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