Before I answer this question…what ethnicity is this character?

She looks European, but is dressed in a kimono..so she must be a European woman who married into a Japanese family!

(Sorry , she’s 100% Japanese!)

How about this character?

Yes, definitely Japanese…properly dressed even…but she has blue hair and eyes?

Welcome to the concept of Mukokuseki!

Mukokuseki, in the context of anime is defined as…

is the deliberate lack of ethnic features included in the character design of Japanese fictional characters. It literally means "stateless" (i.e. "without nationality"), though the term relates to more abstract anime, and in this case, used hyperbolically.

Mukokuseki - TV Tropes

The reasons for such characterisation, based on my opinion plus reading around a bit are a s follows…

• To distinguish between characters: Not everyone is the same, and that kind of thinking extends to anime too!
• To make the anime stand out from others! (Unlike your magical heroine, my magical heroine has multicolored hair!
• And from TV tropes…

the artists are appropriating features from the exotic "other" (in this case white people) into their character designs either for their own interests or for marketing purposes. To that point, the pervasiveness in Japanese pop-culture of physical features such as fair hair and blue or green eyes which are not found amongst the homogenous population of Japan arguably suggests such features are considered fashionable, desirable, and interesting. This was compounded exponentially over the last 60 years or so by the pervasive Western standards of beauty that infiltrated most cultures, including Japan, via Hollywood and the Euro/American fashion industry

• Because the anime characters ARE actually foreign!

Actually an American

• Because, sometimes, it makes their character look cool….

• Yes, he’s Japanese, and sorry he’s taken.

Hmmm, after some thinking, here are some possible reasons I could give you:

1. It could be that they have European ancestry.
2. Adding diversity, because not all characters will have brown eyes and black/brown hair, right? Or probably because they give more normal physical appearance than other crazy hair colors like green or purple.
3. Maybe it's the result of Japanese people's fascination with blue eyes and blonde hair, as they're rarely seen in their country.
4. Could be linked to their personalities.

Source: Anime Hair Colors: What Do They Mean? (An All-in-One Personality Guide)

Hope it helps. If you have some more questions, don’t hesitate to ask :)

they aren’t really western features.

Anime is known to be a form of entertainment where it is a lot easier to experiment.

one of these experiments were probably giving different colored hair and eyes and crazy and completely awesome gravity defying hair.

One of the hair colors just happened to be blond and yellow. They aren’t exactly considered as “Western Features”

And the fair skin is mostly because the Japanese have very fair skin and there are countless dark skinned anime characters as well.

This is just a theory, but I think the various colors is also a good way to give a bit of uniqueness to each character as it is hard to put many facial features to anime characters. I think the color is also a way to express the characters personality through the clichéd representation of colors.

for example this character looks cheery because of her light colored hair and bright eyes:

and this one..

then there are characters like this who look quiet and calm ue to their dark color theme:

But seeing as it is the wondrous world of Anime, authors seem to surprise you by giving characters with dark color themes the brightest and most playful personalities and vice versa

Hope this Helped!

Ahh the blue eyes and blonde hair trend among girls right? (especially the uptight, queen-like I’m superior ones? or the tsundere ones right?)

I’d think that they do this because the japanese (assumption) like western looks. This may be because basically all asians look the same in regard to hair and eye colour, so they like that westerner look where their’s a lot of variation. The blonde hair and blue eyes is also something that is out of their reach genetically so it’s like a form of envy maybe? So since anime is a more fantasy world, they’re able to give their desires a more physical form.

I’m not totally sure as to why but this is just a possible reason.

Sigh.

It doesn’t have anything to do with Aryan envy or any other racial complexes, let alone self hatred (geez, that’s harsh). That’s just one of those things that sounds like it should be true but isn’t.

It’s because anime art is based off of Walt Disney’s style, and because drawing realistic people with pen and screen tones thousands of times is hard, especially if those people look familiar.

Like many Japanese kids, I tried to learn to draw manga at one point. Here’s what I learned about why the stylistic choices are made the way they are.

This is the starting point.

Tezuka Osamu, the undisputed “father of manga,” was a huge Disney fan, and sought to emulate the style way back in the 50s.

Modern anime and manga are a gradual evolution from this art style.

That's the gist of why they don’t look Japanese.

But there’s way more to it, so let me unpack the question a bit.

