Do you remember when Jynx was black? The Ice/Psychic type Pokémon from the first generation (#124) used to look a little different than it does today. It received a lot of criticism around the turn of the century for its portrayal of black face. I'm not going to get into the fine details of this episode, because the internet is full of copy-paste articles about it. For example this article will give you a decent summary of what went down. There were some people arguing against Jynx being racist. The most convincing argument being that she was supposed to resemble a Nordic ice princess. As a kid I didn't see the racism in the character of Jynx either. Then again I was just a kid too busy with 'catching them all'. Also, I am white. I don't have an antenna for racism to begin with. Looking at the whole incident with hindsight I understand that black people took offence with this character. Some people tried to let Nintendo and Game Freak off the hook by arguing that Japan is such a ethnically homogeneous country that they were unaware of the racist elements in Jynx character design. I think that argument does not fly for a big company with a global presence. They should have consulted Western advisors before launching the game, but as far as I know they didn't. Or who knows, maybe they did and the Western advisors also did not pick up on the racism. It was the late nineties after all and it just goes to show how far we've come in the past decades.
The main character in this story is without a doubt Carole Boston Weatherford (picture below). An African-American author of children's books. She was also an opinion maker for the Greenboro News & Record between 2000 and 2002. Her opinion article about Jynx got a lot of attention and brought the debate into the mainstream. After this, Game Freak would quietly make some permanent adjustments to the character design of Jynx, as well as the pre-evolution Smoochie for the about to be released Gold & Silver installments of the Pokémon franchises in the U.S. and Europe. Jynx would go on to have pink skin instead of black and she was made to look a bit less curvy. After reading about this episode I was curious to read Weatherford's original opinion piece. Googling with a limited search range in the late nineties actually got me the original article. You can still read it here.
In her writing she explains that she has completely surrendered to the Pokémon craze. She does not see the appeal as a parent, but it makes her kids happy so she got with the program and bought them the games and the trading cards. This was very recognizable for me because as a kid my parents did not see the appeal of Pokémon either. We only had Pokémon cards because my grandmother bought them for us. Pokémon was simply a phenomenon you could not ignore if you were a child in the late nineties. Everyone, boys and girls, was playing the games, watching the anime, buying the trading cards and the toys. What parents believed to be a crazy fad, turned into the biggest video game franchise of all time and arguably Nintendo's most important intellectual property. Weatherford went on to point out the racist elements in the Jynx character. She argued that in Asia (let's assume she means East-Asia here) racial stereotypes that are no longer tolerated in the West, can still be found. In the last paragraph she wonders if black consumers should continue buying Pokémon products that feature a "monstrously racist image".
Weatherford's article was originally published on january 15th 2000. However, the website mentions an update being made to the article in 2015. Scanning the article, I can see no clear signs of a change being made to the text. This got me a little suspicious about what exactly was changed to this influential text 15 years after the fact. I did another Google search and found this Pokémon website featuring a long write-up about the Jynx controversy. Dogasu's Backpack is a very cool, long running Pokémon fansite that is updated until this day. Very much worth a visit. His article about Jynx did shine some light on the mysterious update from 2015 to the original article. An entire paragraph seems to have been cut from the article, you can read it below.
"Every few years, the Japanese sense of superiority seems to resurface.
For example, the Japanese fought to keep U.S. military bases in Okinawa from relocating to the mainland. And about a decade ago, a high-ranking Japanese official attributed Japan's low crime rate to the country's lack of ethnic diversity, blaming African Americans for the high crime rate in the U.S.
These are strange days. Sisters in Harlem toss long tresses-courtesy of hair extensions shorn from women in Shanghai-to the beat of misogynistic raps produced by Japanese media giant Sony."
In the deleted paragraph, Weatherford links the racist portrayal of Jynx to a Japanese sense of superiority. I think this is a pretty far-fetched argument. It was most likely a case of complete ignorance. Obviously that does not make it right, but Weatherford made the actions of the Japanese seem more evil than was likely the case.
Her next sentence about the Japanese occupation by the United States military seems completely out of place. The presence of American military bases in Japan after World War II is a sensitive topic for most Japanese people. They are a symbol of American imperialism in the world. Okinawa continues to have a huge military base on their main island to this day even though a lot of locals would rather see them close. There have been lots of stories over the decades of American soldiers misbehaving on the island, including the rape of local underage girls. So how does this really relate to the Jynx story? Frankly, I don't see the connection and this makes Weatherford's story not only seem like an impulsive rant, it also displays her own ignorance about other cultures.
In the final sentence of her deleted paragraph she argues that Japanese media giant Sony is responsible for maintaining a culture of misogynistic rap music in the West. A criticism that is valid in itself, but it seems unfair to single out Sony here when American record label giants do the exact same thing.
So what do we make of this 24 years later? A writer spoke out against racism in a Pokémon character. Her opinion piece got the conversation started and seems to have had a big influence in the decision to change Jynx and Smoochum's skin color in later Pokémon releases. Neither Game Freak nor Nintendo ever made a public statement about the matter. Instead they quietly changed the offensive aspects of Jynx's character design. Meanwhile the author who started the conversation turned out to have some cultural blind spots of her own. Instead of doing the mature thing, which would be adding a footnote to the article acknowledging the mistake and leaving the article up as it is, they tried to delete the mistake. I'm using 'they' here, because I don't know if was Weatherford or the Greensboro News & Record who decided to delete the paragraph. We also don't know anything about the motive, although it was likely done to prevent any future controversies.
I think today's story is exemplary of the era we live in. It shows how we deal with mistakes nowadays. The victims vilify the perpetrators. The perpetrators try to bury their mistakes. I guess I understand the reflex to delete a questionable paragraph. In the digital age everything can be edited. Even 15 years later we have the ability to retroactively change a text if we don't like a part of it. At the same time it shows a lack of awareness about the importance of the preservation of historical documents. I expect more integrity from a writer and a news outlet, regardless of who's decision it was to delete this paragraph. I hope that my writing will raise some awareness that the original article about the Jynx incident has been altered retroactively to make Weatherford and the Greenboro News & Record look better.