A controversy in recent days has been raging with expats in Japan over whether a commercial by a Japanese cell phone provider E-mobile, is a racial slur towards US Democratic Presidential Nominee Barack Obama. The commercial in question shows the company’s mascot, a monkey doing a parody of Barack Obama’s campaign stump speech about “change”.

From an American point of view with no context about Japan, it is easy to see how this commercial could be looked at as being racist. However, for those that are familiar with Japan this commercial can be looked at as not being racist at all because E-mobile has had a monkey as their mascot for prior commercial doing the same type of parodies of humans. Here is a perfect example of one of their prior commercials using the monkey:

So it isn’t like E-mobile just decided to use a monkey to parody a black person in America.

Because of this in my opinion at worst E-mobile is guilty of just cultural ignorance because of how they failed to understand how the monkey commercial could be perceived to Americans, but then again the target audience of the commercial wasn’t Americans but the Japanese public.

So is E-mobile guilty of racism or is this just a simple cultural misunderstanding? Also, does anyone think the commercial should be taken off the air regardless of the motivations? I don’t think so but I’m curious to hear what others have to say.