Why don't Japanese videogame characters have black hair like Japanese people?

I've played a lot of Japanese games over the last two decades and have wondered this. I even spent the better part of one of those decades learning the Japanese language so I could play even more of them.

I’ve always wondered why characters that are clearly based on Asian people or even outright stated as being Japanese don’t have black hair like their real life counterparts. It can’t all be the case that all these characters have dyed hair, right?

Over the last few weeks I've noticed a recurring theme in Japanese games that at first I had first thought was just my imagination.

Take a look at the screenshot below:

[Caption: Black haired boy: Wha...?!]

I dunno about you guys but that guys’ hair looks dark blue to me. Not black. If you aren't convinced take a look at the character art:

Pretty sure that is darkish blue right there. But the game clearly says it is black. Is this just a case of the script being finalised well in advance of finalised character design? It's a pretty dark blue so I guess someone could mistake it for black at a glance. Or maybe this is just a typo? I didn't really know what to make of this so I ignored it and forgot about it.

Over the next few months I found several other examples like this but didn't (or couldn't) take screens. I wasn't really sure there was anything to say. Some examples that come to mind are:

[Ever17’s Tsugumi: her hair appears purple haired but the game says her hair as black]

[Fate/Stay Night’s Rin Tohsaka: her hair appears colour appears in-game as anywhere between shades of grey, silver and even brown. But the game says her hair is black]

But these are all pretty dark colours and for each respective game they might be close enough to black that they can exist as black specifically within the game world.

...and then I saw this:

[Fate/Stay Night's Sakura Matou: her hair appears a kind of purple/blue but the game says her hair is black]

Now...hold up. Rin and Sakura are from the same series of games here. They even appear side-by-side at times. It can't be the case that Rin's silver simply passes for black within that game world where Sakura's purple also passes for black. And yet the game is telling us that these two completely disparate colours are both supposed to be treated as 'black'.

And this isn't the result of script and art asset differences as Fate/Stay is actually a trilogy. We find out Rin's hair is black in the second instalment as her hair is mentioned quite a bit to emphasize her femininity (she is the romantic interest in the second game). In the third game which came out later we learn about Sakura and there are several references to her hair (Sakura is the romantic interest in the third game). The game is also extremely script heavy (being a visual novel) so inconsistencies like this would have been corrected, if not in the first game in the trilogy, by the last one for sure.

So I guess what I'm trying to say is that Japanese/Asian characters in Japanese games do have black hair provided their hair is almost any colour that is remotely dark(ish). Doesn't matter if it is blue, purple or even green. Japanese games simply don't tie what their characters actually look like to the way they are presented.

But here is where it gets bonkers. Even though it is understood that a dark haired character must canonically have black hair, the various hair colours are considered aesthetically pleasing enough that when Japanese people cosplay these characters they don't cosplay them them in a way that is true to the source script!

[A Japanese cosplayers' take on Sakura Matou: Her hair is purple to match the aesthetic of the character from the source material even though the character, canonically speaking, actually has black hair]

So...in a way the hair colour in this cosplay is completely off...*mind blown*

Edit: So to summarise. Japanese videogame characters often DO have black hair...it just doesn't look that way because hey, black is more than a colour. Probably for aesthetic reasons.

Edit 2: Title has been altered to be less misleading.

Art style

I'm guessing because it probably be too boring visually to see every character with the same hair color.

Why don't you ask them ?

Why don't western games have more boring looking every day people in them?

Please read the blog. The conclusions I've reached might surprise you.

It from the art style but also it does help when reading graphic novels for the character easy to stand out. It is no different from then the over the top costume super heroes were.

@ Articuno76

Its 1 AM, I don't have the energy for that. Now be quiet while I think of an insult...... Just joking !

Isnt it obvious? Denial! =P

I think that is part of it. I distinctly being taken aback by the anime 'Kurenai' because the characters were looked realistic; non-anime body/face shape and black hair. It's quite rare to see and would probably get dull if all anime were like that.

But what gets me is that even in worlds that are entirely fictional, like the one in the first screenshot, the characters often appear as canonically having 'black' hair...that doesn't appear black. If they aren't designed to be Asian to begin with (giving developers free range to make hair any colour they want), why bother with the whole colour charade?

