And yet every time Hollywood adapts a Japanese property they seem to be unable to find any Asian actors in California to portray any Major roles.

Likewise, when japan does live action versions of their anime, they are unable to find Caucasian actors to fill roles that are obviously Caucasian. Tamaki Suoh in Ouran Host Club obviously has blonde hair and blue eyes in the anime, but in the live action becomes completely Japanese! Perhaps they just couldn't find an actor that looked the role?

Japan is 98% Japanese - that comparison doesn't even make sense.

>Perhaps they just couldn't find an actor that looked the role?

Of course they could, but the problem is it seems as if they wouldn't dare try. They stopped looking after "the one hot female lead we put in every sci-fi movie now."

Yes they are. Yet they present a diverse universe of characters whose ethnicities are clearly not Japanese or are very ambiguous.

Note that for this reason, there was no controversy about the casting of the GIS protagonist in Japan itself. The vocal critics have all been Asian Americans. But that doesn't really say much, as this movie is being judged as an American one rather than a Japanese one; the lack of Asian American actors getting roles like these bothers me also.

>Note that for this reason, there was no controversy about the casting of the GIS protagonist in Japan itself. The vocal critics have all been Asian Americans.

Because Asian Americans are more aware of the lack of diversity in roles for Asians in American movies. Japanese people would have no idea about that because where they live, every hero on every screen in every Japanese movie is Japanese.

I'm well aware of the style in anime to present characters as "stateless", and why it's done, but that isn't the problem. Asian actors appearing to not be on equal footing with Caucasian and African American actors when it comes to the roles they're allowed to portray is the problem.

I'm sick of seeing the same few faces in everything.

The standard excuse is there are no Japanese actors with good enough English skills. Why they can't draw from the Nisei population in Hawaii and the west coast is still baffling.

> roles that are obviously Caucasian

Are they? Anime characters do not seem to be bound by typical (or even possible) hair and eye colours. Couldn't such characters be, well, ethnic Japanese people who happen to have an unusual hair colour? That seems to be the general assumption.

>Couldn't such characters be, well, ethnic Japanese people who happen to have an unusual hair colour?

yes, it's a conscious design choice[0,1]. They're not "obviously Caucasian" so much as "not obviously anything."

[0]http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/Mukokuseki

[1]https://www.quora.com/Why-does-Mukokuseki-rarely-appear-in-W...

Their ethnicities are often explicitly specified (Tameki has a French mother). Japan is also not that homogenous. Sometimes the ethnicities are left ambiguous, in which case it could be hair/eye coloring.

In ghost in the shell, the protagonist is a robot or cyborg, ethnicity isn't fixed.

> And yet every time Hollywood adapts a Japanese property they seem to be unable to find any Asian actors in California to portray any Major roles.

Hollywood wants major established Hollywood names that are perceived as major draws in and of themselves in major roles on any major projects. Insofar as the output of that process has apparent racial bias (and it does, significantly) it's largely an effect of the fact that the process by which one becomes an established Hollywood name with big perceived drawing power involves many, many sources of bias.

I don't watch many major movie releases anymore so I could well be out of the loop and misinformed. If Hollywood is truly getting better at not using the kinds of ethnic, racial, and gender tropes that make for cheap laughs and storytelling then that is very good news to me.

And thanks for the movie tips!

The first is a movie, the latter is a cartoon.

Hollywood is huge, everyone has their own standards.