Japan: Band Cancels Its Music Video Because It was Racist or Something

Oh, damn, boy.

They got racism in Japan now?

BBC:

A Japanese rock band has pulled the music video for its new song “Columbus” after drawing flak for scenes that depicted Christopher Columbus with ape-like men.

The video shows three historical figures teaching the ape-like beings to do various things, like how to ride on horses and play musical instruments.

The video swiftly sparked a backlash after it was released on Wednesday – it was removed just a day later.

The band, Mrs Green Apple, apologised on Thursday, saying the video “contains expressions that lack understanding of historical and cultural backgrounds”.

In the video, the band’s three members – dressed in costumes depicting Columbus, Napoleon and Beethoven – are shown discovering an island inhabited by people who look like apes.

How is this not cultural appropriation?

Some social media criticised the video for being racist while others accused it of affirming slavery.

“Columbus is credited with creating slavery, and [there are] controversial scenes such as educating apes to look like natives. Didn’t anyone notice that,” read one comment on X.

“The music video shows the men dressed as colonisers and the natives are portrayed as literal monkeys… that’s actually insane,” another chimed in.

I strongly suspect none of these people were Japanese.

Or at least I hope they weren’t…

[Editor’s Note: If they were, they were women.]

Others took issue with its portrayal of Columbus – the man has been credited for “discovering” America, but some claim he was a brutal governor who mistreated and enslaved the natives.

“Wasn’t there anyone involved who had studied world history at all?,” wrote a comment on YouTube.

“I think the people defending this video dont know anything about history in North America. Columbus is hated by many Americans, to the point where Columbus Day has disappeared [in many places],” another said.

In one of two apology statements posted yesterday, the band said they had intended to depict “life forms of different ages having a home party”.

“We were concerned from the beginning that [the apes] might be seen as discriminatory expression, but we had no intention of likening apes to humans.

“We never intended to make the content discriminatory or to make it something that affirms tragic history,” it said.

To be clear, racism is a hoax.

Like, it does not actually exist, in the form that leftists/Jews claim it does: no one actually “hates people because of the color of their skin.”

It’s possible that people hate certain races because of what they view as a certain established behavior pattern of that group. But I think that even that is very limited.

What I have found is that people become wary of certain behavior patterns they view as having been established by those groups. What is actually called “racism” is much more a “collective judgement” of certain groups based on pattern recognition, and/or the sense that this group presents a collective threat to their group. However, and this is certainly not insignificant, the most extreme examples of this involve people who more or less look very similar. Certainly on average, Poles are more “racist” against the Russians than white Americans are against black Americans. Further, Japanese are certainly a lot more “racist” against the Chinese (and also really the Koreans) than they are against American Indians (which they would have obviously very little knowledge of, beyond what they read in history books).

What’s more, whether it is white American collective judgement of blacks, or an Asian country’s collective judgement of really any other Asian country (it’s very difficult to find a group of Asians that get along with another group of Asians, aside from something like Malaysia-Indonesia or Cambodia-Laos [and maybe those countries and Burma, though definitely none of those countries and Thailand, let alone Vietnam]), it is where they have not only a shared genetic heritage but also a shared history. (In the case of Malaysia-Indonesia, they actually had a war with each other, an extension of the Cold War, though in my experience the individuals of the two nations do not have explicit and general dislike or distrust of each other).

The important thing about “racists” generally – and again, almost every country on earth takes a position of “collective judgement” against their neighboring countries – is that most people will make exception for individuals. Though they may go into a situation with a specific bias, they also recognize that every person is an individual and may surprise them.

Basically, it’s all a gigantic hoax.

The music video was scrubbed from the internet, but you can still listen to the song

Snake Baker contributed to this article.