Edit: Nadia Hemady points out in a comment that jojouga artists from way back in the late 1800s/early 1900s have also had influence in at least equal measure to Tezuka, especially in shoujo art. Be sure to check out their comment as well, as it’s super interesting.

Why are they so often blonde?

Because most artists prefer to stick to natural hair colors, especially for non-genre, and because offset printing, the most affordable printing technique, causes midtones to look extremely noisy. They’re literally checkerboards:

You could stick with black, sure, but unless you’re a very skilled artist, you’re going to run into same-face syndrome. Hair tends to be the easiest thing to differentiate when all your facial features are basically emojis.

Also, the publisher might call you and tell you to stop wasting ink. This was a real thing up until the 90s or so. Not sure about now, but my dad, who ran a print shop, would grunt whenever he saw a ton of black fills on a page.

Why are their eyes blue?

If you want to distinguish between the pupil and the iris, you want a lighter color. And if you want to stay within realistic colors, your only choices are hazel, blue and green. Blue and green stand out the best against skin tone, although reds and pinks are also common to match hair colors.

If you don’t make the iris discernible, you risk “dead fish eyes”:

So the contrast is exaggerated.

Why are their eyes so big?

Again, because anime is working backwards towards realism from Walt Disney’s style.

Also, try drawing small eyes. It’s really, really hard to make them expressive or shiny or attractive.

If you want to draw thin eyes easily, this is how you’d do it:

Why do they have pointy chins?

It’s not because Europeans or Aryans have pointy chins. Japanese people, on average, have pointy chins. This surprised me as well. I, like many Japanese people, had assumed Japanese people have round chins.

I had an interesting discussion about this in one of my answers a couple weeks ago:

Rei Miyasaka's answer to Anime characters often have triangular chins. I know it's an exaggeration, but every exaggeration is an exaggeration of something. So do Japanese sometimes have a triangular chin if you simplify it to a geometric form, or rather semi-circular?

But that aside, this is probably the real reason:

It’s in fashion right now.

Why are they so pale-skinned?

Because paper is white. Also, because a lot of Japanese people are pale.

Why are they so tall?

Because tall and leggy has stage presence.

It’s the same reason Hollywood celebrities are typically tall and Roman statues are like 9 heads in height. It’s not a European or Japanese thing to aspire to height. Somewhat unfortunate for me as a 5′3″ dude, it’s a universal aspiration. Europeans (and people from certain regions of China) are just lucky in that regard.

Only Daniel Radcliffe can give me hope.

Why do they have such tall, prominent noses?

They don’t. Those are just the ones that first went mainstream in the west.

The anime that first became popular in North America and parts of Europe — Ghost in the Shell, Death Note, Gundam, Akira, Cowboy Bebop, Dragon Ball — were all appreciated primarily for their grit. If you want gritty (or ironic comedy, as in Jojo), you draw chiseled faces.

Those are the ones you’re thinking about.

Most of the shows that are popular in Japan feature characters with far flatter, more stylized faces.

Also, noses are really hard to draw without making them look wrong or too attention-grabbing. So it became more and more acceptable over time to simplify noses.

Why do they look European?

They don’t. They look like drawings.

It’s 100% confirmation bias. It all depends on which features and which characters you choose. So if you want to make the case that they look European, you can easily pick a few features that are assumed to be European — height, jawlines, hair color, whatever —and insist they’re Aryan.

Another answer used these two images to try to make the case that anime characters look Aryan. I’m not sure if they read Japanese, but this image is making the case that they have Japanese features, contrasting to western comics, which have Caucasian features.

This second one, which the other answer cited, is specifically using examples of shows that were popular in the west, and only noting certain similarities — not saying anime characters are European.

In fact, the first character here, Light from Death Note, makes it his life’s mission to create a perfect society by killing off all criminals as well as anyone who gets in his way. If he looks Aryan, that may be intentional.

So why do some Japanese people think they look European?

You know, you could always just ask them.

So the answer is: most of them don’t. But when they do, it’s because they don’t look Japanese, and because the person asking is often Caucasian.

I don’t think most anime characters are white, unless it is explained or mentioned that they are. You could perhaps consider than some characters with specific traits like “blue eyes and blonde hair” could be, but then there also characters that somehow happen to have blue hair, green hair or pink hair, or even multicolor, same with their eyes.

