America’s Ridiculous, And Maybe Racist, Response To “Pokémon”
I’m going to start this story with a confession — I am a Poké-maniac. I wasn’t allowed to have video games until I was 12 years old, so I got started with the Sapphire version in 2004, and my love for the series hasn’t let up since. This did make me something of a latecomer to the series, which had taken America by storm six years previously. Nowadays, Pokémon is a beloved fixture of popular culture, especially given that an entire generation of children who grew up when it was first introduced are now having children of their own. With that in mind, it’s easy to forget that when the Japanese monster-collecting franchise first reached American shores in 1998, the welcome it received was less than cordial.
TIME Magazine published a cover story on the Pokémon craze in its November 22, 1998 issue, which described the franchise in decidedly unflattering terms — as an “addiction”, an “obsession”, and worse. Many other magazines and newspapers wrote similar stories to the same effect, often with the implication that Pokémon was somehow bad for children, and that concerned parents ought to avoid it at all costs. The fervor in these articles was matched only by their poor research regarding Pokémon itself, as they tended to contain blatant errors that anyone who was a fan could point out. But then, Pokémon fans were the last people the writers of these articles were trying to reach. At the same time, Pokémon also found itself a target of Christian fundamentalists, who accused the series of being Satanic propaganda for various reasons. Schools banned the trading cards, and the franchise in general became a subject of intense hostility.
In retrospect, this is odd. Why were parents’ groups and journalists back then so concerned about a relatively tame franchise like Pokémon? For reference, the 1990s saw the debut of shows like Batman: The Animated Series and X-Men, which were far less suitable for young children than the Pokémon anime ever was. But these shows never attracted any significant backlash of the sort that Pokemon and its ilk got. There was general concern about the violent content of American kids’ shows, absolutely, but it was never directed at specific works with such intensity as the anti-Pokémon sentiment.
And it’s possible that the reason for this might be, for lack of a better word, racism. To elaborate, the idea of Japanese pop culture as something mainstream in American society was still very new in the 1990s, and the older generations — the ones writing news articles and forming parents’ groups — might have subconsciously felt threatened by what could only be described as Japan infringing on a field America traditionally dominated. When South Park made its “Chinpokomon” episode, depicting a Pokémon-like franchise as a plot by Japan to brainwash American children, that was actually pretty close to how a lot of older Americans saw the influx of Japanese pop culture at the time. It was seen as something foreign, incomprehensible, and potentially hostile.
This American fear of Japanese economic competition was at its height in the 1980s and 1990s, and the “threat” of Japan competing in established American markets proved fertile ground for journalists and advertisers to sell stories. Pontiac ran a lurid commercial showing the Rockefeller Center (which had recently been purchased by a Japanese company) renamed as the “Hirohito Center”, and imploring viewers to buy American cars. The notion of Japanese corporate power overwhelming America even gave rise to the aesthetic of the cyberpunk genre, with movies like Blade Runner featuring Japanese-dominated American cities in the future.
In some cases, the contemporary fear of Japanese dominance reached heights that seem almost absurd today. George Friedman, an independent geopolitical analyst who famously predicted the Russian invasion of Ukraine, wrote a book in 1990 called The Coming War With Japan in which he speculated that economic disputes would lead to a full-blown war between the US and Japan by the year 2010. Such an event obviously never happened, though Friedman has remained oddly steadfast in his belief that it eventually will.
In light of such things, the uneasy response Americans had to Japanese anime, even something as innocent as Pokémon, is hardly surprising. The success of Pokémon was a visible manifestation of something many older American conservatives were worried about at the time.
Would Pokémon have met with such hostility if it had been an American production? Maybe not. But if it were, chances are it wouldn’t be the Pokémon we know and love.
