Ask John: Why is Col. Sanders in Anime?

Question:
You know that one part in Project A-ko when they go in the theater and Col. Sanders is on the screen and they scream? What’s the deal with that? Did I just totally miss something there? It has been tormenting me for a year!

Answer:
Actually, I’ve offered my theory on the appearance of Kentucky Fried Chicken icon Col. Sanders in anime on the “Ask John” column before, but that posted answer seems to have vanished as a result of one of our site upgrades. Therefore, my theory is that Col. Sanders has a more significant status in Japanese culture than other Western fast food mascots. The Colonel isn’t the most popular or recognized Western food icon in Japan. Today, Ronald MacDonald, the hamburgler and friends appear on Japanese television almost as commonly as anime and baseball do. The Colonel does have historical significance, though. Kentucky Fried Chicken was the first Western fast-food chain to establish itself in Japan in the 1970s. Nowadays, Burger King, MacDonald’s, Wendy’s, Pizza Hut and KFC, among others, all populate major Japanese cities, but a burger king, a clown, and a pig-tailed red-head don’t have quite the same cultural shock value that a bearded Southern gentleman does for Japanese society. Especially 30 years ago, we can probably assume that the image of a white man with a white beard wearing a white suit selling American fried chicken would have been a startling image for Japanese citizens not used to American culture or people. I suspect that this initial surprise has actually evolved into an intrinsic characteristic of Japanese pop culture, and it is that cultural character that anime spoofs.

The famous sequence in Project A-ko is actually a parody of a sequence from Katsuhiro Otomo’s classic anime movie Harmaggedon, but the image of Col. Sanders is used, possibly to suggest the image of a “white devil” or evil foreigner. It’s difficult to imagine a better representation of a Westerner than the pure white, almost wooden Col Sanders, as he is so often depicted. I’m sure that Japanese people know better, but in the same way that Americans like to parody the Japanese as hysterical mobs running from Godzilla, Japanese may enjoy poking fun at Americans by envisioning us as ghostly white, corpse-like specters or zombies or “white devils.”