motoko Kusanagi has always appeared 'Japanese' to me, even her cyborg face looked 'Japanese' to me. Those that think the anime character looks 'white' must also think that, in the anime world, Japan is populated solely with white people, because they all look like her except the actual Americans.

I don't know if you can really consider this character being "whitewashed" since she's doesn't have a race... it's a damn robot with a human mind.

Super Tuesday!

MoA has a great, short piece on Clinton's role in the destruction of Libya, which includes this gem, which I had totally forgotten.

2 more comments have been lost in the ether at this killed duplicate.

This video has been seconded as a duplicate; transferring votes to the original video and killing this dupe - dupeof seconded with isdupe by newtboy.

*dupeof=http://videosift.com/video/Hollywood-Whitewashing-Last-Week-Tonight-Feb2016

This video has been nominated as a duplicate of this video by eric3579. If this nomination is seconded with *isdupe, the video will be killed and its votes transferred to the original.

Wait what? Is it automatically ok if the skewed / whitewashed role is written into the script? You do know that this kind of skew doesn't come about by the kkk kidnapping black actors at gunpoint in the middle of filming and replacing them with white ones?

If a Japanese director were to make a movie about the civil war, but chose to make it about a Japanese fighter who comes to the US, becomes the most kickass soldier of the Union, makes personal friends with Lincoln, and convinces him to stay the course on emancipation... that would be pretty weird, even if the argument went that this was the only way a Japanese audience could identify with this obscure historic time.

Your video, Hollywood Whitewashing: Last Week Tonight, Feb2016, has made it into the Top 15 New Videos listing. Congratulations on your achievement. For your contribution you have been awarded 1 Power Point.

This achievement has earned you your "Pop Star" Level 3 Badge!

I find a lot of these complaints to be pretty silly. Particularly the roles of 40+ years ago, like John Wayne as Genghis Khan, etc.

And The Last Samurai is awesome. OK, Tom Cruise (white guy) is the main character -- because he is a lens through which an American audience can reflect on the respect that he gains for the real (Japanese) samurai. All the roles that the script/plot dictates should be played by Japanese people are. I'd even argue that the title doesn't refer to Tom Cruise's Nathan Algren, but rather to the whole group of samurai (notice how the word can be plural or singular) led by Ken Watanabe's Katsumoto.

There are some (plenty of?) legit gripes about "whitewashing" movies, but accusing movies like the The Last Samurai of it (when they are actually doing things exactly right and making a movie FULL of non-white roles played by non-white people) seems counterproductive to the argument...

Sadly, until the US's whitewashing of history was complete, it was pretty widely-spread that Japan had been attempting to surrender for up to a week before the bombs were dropped, but the US didn't want to lose out on its opportunity to show off it's new war-toy.
This is widely disputed today, but I honestly can't tell if it is for reasons of rewriting the past, or that it honestly wasn't true.
(I'd also heard several times in my life that Japan had subs spotted near Hawaii before the Pearl Harbor bombing, but it was 'ignored' so an attack would justify the US's entry into WW2).
So obviously it's almost impossible to determine facts from history when every generation tries to remove the traces of its mistakes, but I *do* know the Japan-surrender was a pretty widely controversial one, and potentially true. What I know of the US today, that detail is another one of those dark pieces of history I can look at and say: "...Yeah, they would do that".

@Lawdeedaw

There's so much factually wrong here, I don't know where to begin. Let's start with this:

"That rape and mutilation has been going on for centuries but was significant in the Second Sino-Japanese War, a distinct war in and of itself."

Japan was in a state of almost complete isolation from the rest of the world between the years of 1633 and 1853. Even after the period of isolation ended, Japan was too busy for decades industrializing to be rampaging through China, as you suggest.

Japan DID eventually get involved in Chinese politics and in fact went to war with them in the First Sino-Japanese War... in 1894. There are no reports of atrocities committed by the Japanese military during this conflict. In fact, quite the opposite, Japan would release Chinese prisoners of war once they promised not to take up arms against Japan again.