Let’s see different points about why some people think anime characters might be “white” instead of japanese or asian in general.

Reasons:

1. Skin color:

Anime characters are fair skinned:

Fact:

East asian people are quite fair skinned, look at map distribution of skin color:

(Note that color may vary between individuals and with variables as sun exposure, on which latitude they live, and the season of the year )

Examples:

Mongolian:

Korean:

(Here, in the picture above you can see a “white man”, as you can see he is more pinkish than “white”, most anime characters doesn’t have a pinkish undertone to their skin either)

(The person above, Rae Chen is a chinese women, she is naturally of that color, not all chinese people are that much pale, sure, but the fact is that there are East Asian people that are naturally as pale as her, chinese, japanese or korean, there are billions of East Asian people in total, which means there will inevitably be a lot of very, very pale asians)

Japanese:

Chinese:

In most of East Asia (China, Korea and Japan) fair skin have been traditionally prized and considered as the beauty standard since ancient times, because it meant that a person could stay inside a building (in their houses or jobs)instead of having to work outside in open fields like peasants, in other words, it was a symbol of status, richness, and having a good life, even now a days, it is related to upper class to a certain degree as it means that person most likely have a job inside an office under the roof of a building instead of working outside under the Sun as a farmer or a construction worker. It has been traditionally considered beautiful for many centuries, long before having contact with white people. In Japan it has always been like that for nobility, then it became popularized for common people to want to have fair skin too since Edo Period.

Of course you can always search for and look for examples of asian people that are even lighter or darker than these ones I showed.

As I said, it depends on many factors, for instance, for example there are like 56 ethnic groups in China and I don’t know how many more there are in Japan and Korea, some people could as well be mixed with south east asian genetic background, as South East Asia is close to East Asia, or it might as well depends on how much do they expose themselves to the Sun (specially cause asians do tan easier than caucasian people), skin care habits, or the time/ season of the year, like if it is winter or summer and at which lattitude they live.

2. The size and shape of the eyes:

This is a very small example of the variation in eye shapes and sizes of different asian ethnic groups.

Depending on the ethnic background of a person their eyes could look bigger or smaller.

For instance most South East asians (malays, thais, etc…) are said to have big eyes (yes, south east asians don’t have the fair skin color of East Asians at northen areas, but remember that a mixed person could be born with the light skin of northen east asians and the eyes of south east asian as well):

Some of the many reasons why some eyes might look bigger than others are the eyelids (monolids or double eyelids) and the eyelashes.

About 50% of east asian and Japanese people have double eyelids!

Besides, modern japanese people ancestry is mostly composed of two ancient tribes, Yayoi and Jomon, so the features of a japanese person could also date back to that genetic background and of course, that combined with whatever other ancestry they might have due to migrations in the past (mongolian, south east asian, korean, chinese, etc…)

That said many japanese people have quite rounded eyes, even more than many white people:

And before somebody says “surgery, here’s a picture of a japanese woman about 100 years ago:

She has round shaped eyes, this is an old photo taken almost 100 years ago, I seriously doubt they made eyes cosmetic surgery to her to make her eyes rounded.

In case most people don’t know, what really makes someone look more asian, much more than the size or shape of their eyes, or if they have monolids or double eyelids is the lack of a prominent nose bridge and prominet brow ridges which are present in white caucasian people:

And not just japanese, there are also many chinese people with rounded eyes.

Someone anonymous's answer to Can a chinese have big eyes and sharp nose by nature?

For instance many people in Shenzen are mixed east asian with arabic genetic background, givin results like this ones:

There is high percentages of People who have big eyes and tall noses in Northwest China as well, for example

That said, I don’t even think that the size of the eyes of anime characters should be taken that seriously anyway:

Anime eyes are made big, because it makes them more expressive, and characters can portray sadness, happiness or anger with their eyes. (Western cartoons use more the mouth to portray emotions)

Besides, if we continue talking about the eyes of anime characters, anime kawai smilling eyes seems to be a direct reflection of asian smilling eyes, which easily forms naturally in some Asian people without any effort, just by smiling.

That is not to say that white people can’t have smilling eyes either, but it is easier and more naturally given in asian people due to their eyes.