Why not just say the character with (seemingly) blue hair has blue hair? Isn't our suspension in belief in the fictional world enough to that we can accept that it is populated by blue-haired people?

I don't get that.

Sounds pretty self-explanatory to me: they have always compensated the characteristic japanese somatic traits by representing the reverse in manga: big eyes, wild hair of many colors and huge boobs.

There is a difference though; you aren't going to see characters with huge boobs in a game being treated as canonically small-chested.

Likewise, you probably aren't going to see the characters in the world who have big eyes being described as having shifty looking eyes; those characters would be drawn differently from the rest of the characters to emphasise that they pass for 'shifty eyed' in context.

This is different from 'black haired' characters in Japanese games who don't look black haired, but are treated as if they are in context.

So have any of you ever messed around with textures in a videogame? The problem with black is that pure black kills the details in your meshes and normals. Basic airbrushing problem - use too much dark color and everything just muddies together. You need to highlight it with something to get it to pop back out, so you're not going to use gray scales, you're going to use dark reds and dark purples and dark blues.

In general, when you're painting you sometimes make unrealistic choices to create detail, like simulating the way light reflects. Go take a close look at the texture of a metal blade and you'll find a lot of reds and greens in it.

@ Ish_basic

Silent Hill used fog to mask loading in the background.

Mario wears a hat because back in the day there weren't enough pixels to render hair.

You gotta love developers, nothing gets'em down !

That's my guess. But they definitely do it with exaggeration. Similar to how they draw western characters (broad chins/jaws bigger noses)

This is interesting, but it doesn't explain the phenomenon of canonically black-haired characters (who don't appear to have black hair) in games (or any media) where old-fashioned 2D artwork is used.

Take a look at the two characters in from Fate/Stay in the OP. That's a game where all character art is 2D but we still see the split between canonical and aesthetic colouring.

No idea, but it's not a Japanese video game trend. This art style has been in anime and manga since before the Pacman days. While much of the manga is black and white (except for the covers) I can point you to a number of different anime TV shows and movies that depict the style you describe that predate a video game's ability to depict anything beyond what an Atari 2600 could do.

From a strictly color standpoint, Asian hair is generally thought of as "blue-black" versus European black hair which is thought of as more of a "brown-black" (i.e. brunette hair so dark as to be black). I'm no hair stylist, but when coloring hair I've heard that these have to be approached differently.

Also, "blue-black" hair is considered to be one of the 32 physical characteristics of the Buddha. Artists representations tend to be completely blue, emphasizing the "blue" rather than the "black" of the "blue-black" hue. That's probably one of the earlier origins of this trend.

-Byshop

#

all painting is 2d and so suffers from the same issues. 3d games don't use 3d paint jobs...I mean, what would that even mean? What you see in game is a diffuse map - a flat painting - wrapped around a 3d model, or mesh, usually with some normals to give it texture, specular map to tell it how to react to light, etc.

edit: I decided to just give an example of what happens when you use pure black rather than just typing out painting theory and such. Click to enlarge the pictures...but as you can see you go darker with the hair and you retain the same detail until you hit black and the whole thing just turns into a hair-helmet, losing all shred of detail beyond the basic silhouette ....the flat painted texture is painted in a way that simulates both body and shine to the hair as well as giving you a sense of dimension, until you hit black and it just muddies into a solid block.

painting hair in animation or videogames or comics is all about gratuitous use of highlighting to create the sense of sheen and depth, and you can't highlight black hair because there's nothing darker than black...but you can highlight dark blue or gray-purple hair (with black) and create a "black-ish" hair color that still retains detail. So any animation that really cares how its characters look (i.e, not American kiddie cartoons) will likely avoid pure black and use a substitute made with purples and blues.

@Ish_basic: I raised 2D artwork as an exception because there are no dynamic light sources in game where there is only 2D artwork; it's just a picture. Artists typically avoid the blocky hair by simply drawing coloured light onto the end of the characters hair to replicate the effect of the light source in the static shot. In other words there is no real reason not to use black if the artwork is entirely two-dimensional, they only have to use a non-black to show the effect of light on the end of hair strands (which separates them visibly).

