| Rika is half-Japanese; her father, Pierre, is French. Half-Japanese characters show up in anime often enough, but what makes Super Doll Licca-chan unusual is that the half-Japanese character is the protagonist, and even more so, that her mixed ancestry is never important or even explicitly mentioned. Usually partial-European ancestry is an excuse to play with stereotypes of white people both culturally and physically, and indeed, Rika has light-colored hair and is a lot taller than her fully-Japanese friend Sumire, but attention is never drawn to this. Additionally, the child characters in the show go to a Catholic school, Saint Teresa Academy, run by nuns. This too, isn't remarkably uncommon in anime, but the Christianity of such settings is usually used merely as a piece of exoticism and Japanese attitudes towards religion mean that the students of such a school aren't necessarily Christan themselves (for example, Maria-sama ga Miteru). In Licca-chan however, we're explicitly shown that the family of one of the supporting characters, Dai, is Christian when his mother answers his complaints about the family's lack of Christmas festivity with "the purpose of Christmas is to celebrate the birth of Christ" while crossing herself. Moreover, Dai's family is actually a little bit of an anachronism; they live in a modestly-sized house of traditional Japanese architecture, are a quite large family when Japan's birth rate has been quite low for years now, and there's the authoritative presence of a second-generation elder (the grandmother). I feel it's likely this mild exaggeration of supposed Japanese characteristics is being deliberately contrasted against the quite atypical characteristic of Christianity. This kind of deliberate diversity has been normal and even nearly expected in American children's cartoons for a while now, but I find it very unusual in a Japanese one, where I've more gotten used to ethnocentrism. I wonder why this is so, but I don't really know any way of finding out. |
FronzelMay 11, 2011 3:33 PM
| You do bring up several good points, but I admit that I don't have any really good answers for you either. To me, they're part of the setting, and Christianity has a fairly decent foothold in Japan. |
| - doll_licca Founder and encoder of Licca Fansubs |
doll_licca said: You do bring up several good points, but I admit that I don't have any really good answers for you either. To me, they're part of the setting, and Christianity has a fairly decent foothold in Japan. Just pulling from Wikipedia (the lazy way): "Christianity is a minority religion in Japan, with less than 1% and possibly less than one-half of one percent of the Japanese population claiming Christian belief or affiliation." Maybe I should bring up my confusion on how Rika's mother is apparently Japanese even though she actually isn't from Earth at all. |
| Well, when you have to hide, you have to adopt the customs of the land you're in as much as possible. If that requires a makeover, that's what you would have to do. |
| - doll_licca Founder and encoder of Licca Fansubs |
| But there's no indication that Orie isn't her real name, plus Yae calls her sister Nanae and would have no reason to use any fake name her sister adopted, not to mention she isn't in hiding herself so Yae must be her real name. To further the confusion, Nanae's husband is named Franz, which is German. And anyway, if Orie wants to hide on Earth somewhere, why not in France where Pierre is presumably from? How and why did any of these people end up in Japan? Having a multi-cultural couple in the show is kind of interesting, but it's left some unanswered questions. |
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