The latest installation in the line of merchandise and marketing that capitalizes on Asian stereotypes is Comedy Central’s staggeringly humorless and offensive show, Banzai. The show’s official tagline, posted on the Comedy Central web site and which presumably intends to mimic the broken English that all Japanese apparently speak, reads: “Get ready for new gaming opportunity!”

The show panders to the bottom-feeders of the Comedy Central audience — in the brief minutes that I watched the show in transfixed horror, I saw a man who was excitedly screaming in broken English as two dwarves attempted to climb a “mountain,” which was, in fact, a rather tall man.  Characters, which I can only presume where meant to look like the Japanese script of Kanji, occasionally cascaded across the TV screen.

Comedy Central joins Urban Outfitters and Abercombie & Fitch in peddling Asian-themed merchandise.  Abercrombie was pilloried for its offensive line of clothing; among the Abercrombie t-shirts that excited national outrage was a shirt that featured a hunched over and apparently Chinese cartoon figure under the slogans “Wok-N-Bowl,” “Let the Good Times Roll” and “Chinese Food and Bowling.”

Asian-American Village has addressed the creative retaliation that Abercrombie & Fitch’s marketing ploy has produced, such as t-shirts that read “Artfulbigotry & Kitsch.”  While it doesn’t appear that Banzai has excited the same outrage that the Abercrombie scandal achieved, it is certainly evidence of a commercial trend.  

Aside from its curious and total lack of humor, and disregarding the offensiveness of the show, Banzai evidences a complete lack of cultural context. “Banzai,” the title of the show, is a cheer that is often used at times of celebration. However, it is also a cheer that resonates deeply with Japanese nationalist sentiments, and which Japanese nationalists, who often campaign in the streets of Tokyo, yell out with pride. At a time when Japan is entering into a situation of armed conflict for the first time since the end of WWII, and when the remilitarization is a serious — and, for many, a very troubling — issue in Japanese politics, Comedy Central displays its blindness to the cultural context in which it exists.  

Mimi Hanaoka