adventures in Japanese TV: “haafu”
aaahhh, more annoying Japanese TV. despite what i said (in Japanese) while letting off steam livetweeting on Twitter, i know it’s not fair of me to expect anyone, let alone this guy (Jun Soejima, an actor / “talent” btw), to react any certain way or educate the people around him on behalf of other black people in Japan. i really don’t actually expect that or anything else of him, despite my whining, but it does admittedly annoy me when people on Japanese TV just laugh off some really shitty, problematic stuff that people say or do to them, be it re: racial issues, trans issues, or anything else. they’re in a difficult situation and have all kind of things to consider when they react to something, whereas i can huff and puff at the TV saying all the choice words i like without consequence. i get that…. but meh.
it was good that he was able to spend a literal minute talking about how hard it is for him to get any work as an actor here in Japan, especially in response to another actor (jokingly but still annoyingly) commenting on how ‘a half-Japanese person who can’t even speak English but who has immediate impact on screen like Jun can make another half-Japanese talent like him seem ordinary’ and thus he (again jokingly but annoyingly) wishes that he’d stop trying to get into the entertainment world. at least Jun got a serious minute of air time to talk about how he’s constantly limited to playing only foreign exchange students (despite not speaking any English himself and having never been abroad once) and such obscure roles as having been cast as a half Brazilian, half Japanese zombie…. >_>;
yeah, at least he got to talk about that and people took that more seriously for all of a minute. i’m still annoyed, though.
to make things worse, they sat him next to another half Japanese person. this half Japanese (but light-skinned) person who’s also lived in Japan all her life and can’t speak any English. still, the difference between the questions she got and how she was treated was night and day. meh.
