A few minutes and polite questions passed before anyone tackle the enormous zombie elephant in the room. So… how did resident evil 5 producer Masachika Kawata react to the accusation that the game’s use of African villagers as monstrous enemy was inherently racist? “It was a little bit unfortunate,” he explains calmly. “And we feel that it was a little bit unfair because we set the game in Africa and then obviously we had to make the indigenous people, and they happened to be black people. We don’t take racism so lightly it was just a coincidence nothing more.”
We are talking to Kawata san in Germany at the Leipzing Games Convention, and he’s not at all fazed by the line of questioning. Indeed, he seems relieved to put the record straight. In case the brouhaha passed you by, here is a recap: in the summer of 2007, Capcom unveiled the trailer for Resi 5 which showed a fictional African village where the inhabitants had been turned into zombies and were trying to kill the lead character Chris Redfield. Website Black Looks picked up on the fact that most of the enemies were black, Chris was white, and so a scandal was born.
Kawata san admits that the reaction caught his team on the hop, and says that perhaps it’s all down to cultural differences: “You can’t please everybody, you know. Everyone’s got different opinions. For us Japanese, we may be a little bit more naive in comparison to the Western people, because we have never had a history of living with any other race as such. It was a lesson: that probably we have to be a bit more sensitive about the issues in the future.”
We are talking to Kawata san in Germany at the Leipzing Games Convention, and he’s not at all fazed by the line of questioning. Indeed, he seems relieved to put the record straight. In case the brouhaha passed you by, here is a recap: in the summer of 2007, Capcom unveiled the trailer for Resi 5 which showed a fictional African village where the inhabitants had been turned into zombies and were trying to kill the lead character Chris Redfield. Website Black Looks picked up on the fact that most of the enemies were black, Chris was white, and so a scandal was born.
Kawata san admits that the reaction caught his team on the hop, and says that perhaps it’s all down to cultural differences: “You can’t please everybody, you know. Everyone’s got different opinions. For us Japanese, we may be a little bit more naive in comparison to the Western people, because we have never had a history of living with any other race as such. It was a lesson: that probably we have to be a bit more sensitive about the issues in the future.”
