Meet Mr. James; or for those in Japan, Mr. ジェームス. Apparently he’s a 43 year old American from Ohio who is promoting McDonalds for the Summer/Fall 09 set of burgers. From the ads in McDonalds and his blog he seems to really enjoy Japan, McDonalds, and Soaplands; actually, that last one might not be true, but let’s just say he does.

Captain Soap saves you from images of naked soapy Japanese women.

No problem with me so far, but some people have trouble with the next part. If you’ve been studying (I’m guessing no) and you’ve already taken a look at his blog you’ve probably noticed that he’s using a lot of Katakana. When someone uses Katakana it’s usually for a couple of reasons: non-Japanese words, emphasis, manlyness (yes, really), and showing badly pronounced Japanese. You can probably guess the reason why some people living in Japan, and the SF Chronicle, would frown on McDonald’s current campaign.

I can understand why a lot of people think that this is condescending, but I think a lot of people are going too far with this. I don’t feel this is any worse than some cereal commercials or another McDonald’s advertisement shown in the States. The campaign isn’t saying anything about people living in Japan or how good/bad their Japanese is so what’s all the fuss about? Another thing that I think has been forgotten about in all of this is that Mr. James studied Japanese from a phrasebook while he was still in the USA. Is it honestly that unrealistic to show someone who, until recently, had no real contact with a native speaker of the language they were learning and, therefore, had bad pronunciation? When you take into consideration how little people usually know about Japan/Japanese when they come to work/visit and also that there are people who live here for years without really learning any Japanese I’d almost say that this type of advertising should be encouraged.

Miyuki, meet your new father.

I know that things aren’t perfect here, nor anywhere else, but lots of people are overanalyzing this. Debito, a fighter for foreign rights in Japan is pretty zealous in his stuggle. However sometimes he goes a little overboard and I do believe this is one of those times.