By Gregory Hatanaka
Every awards season, Hollywood congratulates itself for diversity — celebrating inclusion, representation, and progress. Yet for many Asian Americans, that progress feels strangely hollow. What’s being sold as diversity often feels more like obligation — an aesthetic checkbox rather than an honest embrace of culture or identity.
From corporate boardrooms to writers’ rooms, Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) has become the vocabulary of modern Hollywood. But what happens when the language of inclusion is wielded by people who still control the narrative — and still don’t look like the communities they claim to champion?
THE ILLUSION OF REPRESENTATION
Look closely at how Asian characters appear onscreen today, and a pattern emerges. Even in projects helmed by major studios with Asian-led casts, there’s an unmistakable softening — a “de-Asian-izing” of faces, personalities, and voices. Take K-Pop Demon Hunters, a recent animated feature from Sony. On paper, it’s a win for Asian representation: an all-Asian cast, a story rooted in Korean pop culture, and a production team celebrating diversity.
But look closer, and the characters themselves barely appear Asian. The faces are rounded, the eyes wide and westernized, the color palette bright and neutralized. It’s as if the film is terrified of reminding audiences that it’s about Asians. Even the kids watching — many as young as five — might not realize they’re looking at Asian heroes at all. Representation becomes camouflage.
THE WHITENING OF ASIAN FACES IN GLOBAL ANIMATION
The controversy surrounding K-Pop: Demon Hunters highlights a recurring problem in global media: the quiet “whitewashing” of Asian features through digital design. Although the film celebrates Korean pop culture, the heroines’ faces are modeled with softened noses, lighter skin, and Euro-centric proportions that echo Western beauty standards more than Korean diversity.
This is part of a larger trend visible in projects like Big Hero 6, where Japanese characters were Westernized into racially ambiguous designs, and even in video-game icons such as D.Va or Kiriko, whose stylized looks smooth out ethnic details to fit a global market. Live-action cinema has long followed the same pattern — from Scarlett Johansson in Ghost in the Shell — revealing how globalization and Western-led production pipelines often turn “representation” into aesthetic assimilation.
What’s lost is cultural specificity: the small, local nuances of faces, textures, and gestures that define true Asian identity. In chasing universal appeal, studios risk producing a homogenized future where even Asian heroes no longer look Asian.
FROM YELLOWFACE TO DIGITAL ERASURE
To understand today’s contradictions, you have to look back. Early Hollywood didn’t just exclude Asians; it invented its own versions of them. The most famous Asian detective in film history, Charlie Chan, was played by white actors in yellowface, usually with taped eyelids and heavy makeup.
In 1937, Luise Rainer won an Academy Award for portraying a Chinese farmer’s wife in The Good Earth — a performance that denied Asian actresses the chance to play themselves. A few decades later, Mickey Rooney’s grotesque caricature of Mr. Yunioshi in Breakfast at Tiffany’s turned Asian identity into a running joke, complete with fake buckteeth and a cartoon accent.
Even when Hollywood began featuring actual Asian characters in the 1970s and ’80s, it continued to frame them as submissive, sexless, or buffoonish. Think of Sixteen Candles and its painfully stereotyped foreign-exchange student Long Duk Dong, or Gung Ho, where Japanese workers are depicted as robotic and humorless beside their loud American counterparts. In 1985, Remo Williams: The Adventure Begins cast Joel Grey — a white actor — as a Korean martial-arts master in full yellowface makeup. That same year, Linda Hunt won an Oscar for playing a male Indonesian-Chinese character in The Year of Living Dangerously — marking the second time an Academy Award was given for a yellowface performance.
Even into the 2000s, echoes of these tropes persisted. Ken Jeong’s character in The Hangover films may have been played by an actual Asian actor, but he embodies the same tradition of ridicule — written as a shrill, androgynous oddity designed for cheap laughs rather than complexity or dignity.
These portrayals weren’t merely offensive — they set the visual and behavioral template for how Asian identity could be imitated, stylized, or erased. And while yellowface makeup has mostly disappeared, its spirit lingers. The modern version is algorithmic and digital: 3-D rendered characters and marketing campaigns that “smooth out” Asian features until they’re racially ambiguous.
Hollywood’s message hasn’t changed much since the 1930s — it just got better software.
WHO REALLY CONTROLS THE NARRATIVE
While Asian actors and creators are increasingly present in Hollywood, the real decisions still come from non-Asian executives. Even the most progressive-sounding projects often bear the fingerprints of people who see “Asian inclusion” as a trend or a requirement.
It’s not uncommon to hear showrunners joke privately that they “need one Asian” to meet a quota. Late-night talk shows suddenly feature Asian celebrities — but the interactions feel awkward, almost scripted, as if inclusion is being performed for the camera rather than felt in the room.
These gestures, while well-intentioned, reveal how far we still are from true equality. Diversity without understanding is decoration. Inclusion without empathy is tokenism.
