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In 2019, Nissin Foods released commercials featuring Japanese professional tennis player Naomi Osaka alongside anime characters from the manga ‘Prince of Tennis’. Some viewers criticized the advertisement based on their perception that Osaka was represented as having lighter (‘whiter’) skin than her actual skin tone. As a result, Nissin voluntarily cancelled the ad from the airwaves. Ho and Tanaka (2021, p. 1) indicated that these advertisements reflect the tendency for local Japanese media to ‘regularly portray “racially neutral” characters, [and] celebrate lighter-skinned hafu (half; multiracial) women’. Subsequently in 2020, Nike Japan released a video advertisement featuring three teenage student female footballers all of whom are bullied: one is Japanese, one is a Korean born in Japan, and the third is African-Japanese. This advertisement attracted both positive feedback and angry criticism both within and outside of Japan. Oh and Han (2021) conducted a textual analysis of this advertisement including comments on Nike’s YouTube channel. However, while this was a useful study it focused solely on the comments of relatively anonymous YouTube users. The aim of this study is to examine the perspectives of Japanese university students towards three TV advertisements in relation to the intersection of gender, race and national identity. The study conducted focus group interviews with six to twelve students based on their viewing of these TV commercials in November, 2022 and used the circuit of commodification and communication model (Jackson, 2012) as its theoretical framework in order to examine the links between production, representation and consumption.