The subjugation of Taiwan (which was ceded to Japan at the end of the first Sino-Japanese War but resisted Japanese rule) is a different story. However, accounts of what exactly happened are sketchy and most of the information we have is anecdotal. What can be gleaned from these anecdotes is that the Formasians put up a fierce guerrilla resistance campaign and that the Japanese tortured and killed anyone suspected of aiding the resistance. Still, it doesn't appear to have been on the same scale as the massacres which occurred during the Rape of Nanking.

As you mentioned, some of the most awful abuses were done during the Second Sino-Japanese War between 1937 and 1945 (the Rape of nanking occurred during this war). The abuse ended Japan's defeat in WWII.

What you can see here by doing the math, is that Japan's military abuses in China lasted a grand total of 50 years--from the subjugation of Formosa (Taiwan) to the end of World War 2--not "centuries."

Next, let's talk about misrepresentation. You seem to be implying that Japanese textbooks don't say that Japan is the aggressor in WW2 (or previous conflicts). As I pointed out in my last post, that is flat-out wrong. There is ONE textbook that was approved for use that whitewashes the history but that book has been ignored an not used by the vast majority of schools in Japan.

If you want to criticize Japanese textbooks, you could criticize them on the grounds that though they mention the terrible things that Japanese forces did, they don't go into a whole lot of detail. See this article for more information.

As far as Abe goes, what exactly has he said that is so terrible? Yes, he hangs out with revisionists. Yes, he has expressed his opinion that Japan should stop apologizing for WWII and start looking to the future instead of the past. Yes, he has said that the issue of "comfort women" should be re-examined in light of claims that some of evidence of their existence was fabricated. But these are not really radical statements by any means. And many people and newspapers do strongly and openly disagree with his statements, so this idea that Japanese people don't challenge him is completely wrong as well.

Yasukuni is a total clusterfuck of a situation. It is a shrine to ALL of Japan's war dead. This includes war criminals, but it also includes regular soldiers just doing their duty. In terms of Shinto beliefs, all of their souls now reside there. Basically, if you want to pay your respects to someone who died in military service in Japan, you have to go there to "see them."

Abe is a total dumbass (and the press let him know it) for going there because he knows already how China and Korea will perceive it, but on the other hand his going there does not mean in any way that he reveres the war criminals who are interred there. I have no idea what his personal views are but publically he has stated that he and his wife go there to remind themselves about the terrible toll war had on Japan the last time Japan engaged in it.

Finally, as for the link you provided, it was to a year-old opinion piece that lacks context. Abe made that statement at a time when it was revealed that some of the evidence of the existence of comfort women in Japan had been faked. It was later decided that the apology would not be changed. In fact, The Japan Times is reporting that it is likely that Abe will mention that "comfort women" had their human rights violated by Japan in his upcoming address on the end of WWII, so the comparison of him to Ahmadinejad is a bit far-fetched.

Actually, Japanese kids learn about Unit 731, the rape of Nanking, and the issue of "comfort women" (though they are still not called by their proper term "sex slaves"). See here for more info.

What is controversial is that the right-wingers managed to get a textbook approved by the Ministry of Education that whitewashes Japan's military past--a textbook, by the way, that was shunned by almost every Board of Education in Japan (it was used by only 0.039% of the schools in Japan).

The notion that Japanese people are unaware of the crimes committed by the Japanese military during WWII is utterly false. As I mentioned, there are revisionist right-wingers out there who are actively working to change that but so far they have been unsuccessful.

Interesting that he didn't actually say, "No, I did not try to pull him into the car". All he said was "That would be against every training ever taught to any law enforcement officer." True or not, it was not an answer.

Later, he grabbed Brown's forearm, to try and push him away from the door? I'm not sure I buy that either, unless he was completely panicked. Which is not what he's trying to portray at that point.

This sounds an awful lot like a rehearsed whitewash.