But what I am talking about above is 'like-black', not true black. True blacks as you said, don't work because they create a blocky effect. Let's look at that a bit more to see why it is different from what is happening in Japanese games:

In Western games the colours the artists use actually look black to anyone who isn't looking to hard.

Take a look at the following:

Now you are right in saying that these characters don't have truly black hair. If you look carefully you can see hues of blue, grey, white and brown. But the important thing to note is that the major colour is black, with the other colours acting as highlights to prevent the blocky effect you mentioned.

To most people these characters' hair looks more black than it does anything else.

This is very different from Japanese games where we aren't just talking about hues, but the major colour in hair being something other than recognisably black.

I started this thread not to make a point that characters in Japanese games don't have true-black hair. It was to show that many of the characters in the game don't even have 'like-black' hair, but are treated in game as having black hair.

And remember, we aren't just talking about dark colours either; Fate's Sakura has light-purple hair that doesn't even resemble black, not even if you squint. How do you explain pale/light colours passing for black? Dark greens and blues I can kind of get, but light purple?

You can make characters with literally any color in the color grid, why settle with "normal" hair color. Artists can make them the way they want them to be.

@Krelian-co: It's a shame you didn't really understand the point of the OP *sighs*. I guess that title is a little misleading and I'm to blame for that.

To clarify, the point wasn't really to ask a question (it was rhetorical). I was to make the observation that characters who don't appear to be anywhere near black-haired actually are (or can be) when in their respective contexts.

Very interesting post :)

Why are so many Japanese characters portrayed having multi-coloured hair? That's a great question but what is even more interesting is, why do the characters, even those who are clearly stated to be Japanese, not look Japanese? It's not just game but in Japanese entertainment in general (pretty much every anime and movie). That is something I find quite worrying, is it because of Japan's post-WW2 subservience to the US?

Not all video games are meant to be realistic. That's as dumb as asking why japanese anime characters have huge eyes while japanese people have small squinty eyes? c'mon.

See my reply to Black_Knight to understand why this topic is not what you think it is (and please, do actually read the OP).

@Articuno76: This is very different from Japanese games where we aren't just talking about hues, but the major colour in hair being something other than recognisably black.

I've been taking the direction I've been taking on this because I would submit that what initially started off as artistic consideration for the effects of using too many dark colors eventually evolves into a pure aesthetic. So one day a guy is looking at his black hair with blue/purple highlights, likes the shade of blue he's chosen and decides to make it more prominent and then decides to reverse the colors altogether and says, "hey, I like that!" Other artists see this blue-headed character, think it's pretty cool, and use blue hair in their own work. Most of the time our reasons for doing things aren't any more complex than that's what we saw the other guy doing.

The only cultural consideration I'd throw in there is that Asian animation in general uses a much brighter palette with an almost altogether unrealistic level of saturation and contrast than most western palettes, which seem to favor more leeched colors and lots of browns and grays. I think the use of these bright hues in hair color is in following with that. Also, Asian characters have very unique silhouettes, with characters being recognizable by their very shadows often times. Hair is a much bigger part of the identity of these characters than western characters, and in keeping with that focus on establishing identity through hair-style, it only makes sense to go beyond the normal, every-day color range when coloring their hair. Just another level of uniqueness for that character.

Come on Gamespot isn't it about time you got that blog mark again on these blogs, its pretty annoying when 60% of new posts are nothing but peoples blogs.

I read it before. The answer is incredibly simple, it is all fantasy. whether its a video game or just artwork, its all made up. Looking deep into something that defies logic is pointless.

Honestly who cares why JRPG and Jgames have characters with a different hair colour then in RL? its a game.

@WR_Platinum: This topic isn't about why characters in Japanese games don't have like-black hair, it's about why the gap between canonical hair colour and aesthetic colour exists, why those rules only work one way and why the logic of the rules is (normally) never reversed. Read on.

The interesting question isn't asking 'why do these characters have hair that appears blue, green and purple', it's asking 'why bother still making them be canonically black?'.

