McDonald’s Japan is currently running a bizarre promotion using a caricature of an American named Mr. James, who hails from Ohio and is living in Tokyo with his daughter Jennifer. The advertising campaign is promoting McDonald’s All Stars, four premium hamburgers that will be available through November, starting with the current Tamago Double Mac. The fact that Mr. James speaks broken katakana Japanese and is called improperly (“Mr. James,” just as I spent years being called “Mr. Peter” by my students) has some foreigners in Japan upset about the ads, even going so far as to make an anti-Mr. James group on Facebook. While I think the ads are silly, I’m not particularly offended by them or anything. I’m personally at peace with the fact that many Westerners often are walking parodies of themselves in Japan, bumbling around asking for directions and snapping pictures of public restrooms and vending machines because they look new and interesting to us, and we probably look even funnier than Mr. James to the Japanese. This is okay — it’s all part of the cultural communication process between East and West. I also know that the character of Mr. James is based on the overwhelmingly positive image that Japanese have of foreigners here, from that first overly exuberant eikaiwa (English conversation) teacher they had back in school. Japan making fun of gaijin is quite common, from anime series that feature oddly-accented foreigners in them to the bizarre OH! Mikey, a parody of Americans living in Japan made using fashion mannequins, and there’s nothing vindictive about it at all.
Mr. James loves Japan and McDonald’s hamburgers, but some foreigners hate him.