FORCED FACES, FORCED ROLES
Even in television and film today, Asian men are often cast in roles that feel interchangeable with white characters — as if the studio is simply inserting an Asian face into a pre-written part. The result? Performances that feel forced, awkward, and stripped of cultural nuance.
It’s as though these actors are being asked to act white — to deliver lines designed for a character never meant to reflect their background. It’s a quiet industry mandate to blend in rather than stand out.
That subtle erasure — the pressure to conform rather than express — reduces representation to performance art. Instead of celebrating identity, it masks it.
THE GLOBALIZATION PROBLEM
Another layer to this phenomenon lies in globalization — the way media industries across continents now mirror Hollywood’s formulas, aesthetics, and market priorities. In India, mainstream blockbusters increasingly mimic the Hollywood spectacle: larger-than-life heroes modeled on Tom Cruise or the latest Western archetype. What once made Indian cinema unique — regional storytelling and moral contrast — is giving way to CGI explosions and self-serious swagger.
China and Korea are following similar paths. Their biggest productions now feature camera styles, pacing, and character arcs that could belong to any Marvel or Mission: Impossible film. Cultural exchange has mutated into homogenization — “global” too often meaning “Western.” The result is a world cinema that looks increasingly the same — glossy, fast, loud, and safe.
In that sense, Hollywood’s de-Asian-izing impulse has gone international. The West didn’t just export movies — it exported the blueprint for how to erase identity in pursuit of mass appeal.
THE CATEGORY PROBLEM
Part of the issue lies in how the U.S. itself classifies people. The government’s census — and by extension, DEI policy — uses a single, catch-all term: “Asian.” That word lumps together vastly different cultures, histories, and languages. The result is statistical invisibility. A Korean American and an Indian American have completely different realities, but both are reduced to “Asian.”
In entertainment, this flattening of identity becomes aesthetic: the “pan-Asian” look that satisfies everyone and represents no one.
Today, Korean culture dominates the global conversation. K-pop idols and Korean dramas are international sensations. But to call that “Asian representation” misses the point. Korean is Korean. It’s not a substitute for the rest of Asia. When Western media conflates the two, it distorts understanding rather than broadening it.
THE CULTURAL WALL AT HOME
Even within Asian communities, another obstacle persists: cultural resistance to the arts. Many Asian households, especially among immigrant families, discourage careers in film, music, or performance. Success is defined by stability, not the uncertainty of Hollywood.
That’s changing slowly, but the stigma remains. Until more Asian parents embrace creative professions as valid, the industry pipeline will continue to depend on a small handful of outliers — the few who dared to rebel.
LOSING ON BOTH SIDES
Then there’s the uncomfortable truth about how Asians are treated in America’s broader DEI ecosystem. Asians are often excluded from minority support systems and simultaneously denied the privileges of the white majority. In higher education, this contradiction becomes painfully clear.
When I applied to UCLA years ago with a 3.5 GPA, I was told that as an Asian, I’d need to perform far better to stand out. Students from other minority groups with similar grades would have better chances under affirmative action. Asian Americans often lose on both sides: not “minority enough” to benefit from diversity programs, yet still subject to racial ceilings.
Hollywood’s DEI mirrors that paradox. Asians are visible but voiceless, celebrated but sidelined. They’re essential to the optics but expendable to the substance.
THE LANGUAGE OF OTHERING
We still hear phrases like “that Asian guy” or “that Chinese girl,” treated as normal descriptors. Yet you rarely hear anyone say “that Black guy” or “that Mexican girl” in polite conversation. This reflex reveals an unconscious bias — that Asian identity is perpetually foreign, something that must be clarified or explained. Even in 2025, Asians are still the “other.”
THE INSTITUTIONAL BLIND SPOT
Organizations that claim to represent “people of color” often overlook Asians entirely. The NAACP historically claims to advocate for all non-white communities, but in practice, its mission has focused overwhelmingly on Black civil rights. That’s understandable given its origins, but the effect is that Asians — and others — remain peripheral to America’s diversity narrative.
Hollywood’s corporate DEI offices repeat this pattern: plenty of talk about diversity, but little nuance in how it’s applied.
THE PATH FORWARD
For real change to happen, Hollywood has to move beyond quotas and metrics and toward authorship. Asian filmmakers, producers, and executives need to be empowered to tell stories from their own cultural truths — not filtered through the lens of Western marketing departments.
Representation isn’t about the number of Asian faces onscreen; it’s about who shapes those faces, who writes their dialogue, and who decides what they should look like.
Until then, Hollywood’s “diversity” will remain largely performative — a surface-level correction to a century-old problem. It’s progress wrapped in irony: a new kind of yellowface, coded not in greasepaint but in pixels.
Because when diversity becomes policy rather than principle, it stops being art.
Gregory Hatanaka is a Los Angeles–based filmmaker, writer, and media analyst whose work explores identity, globalization, and independent cinema. He is the founder of Cinema Epoch and Cineridge Entertainment and has directed and distributed numerous international and American independent films.
