It is inarguable that the West is infatuated with the oriental picture of Asia—has been since it was first presented by European explorers and traders—and refuses to outgrow the idea, decades later. This is why concepts like Ninjago are successful. Ninjago, for all its efforts to sell East Asia as a concept, does not market to Asians or Asian-Americans. Rather, it markets to a young white audience, taking the strange foreign ideas of ninja and dragons and emperors from Asian culture, and repackaging them in a way that appeals to the white person who has never been to China or Japan themselves. 

 

Lego Ninjago is a television show that blatantly culturally-appropriates from East Asian cultures with no respect for their distinctions or the real-life impact their white-washed stories have on their impressionable audience. The showrunners intentionally leave POC out of any part of the process and treat the ‘Asian’ concept as either a kitschy perversion of real history or a tokenistic background to tell white stories. The Occident told Asia that everything they did was backward and wrong and primitive for centuries and many Asian nations continue to face difficulties because of the disenfranchisement caused by white colonialism. Now suddenly, they’ve changed their minds because it will make them a quick buck. It is, at best, in poor taste, and at worst, egregiously ignorant and downright insulting. 

 

And yet, as an Asian-American kid who grew up with this show as one of the only sources of even vaguely Asian-adjacent kids’ media, I can’t help but remain fond of Ninjago despite it all. Although this website might not make it seem that way, I picked this topic because of the love I have for Ninjago. It was one of the first shows I saw to present Asian culture and lore concepts as an integrated, celebrated part of a fantasy world. For me to have become so attached to a product as inaccurate as Ninjago speaks to the larger unfilled niche in entertainment in general: a respectful, authentic product celebrating Asian culture and heritage, run by POC. I can’t imagine how much it would have changed me to be able to see that from a young age, rather than Ninjago. 

 

Because this, I think, is the part that Ninjago showrunners and Ninjago apologists keep forgetting—that there are real people who are affected by the careless depictions of Asia. 

 

As I said before, Ninjago doesn’t exist in a vacuum. It doesn’t matter whether or not the showrunners meant to offend or misrepresent or harm; harm was caused. Harm continues to be caused, and that’s not fictional. It harms people like me, Asian-Americans, who already have to deal with a barrage of stereotypes and microaggressions on a daily basis. Ninjago’s audience is 6–11-year-old boys, mostly white, and it’s naive to think that none of them gather any takeaways from seeing this orientalist portrayal of Asians and ninja from such a young age. For non-Asian kids, it could lead to them treating their Asian classmates insensitively or developing stereotypical ideas about them. For Asian kids, the messages they—we—receive about who is a main character and who is part of the background is more damaging than most people want to acknowledge. 

 

As I've gotten older and reflected on my childhood, I've come to some realizations about the Asian-American experience that I don't often hear spoken about in the mainstream. It seems to be this universal experience for Asian-Americans to overcome a period of intense self-hatred in their early lives. Out of all the Asian-Americans in my life, 100% of them agreed with this statement.

 

From a young age, we see products like Ninjago alongside a million other voices that tell Asians that we don’t belong. It’s the way we look, or the foods we eat, or the experiences we have that we learn don’t fit the mainstream. Personally, it led me to reject my culture and my second language out of desperation to assimilate for many years. The “wish I was white” phase is this unspoken phenomenon that affects huge swaths of our country and it’s never spoken about. I was lucky; my parents were firm that I keep learning Mandarin. Now, having outgrown the phase, I still retain most of it, as well as close ties to my Chinese heritage. In fact, I’m lucky that I was able to outgrow the phase at all. This was not the case for everyone. A lot of people I know went through this phase in the most formative years of language-learning and no longer have knowledge of the language of their culture. A lot of people carry the pain of being unable to embrace their heritage through their whole lives. 

 

This is what I mean when I say there are real consequences—concrete losses—to a lack of, or poor representation. To look at an already blatantly-orientalist package like Ninjago and see the main character with bright green eyes and platinum blonde hair is unspeakably damaging. Ninjago gets away with it under the reasoning that the ninja are not technically any race, and therefore, the writers can't be complicit in Asian erasure, but it has real consequences on the Asian kids who watch the show. If you can’t see people who look like you and share your experiences reflected in the world, it’s incredibly alienating. I am fortunate, as one of the most prominent ethnic groups in Asia, that the West deigns to acknowledge my existence every now and then, even if it’s stereotypical. My friends from Southeast Asian countries, like Thailand, Vietnam, and the Philippines do not have even that luxury. 

 

All in all, this website is a love letter to what Ninjago did for me as a kid and, simultaneously, a demand for better. I criticize this show because it matters to me. I criticize this show because in America, the conditioning to hate your culture starts young; yes, even as young as 6–ll. I criticize this show in hopes of getting better for kids like me and all diaspora kids, who deserve to grow up seeing accurate reflections of themselves and feel celebrated.