Wow its so appropriate how last week's new South Park episode relates to chapter 4 on stereotyping!! First of all i thought the new episode, 'City Sushi', to be absolutely hilarious! I am a big fan of South Park and watch the new episodes every week as they come out and i have to say City Sushi, or pronounced with a stereotypical Asian accent- Shitty Sushi, is my favorite episode in the newest season.
The episode, like most, is split into different stories. one half of the story is about the Chinese owner of a restaurant called City Wok (Shitty Wok), against the new Japanese owner of City Sushi. the episode pokes fun at many stereotypes about Asian people including emphasis on the characters sharp looking eyes. throughout the episode stereotypes on Asian speech is constantly made fun of. a Chinese man argues with a Japanese man and gets to the point where the characters even taunt each other for not speaking clear English! (incredibly funny)
One of the big stereotypes i noticed when i re-watched the episode was about Japanese people committing suicide. This actually happens in the episode when the Japanese man finds out that the Chinese man was a white man the whole time with multiple personalities order. The Japanese man jumps off a building and even yells "Oh No! this is racial stereotype!" as he is falling to his death.
Again i found the episode incredibly funny especially when the Chinese man makes a reference to Pearl Harbor (As in the title). When i started reading chapter 4 i had to re-watch the episode to pay attention to all the racial stereotypes, which was ok with me.
I'm not really sure what my opinion on that is actually. South Park usually uses stereotypes and parodies life in satirical ways. But with the Japanese thing, I'm not so sure what the point was. They mentioned the Asian stereotypes in a way that seemed productive, yet was still funny, only in the end to just go through by having the Japanese dude kill himself, adding to the stereotype anyway. Like, "We called out stereotypes so now we are free to portray them with no harm."
ReplyDeleteRandom note : Korea (South, few people say 'South Korea' outside of the USA, it's just Korea) has the highest suicide rate in the world. Japan is the second highest.