Word: mr
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...elsewhere, Mr. James, dressed in his buttoned-up red polo shirt, tie and khakis, is seen as playing to Japan's xenophobic tendencies. Annoyed expats have described the character as "white, dorky" and speaking "mangled Japanese." The chair of the Foreign Residents and Naturalized Citizens' Association of Japan, Arudo Debito - a naturalized Japanese citizen born David Aldwinckle - has officially protested the Mr. James campaign with a letter to McDonald's Corp. headquarters in Illinois. Soon after the ads started to roll out, somebody set up an "I hate Mr. James" Facebook group, which now has 67 members...
...blog, Mr. James posts travel plans - to places like Kyushu, where he visits McDonald's restaurants - and ruminates about his favorite burgers. He bungles his attempts at written Japanese and mispronounces words with a staccato-like butchering of the language. One online video shows him talking to himself while practicing from a phrasebook, proclaiming "horenso" (spinach) with a gesture. Mr. James has appeared in two commercials since the campaign began, in which he also mistakes words, for instance, yelling "tamago" (egg) in Japanese instead of the similar-sounding word tamaya, which is shouted during fireworks...
...McDonald's Japan spokesman Junichi Kawaminami says there is no official response to criticism of the Mr. James campaign. He does, however, explain the story of the character, which appears in the first commercial. "Mr. James' daughter was determined to go to Japan and study, and so he looked at maps and got excited to go with her," says Kawaminami. "Once he found out that McDonald's was offering the Tamago Double Mac, it became the deciding factor." Why? It was on the McDonald's Japan menu years ago and became Mr. James' favorite when he was a student...
...Some of the Mr. James criticism, however, seems a little thin. One comment on Facebook says that because Mr. James wears the same clothes every day in August, it might suggest that foreigners are "unclean." If we're going to look at the clothing choices of fast-food icons, it seems fair to point out that Ronald McDonald and Colonel Sanders have been wearing their famous uniforms for half a century. There's no doubt that the spectacle of the foreigner in Japan is an everyday occurrence in media. A foreigner's response that he or she can use chopsticks...
...same burger he ate in his youth - basically a double Big Mac with an egg on it - is as much an affirmation of Japanese food by McDonald's Japan as it is unbelievable and unrealistic as a narrative. That's why it's a commercial campaign. To protest Mr. James as a stereotype of a minority population in Japan because the Ohio native fails to speak or write Japanese fluently, dresses like a nerd and blogs about burgers only ends up underscoring the fact that there really aren't a lot of foreigners who fit the bill running around Japan...