History Main / Mukokuseki

** Averted in ''VisualNovel/TheGreatAceAttorney'' duology which takes place in both early 20th century Japan and Great Britain. The Japanese characters all have dark hair, eyes, and a range of Asian skin tones that deliberately constrast with the more varied features of the European cast, even the ones who're drawn in a more typical "anime" style.

** Averted in ''VideoGame/TheGreatAceAttorney'' duology which takes place in both early 20th century Japan and Great Britain. The Japanese characters all have dark hair, eyes, and a range of Asian skin tones that deliberately constrast with the more varied features of the European cast, even the ones who're drawn in a more typical "anime" style.

* ''VideoGame/ProfessorLaytonVsPhoenixWrightAceAttorney'':
** Phoenix and Maya look ''very subtly'' more Asian than the other characters in the game, who all happen to be British. Of course, due to the ''Franchise/AceAttorney'' franchise’s CulturalTranslation, Phoenix and Maya are American in the English version as opposed to Japanese.

* In ''Manga/AttackOnTitan'' most of the characters have wide eyes and hair ranging between brown and blonde. Mikasa is stated to be 'half-oriental' and her mother probably the last person 'from the orient' in the world. They both have straight luxurious black hair and more narrow eyes than most of the cast. Judging by her name she's probably Japanese while most of the rest of the cast is German (based on their names and that half of both theme song's lyrics are sung in German). [[spoiler:Later on, we meet characters who are from the part of the world that Mikasa's mother hailed from, and they have much more clearly Asian features.]]

* An InUniverse deconstruction; in the ''Franchise/LyricalNanoha'' fictional report: ''[[https://www.fanfiction.net/s/5990995/1/Strategic-Analysis-of-the-TSAB Strategic Anaylsis of the TSAB]]'', this works in disfavor of the TSAB as the US Department of Defense finds the lack of PoC disconcerting, along with the FantasticRacism against Artificial Humans and Combat Cyborgs, thus mistakenly likening them to UsefulNotes/NaziGermany.

* An InUniverse deconstruction; in the ''Franchise/LyricalNanoha'' fictional report: ''[[https://www.fanfiction.net/s/5990995/1/Strategic-Analysis-of-the-TSAB Strategic Anaylsis of the TSAB]]'', this works in disfavor of the TSAB as the US Department of Defense finds the lack of PoC disconcerting, along with the FantasticPrejudice of Artifical Humans and Combat Cyborgs, thus mistakenly likening them to UsefulNotes/NaziGermany.

* Justified as a plot point in ''VideoGame/GoldenSunDarkDawn''. Of the three [[FantasyCounterpartCulture ethnically Asian-counterpart]] player characters, two (a Japanese Miko and a Vietnamese pirate) look reasonably Asian-ish, and Amiti (from more-or-less Thailand) has the same generic features as the ethnically white characters ([[spoiler:because he's the bastard son of Alex, who is white Norse]]).

* A curious inversion occurs in ''Anime/{{Patlabor}}''. While it plays this trope straight to varying degrees with the main cast, in order to emphasize Kanuka Clancy's [[ButNotTooForeign otherness]] she was drawn as the the most Japanese-looking.

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* Averted in ''Manga/{{BECK}}''. To keep with the indie-film feel, the whole cast have rather realistic hair colors and rather look Asian. Of course, the series throws in a couple Black people and a few Whites for contrast.

* ''VideoGame/{{Siren}}'' models all the game's characters after Japanese actors, complete with their real life faces, making this game as absolute an aversion of this trope as one could find.

** A rare Western media example. The "playable" human characters are rendered with completely white (as in the color of a sheet of printer paper) skin, while actual white people (like Andrew Hussie's AuthorAvatar and ''Webcomic/DinosaurComics'' author Ryan North) are rendered with not-quite-flesh-tone skin that's more orange than anything. WordOfGod has specified that the blank white characters [[http://mspandrew.tumblr.com/post/15937434515/predictably are supposed to be a-racial]], so it's left up to the reader to decide what race they are.

* Franchise/{{Gundam}} usually averts this by simply having a multinational cast along with blurred nationalities given the futuristic setting. But this still comes up from time to time. Many of the installments include the formation of a OneWorldGovernment and the deportation of large swathes of the population into space colonies, so the “statelessness” of its characters simply reflects the tangled mess that concepts like “ethnicity” and “nationality” have become under those circumstances.

* ''Manga/InsideMari'' and ''Manga/TheFlowersOfEvil'' both avert this, though the latter does have the brightly redheaded Nakamura (with natural red hair being possible but very rare in Japan). The anime of the ''Aku No Hana'' infamously averts it by being rotoscoped.

** Between that series and ''SasamiMagicalGirlsClub'', you get a lot of non-Asian-looking Asians due to the cast keeping their ''Anime/TenchiMuyo'' looks despite being normal Japanese people instead of long-lived HumanAliens. Mind you, it's that or everyone becoming unrecognizable.

* The characters from Franchise/SuperMario, with native Mushroom Kingdom names just sounding like European ones, according to Masayuki Uemura.
* ''VideoGame/{{Tekken}}'' is surprisingly down-to-earth when it comes to portraying characters of different ethnicities. All Asian characters have either black or dark brown hair and brown eyes and sport racially accurate facial features. The only people who have unrealistic hair, the white-haired Lee Chaolan and the red-haired Hwoarang, explicitly dyed theirs (notice that their eyebrows are black). And Lars, despite having blond hair and blue eyes, presumably got his rather tan skin for a Northern European man from his Japanese heritage. Even the most blatant Animesque character, the pink-haired green-eyed Japanese-speaking Alisa Bosconovitch, has the justification of being an [[RidiculouslyHumanRobots android]], so she can look and speak however her creator wanted.

** Also worth noting is Izumi also sports a much more Asian appearance than the rest of the cast as well, and not to mention has a distinctly Asian first name amongst a cast that has predominantly Western names even despite her [[MultiEthnicName Western maiden name]], "Harnet". Like Mustang, her ethnicity has yet to be commented on. Note that since Amestris does sport a variety in race in its population, it might not be considered worth commenting on by the rest of the cast.

'''The second''' is the idea that the artists are supposedly appropriating features popularized by the West into their character designs either for their own interests or for marketing purposes. It is speculated that the pervasiveness of these physical characteristics in Japanese pop-culture are the result of Western influences. Eurocentric beauty standards have infiltrated most cultures over the centuries via Western colonialism and soft power. The Portuguese missionary Luis Frois, who stayed in Japan for more than 30 years during the Warring States period, said, "Europeans say big eyes are beautiful. The Japanese consider it horrifying and make it beautiful to have the eyes closed." Although large eyes can be quite common amongst Japanese and other East Asian ethnicites, this describes how the Japanese at that time idealized the smaller eyes as depicted in picture scrolls and bijin-ga, rather than big eyes which are a dominant beauty standard in Japan today. Western societies tend to view ethnic Caucasian features as "default" or "featureless", so when they see unrealistic depictions of humans they subconsciously assume the depiction "looks white" unless there's specific racial stereotypes attached.