3. Hair colors and eyes colors

When ever somebody makes the claim that anime characters are white because of the hair color and eyes color, they always say “blonde with blue or green eyes”, it is not like all of them are like that:

Anime characters come with all combination of hair colors and eye colors, including eye colors and hair colors that are not even natural to human beings at all, like pink hair, purple hair, green hair, blue hair, etc… Same with eyes.

Heck, some anime characters even have multicolored hair and eyes:

Even, more, some even have designs and patterns in their eyes:

Besides, hairs colors and eye colors in anime sometimes help distinguish characters that have same basic shape of faces and as well represent personality traits of the character:

That said, dying their hair, or even using wigs and contact lenses can be normal for some japanese people, in what we can call as japanese street fashion, which can be seen in places like Harajuku (it isn’t like every japanese person do this, but it is fairly normal for some people to do it)

4. Now, the last point is facial and physical features:

Not every japanese or asian person have an animeish look, but some of them do, and I would argue much more than white / caucasian people:

For instance, while it is true that many asian people won’t naturally have certain features, like colored hair and colored eyes (about which I already talked about).

It is also certain that white people don’t fit anime either in ways asian and japanese people do better, specially those who land a job or manage to get selected as models, tv stars, j-pop or j-rock singers or idols, specially when compared to the models and TV stars in western countries:

Did you noticed?

No, you didn’t?

Most or at least a lot of this people have squarish faces.

Some people even think that Zac Efron looks like Light Yagami (Kira from Death Note):

But Zac Efron’s face is too squarish, kira doesn’t looks like this:

Kira looks like this:

Japanese models and actors fit better:

-

-

Not just that, anime characters lack prominent forheads, prominent brow ridges, prominent nose bridges, prominent jaws:

Just like many japanese people:

(And before somebody talks about “jaw surgery”, look at this pictures that date back at about 100 years ago, still fit the mold)

Give or take, anime characters don’t have much details, that said, whenever japanese animation movies want to make more realistic human like characters, like with 3 dimensional computer generated imagery, this are the results:

As a final question to the reader, who looks more like Cloud Strife?

This japanese rock singer with dyed hair and contact lenses, Gackt:

Or any of this white model with his naturally blond hair and blue eyes?

In american cartoons asians have been given certain stereotypes:

so it is likely that other countries have given stereotypes to white people or at least people form the USA, so here are some undeniably caucasian / white people in anime:

So, basically, most anime characters are most likely asians that look like japanese models, idols, singers, tv stars with dyed hair and contact lenses and crazy styles.

I got some information from other quora answers:
Someone anonymous's answer to Can a chinese have big eyes and sharp nose by nature?

Antoine Millen's answer to Why do Japanese animations not look like Japanese people?

They do look Japanese, to Japanese audiences.

What race are the Simpsons? Your first instinct is probably to say that they’re white, but why? The Simpsons have no identifying racial traits. There isn’t a person alive with bright yellow skin, naturally blue hair, and perfectly round eyes. But in our culture white is considered the default, so any character with no clearly defined race is perceived as being white.

This becomes even more obvious when you compare the Simpson family to minority characters. East Asian characters have paler skin, straight black hair and almond shaped eyes.

Indian characters have reddish-brown skin and black hair. Etc…

But in Japan the default race is Japanese, the country’s population is 98% ethnic Japanese, with most of that remaining 2% being other Asians. Sailor Moon takes this to the extreme. Usagi Tsukino and Minako Aino have blonde hair and blue eyes. Makoto Kino has brown hair and green eyes. Ami Mizuno’s hair and eyes are blue. And even Rei Hino, the most Japanese looking girl from our perspective, actually has dark purple hair and eyes.

Yet as their names imply, all five are meant to be Japanese. Sailor Moon’s large eyes, blue irises and blonde hair aren’t meant to register as racial features. They’re a stylistic embellishment meant to make the character look more interesting. Same as Sailor Mercury’s blue hair.

To further drive the point home, in the live action adaptation all the Senshin are played by Japanese actresses. Because they were always meant to be Japanese.

Sailor Moon is of course an extreme example. It’s a very stylized anime. Something like Grave of the Fireflies is more grounded, and has a more realistic art style. There are no flamboyant hairstyles or striking eye colors. Even the eyes are realistically sized.