I don't need the question 'why don't Japanese characters have black hair' answered because I answered that myself in the OP (they do have black hair, it just doesn't look it); that's the starting point of discussion.

Looking deep into something that defies logic is pointless.

Ah, but these games do follow logic; a logic of their own. You can't simply take any colour and make it stand-in for any colour:

For instance, yellow is invariably either dyed hair or blonde. Orange is understood to be either dyed or ginger. It's not like you can take a canonically black haired character and make their hair aesthetically yellow; the logic of the art doesn't work that way (though as we will see, the rules are flexible in other ways...).

Let me try asking you another question to help you reach the point of revelation: why is it that even though we have characters who have aesthetic-green, blue and purple hair that we have so few characters who are canonically green, blue or purple haired?

It if is just fantasy why not just populate the world with characters who actually have those hair colours canonically (actually are green, blue or purple haired to the people of the world) instead of having aesthetic colours that represent black? After all, It's just fantasy, right?

There's something stopping that from happening; this isn't a free-for-all where anything goes because it is a game/work of fiction.

See above.

--

But I'm not done yet. Remember in my example above I showed that Fate's Rin and Sakura where considered to both have black-hair, right? The story actually deepens and becomes a real cluster-****. because even though they both have canonical black hair they also both have hair colours that the game world characters can distinguish (in addition to being aesthetically different in a way we can distinguish them as grey/purple).

Spoiler warning:

As it happens, Rin and Sakura are sisters. One character comments that something that happened to Sakura that changed the colour of her hair from Rin's black (which we see as grey) to Sakura's black (which we see as purple).

What is happening here initially appears to make zero sense. How can the characters of the game world differentiate between two colours that they themselves identify as the same colour 'black'?

The realisation is actually quite profound: not only do Japanese games have a split between canonical and aesthetic colouring, but sometimes in a almost fourth wall breaking way, the differentiations in aesthetic colouring (normally only perceptible to the audience) can be used as a narrative device.

That is to say that sometimes purple and grey are both black, but that if it suits the needs the narrative they can be 'different blacks'.

Think about that for a second :P

Again, you're asking the wrong question. This artistic style predates video games by a number of years. As soon as Japanese video games were capable of doing so, they immediately began emulating manga and anime art styles which had already been doing this for years.

-Byshop

The art style is centered around anime. And technically anime is supposed to be its on unique race different form anyone in existence.

Which question?

I'm not suggesting that this phenomenon is unique to games. Just that it exists in games. The question I'm asking doesn't even talk about games; just characters and colours. The question (the real question, not the rhetorical one in the topic) was:

"The interesting question isn't asking 'why do these characters have hair that appears blue, green and purple', it's asking 'why bother still making them be canonically black?'."

I used games as the primary example because this is...you know, a videogame forum.

Until now, I just assumed that if a characters hair was purple then it was purple. Not that it was actually black. And I certainly didn't assume that two different colours like grey/purple could both be black AND both be distinguished from each other even when treated as the same colour; showing not only a separation between canonical truth and aesthetic choice, but occasionally a blurring of narrative truth and audience perception. <<- The latter is IMO really interesting and I've not once seen that point made before.

Sorry, but I'm a little in awe that everyone just knew all this stuff all along. Finding that very hard to believe. I've never seen proof like the kind I've put up in pictures used to make a point before;just conjecture.

In fact I've never even seen the points I'm making be made before when talking about Japanese aesthetic design. It's normally just a superficial observation that the hair colours used in Japanese media are not black. To which I say; well, no sh*t Sherlock!

So you guys seriously knew everything I've written and aren't even the least bit interested or surprised? I was kinda thinking I was making some astute observations here...

The blue I always knew was supposed to be black albeit with artistic license. To me, this was just a logical extension of the idea that asian black hair is a "blue-black" hue so that made sense to me. I can think of several anime where the main character basically had black hair but it would show as blue in the light or it was just depicted as a very dark blue. The idea that purple or other lighter shades of blue are supposed to be black hair is not something I expected but at the same time there's pretty much nothing from Japan that surprises me anymore. :)

-Byshop

pure black hair shows up badly on tv and in games so thats why... plus its boring if all the people looked the same.