16 October 2005

What exactly are they trying to teach these kids?


Stop me if I'm repeating myself, but I just found this photo again.

Last year there was a highly publicized kidnapping in Japan. Some guy snatched a elementary school girl and sent pictures and ransom demands to the kid's mom using her mobile phone. So naturally, all the elementary schools started putting up PSA posters warning kids to be wary of strangers. Pretty standard stuff. But the poster they put up in all the public schools was this one, which claimed that sometimes bad people will act like nice people to try and trick you. But the bad people in the picture ALL looked like foreigners. Stereotypical, round-eyed, big-nosed foreigners. Even though most Japanese cartoon characters tend to look sort of, well, non-Asian, there are a couple of standard cues used to mark which characters are supposed to be non-Japanese. Big noses or prominent nose bridges being the most obvious.

And for the record, the kid was taken by an ordinary, run-of-the-mill, regular looking Japanese guy. He wasn't half-anything, he wasn't from Okinawa, and he wasn't even that strange-looking.

No comments: