Anime Character Designer Calls The BBC “National Shame”

A British journalist has recently released a documentary for BBC Three that has sparked outrage from the anime community online. Stacey Dooley, the woman behind the controversial documentary, Stacey Dooley Investigates: Young Sex For Sale in Japan, makes references to many anime series through the video. One anime she uses as an example in particular, is Girls Und Panzer, however she never includes anything from the interview she conducted with the show’s character creator.

According to Takeshi Nogami, character designer behind the hit show Girls Und Panzer, was interviewed by Dooley for over three hours, and the entire interview was excluded from the documentary. Nogami was quite frustrated by the situation and went on to went on to tweet about it and call the BBC “National Shame Fake News”.

Nogami was frustrated at not being included at all even though he had taken time to sit down for an interview. Unfortunately this isn’t the first time the BBC has misrepresented Japanese media, and made anime fans angry. However, Nogami was so frustrated by the situation and video, that he tweeted multiple tweets about it. The translation of the rant is translated thanks to ricedigital.co.uk below:

“I was interviewed by this lady at my workplace. One-on-one Q&A session for three hours. Through that I realized one most important thing. I was thinking about releasing it online as manga but… The core difference between this interviewer and myself was the attitude towards human being. My position is… “all human beings have “dirty desires”. Isn’t it better to be vented appropriately?”. On the contrary…Ms Susie(sic) stated this. “All human beings are naturally innocent and have no “dirty desires” and reading media…media depicting erotic, pedophilic, and gore contents will affect them to be corrupted”.

Then I realized. So the definition of human being, or Operating System(sic) is different. After three hour long interview, this realization was the most productive experience, I think. Oh, on top of that, she said, with a look of a hitman in BLACK LAGOON, “My desire is to put all pedophiles, and ones who produce pedophilic media into jail”. Ah, “Justice” is kinda scary when it infects people. Isn’t she trying to substitute everything into the subject of that sentence? It’s been two times where I was interviewed like this. She ignored me when I said… “Don’t look at us to turn away from your problem within the UK”….

During the interview, we touched upon ways that we can tackle the child abuse issues in Commonwealth world. She said “banning all fictions like this!”. I suggested “Well, solve poverty first. Legalizing fictions that has no victims will lower the crime rate”. She seemed like she didn’t get the idea. It seems that her view is a common one throughout the Commonwealth countries (that’s why you get arrested… for having porn comic in Canada), so objection in words might not help much. It might be better to foster… young, enthusiastic “comrades” within them.

So Stacey asked me “Why don’t you Japanese just follow (adjust to, do) what we do in the UK?”, and I returned “Why don’t you British people just do what we Japanese do since we are more civilised and have lower crime rate?” (Rice Translation — the quotes are written in quite a rude way)”

This interview shows the vast difference between the two cultures the interviewer and interviewee are coming from. Obviously there were two different point of view coming into the whole interview, and Dooley seemed to just be making assumptions and get comments rather than actually interviewing him. Also the quote about how Japanese people should be more like the UK was quite rude and judgemental. From the exclusion of the interview from the documentary, and the way anime and Japanese culture is portrayed in a negative light, many are calling her out online.

However the anime section of the film was only included as a short segment, and most of the documentary dives into things like cafes, modelling, and harassment, all of which are obviously an issue. The documentary is currently available on BBC Three and Takeshi Nogami’s twitter can be viewed here.