Anime Accent Absence: Difference between revisions

* Eclair, the French girl introduced at the end of ''[[Ouran High School Host Club]]'', who has no trouble conversing with anyone despite there being nothing to indicate that she has lived in the country or by some other means has learned to speak Japanese like a native.

* Both played straight and averted in ''[[Itazura na Kiss]]''. British national Chris speaks near-flawless Japanese. Possibly justified given the amount of time she's spent studying Japanese culture and the time she's spent living there. Her MOTHER, however, speaks Japanese with an obvious English accent.

* The non-native Kaolla Su in ''[[Love Hina]]'' speaks Japanese with a broad [[Kansai Regional Accent]] and uses malaprops. This is [[Lampshade Hanging|lampshaded]] as her having been taught by Kitsune, an [[The Idiot From Osaka|actual Osakan]], but the real reason is it just fits her boisterous personality.

** [[Wendee Lee]] complicated matters in the North American dub by giving her a Hindu-like accent based on her appearance because the above information was not provided to her until it was too late to change it. Despite this, Su's personality managed to carry over just fine.

** It could be argued that this even bleeds over to the subtitling of the spoken English dialogue in the anime. Whereas Japanese subtitles censor out some naughty description of Ogui's doujinshi, the spoken English dialogue {{spoiler|with such gems as "it was so hot when he shot his sperm all over that guy's glasses"}} keeps it in full force.

* In the ''[[Full Metal Panic!]]'' anime, Kurz (German by birth, raised in Japan), Sousuke (ethnic Japanese raised in Russia and Afghanistan ([[No Communities Were Harmed|renamed Helmajistan]] in anime), Mao (Chinese-American) and Tessa (Italian-American by birth) all apparently speak flawless Japanese. This is partly explained by the fact that both Tessa and Kurz lived in Japan as children, and Sousuke was born and lived the first few years of his life in Japan, details only glancingly referred to in the anime series and provided in more detail in the [[Light Novels]].

* In the ''[[Pokémon (anime)|Pokémon]]'' anime, Raymond, who's not implied to be a foreigner in any other way that his voice, speaks in a really thick American accent (and even has an American voice actor), while the actually canon American character Matisse (Lt. Surge) settles for really (REALLY) [[Gratuitous English]].

* ''[[Haruhi Suzumiya]]'' actually does this with [[Kansai Regional Accent|Kansai-ben]]; it's set in the author's birth city of Nishinomiya, which is a natural place for that dialect to be spoken, as it sits straight in the heart of the Kansai region, right between Kobe and Osaka; but everyone speaks with a standard Japanese accent, in both the light novels and the anime.

* In ''[[Shaman King]]'', the entire cast outside of a rather minimal amount of characters are not Japanese, even more so when they move for the majority of the series to America. Despite characters being from a great deal of countries, and despite covering a great deal of specific dialects within that, there is little effort made to distinguish them with voice. Foreign characters speak in fluent, if not at times refined, Japanese except for random sprinklings of their native languages (consisting of perhaps a word or two, maybe a sentence; though this is mostly used for minor characters, and is dropped when the character becomes more important plot-wise). This wouldn't have been such a point of contention were it not for the fact that the vast majority of said international cast had only about a week to realize that they needed to learn Japanese at all; and even then would only have had to use it for a period of maybe 2 weeks.

* In the English dub of ''[[Monster (manga)|Monster]]'', [[Translation Convention]] means that the German speaking characters are rendered with American accents, though a British couple in one episode are given authentic accents.

* In ''[[Digimon Adventure 02]]'', apparently everybody in the world speaks the same language...except for the Russians.

** ''[[The Movie|Digimon Hurricane Touchdown]]'' has Wallace, or Willis as he's known in the dub. The original version has him justify this by saying that a Japanese girlfriend taught him.

* The crew of the ''[[Black Lagoon]]'' and Balalaika's [[The Mafiya|Hotel Moscow]] all speak perfect Japanese. Out of the world-wide transient population of Roanpur, [[Anime Chinese Girl|Shenhua]] is the only aversion. It's all a [[Translation Convention]], though, as they all speak English, and Shenhua's broken Japanese symbolizes her equally broken English. In the second season when American-born Revy and Russian Balalaika come to Japan, they both need Rock (the only ''real'' Japanese speaker in the cast) to translate for them, and speak (in the original) with [[Gratuitous English|thickly accented English]].

* In ''[[Gravitation]]'', Claude "K" Winchester is Bad Luck's trigger-happy American manager, yet he seems to speak normal Japanese. This may be justified due to the fact that he previously managed Ryuichi Sakuma, the singer from the world famous group Nittle Grasper, for some time. What makes him a weird case is that while his Japanese is normal, his ''English'' is noticeably accented, despite the fact that he's supposed to be American.

** Kanzaki Kaori is a native Japanese speaker which gives her partner Stiyl Magnus an excuse and their immediate superior has also been learning the language from here. They are the only ones with any excuse.

* Subverted in ''[[Ghost Hunt]]''; the Australian John Brown is laughed at for speaking Kyoto dialect, which the other characters call "weird"; he was under the impression that it was a more polite way of speaking and starts correcting himself when it's pointed out.

* In the ''[[Street Fighter (video game)|Street Fighter]]'' franchise, Americans Cody, Charlie and Guile, British Cammy, Jamaican Dee Jay and [[Parts Unknown|unknown-nationality]] M. Bison speak with Japanese accents. In ''Street Fighter IV'', everybody has an American accent save for Zangief, El Fuerte, Cammy and Rose in the English dub. ''SFIV'' comes with the option to hear many English speaking characters either speaking English or English with a heavy Japanese accent!

* Yoh from ''[[Starry Sky]] [[in Spring]]'' displays an amazingly extensive Japanese vocabulary, despite having spent most of his childhood and teens in France.

* In the American version of ''[[Trauma Center (series)|Trauma Team]]'', Naomi Kimishima and Tomoe Tachibana both speak perfect English without accents, despite both characters hailing from Japan.

* In ''[[Power Stone]]'', a series of [[Fighting Game|fighting games]] for Dreamcast (and later PSP), the characters are from different countries and nationalities, but they speak Japanese.

{{reflist}}

[[Category:Accent Tropes]]

[[Category:Alliterative Trope Titles]]