That last design choice, by the way, has an interesting history. Large expressive eyes are a common feature in anime/manga, having been popularized by legendary mangaka Ozamu Tezuka. But Tezuka was influenced by the work of his penpal, American cartoonist Carl Barks, who is mostly remembered for his Donald Duck comics. And Banks was just copying Walt Disney’s style from the cartoons.

And Disney drew all his characters with large eyes to make it easier to read their emotions.

Which isn’t to say that anime doesn’t have explicitly non-Japanese characters. It’s just that these characters largely rely on Japanese perception of foreigners for their racial signifiers, much in the same way that the Japanese characters on The Simpsons are identified based on our perception of the Japanese.

If you want to know more about how the Japanese perceive both other nations and themselves, One Piece is actually a great source of information, because all the characters have a canonical real world nationality.

A Japanese Youtuber named Yuta (channel:That Japanese Man Yuta), conducted a street study where he asked Japanese people what nationality certain Japanese characters are. Let me show you some of the screenshots:

Now, do these characters look Japanese to you? If you’re not a Japanese person, chances are your answer is no.

When discussing race in Anime people often fail to realise that race is perceived differently based on variety of factors, including the geographical location.

Julian Abagond, does a wonderful job at explaining it:

The Japanese see anime characters as being Japanese. It is Americans who think they are white.

If I draw a stick figure, most Americans will assume that it is a white man. Because to them that is the Default Human Being. For them to think it is a woman I have to add a dress or long hair; for Asian, I have to add slanted eyes; for black, I add kinky hair or brown skin. Etc. The Other has to be marked. If there are no stereotyped markings of otherness, then white is assumed.

To Japanese, the Default Human Being is Japanese.

Therefore, due to the lack of salient racial details in anime characters, most Japanese people will assume that the majority of anime characters are also Japanese.

Amy Shirong Ru has dubbed this phenomenon ORP, or ‘’Own Race Projection’’.

All respondents agreed that the above character looks ‘’foreign’’ and ‘’European’’ due to a ‘’prominent nose’’, ‘’defined jawline’’, and ‘’blue eyes’’.

Similarly, most Westerners will assume that anime characters are white, since they associate big eyes, coloured hair, pale skin to be typically Western traits. However, a lot of it has to do with the history of anime and history of Japan.

Anime has been influenced by Western animation since its inception. Osamu Tezuka, one of the founding fathers of Japanese anime and manga, has openly expressed that his inspiration for characters, in particular, the big-eyes-small face combo, comes from Disney’s animation. Japanese also don’t see small noses or white skin as only ‘’Western’’ traits, as white skin has been the beauty trend long before the Japanese had their first contact with Europeans. In fact, even Europeans referred to Japanese as white until the end of the 18th century. The hair is often nothing more than a stylistic choice. After all, when you have such a homogeneous society, how do you make a character stand out?

When characters are not supposed to be Japanese, the biggest give away is how exaggerated certain features are:

• name - usually ‘foreign’’ sounding and a bit weird
• skin tone - particularly for black characters, skin tone tends to be one of the most defining features
• the overall body shape - usually more robust for men or voluptuous for women
• face shape (usually square), defined cheekbones and jawline, strong eyebrows
• nose - tends to be more defined, bigger and wider
• hair
• clothing
• May speak funny/broken Japanese, further accentuating the ‘otherness’.

The below characters were DESIGNED to look foreign:

and these are the typical ‘Japanese’ characters:

Notice the difference?

Softer features, almost non existent nose, big, round eyes, slimmer bodies, etc?

Asian characters don’t look identical to Caucasian ones. The confusion comes from the fact that Japanese characters lack what most perceive as the “stereotypical Asian” features (epicanthic folds, black hair, dark eyes).
Sometimes, making characters appear as racially ambiguous as possible is also done on purpose by big animation studios. After all, people relate more to characters they perceive more similar to themselves.
Westerners tend to subconsciously project their own identities onto anime, lumping all Japanese and non-Japanese characters together. However, the reality is that unless the ‘otherness’ is accentuated(name,facial features,body language, speech, etc), the vast majority of Anime characters are supposed to be Japanese. And most Japanese view them as such.

Lastly, who looks more like a typical Anime character:

Japanese singer, Ayumi Hamasaki

or

American actress, Scarlett Johanson?

Nah.

When I read manga or watch anime, unless the person’s features are clearly exaggerated to resemble that of a white person (big nose, angular face), I just assume that they’re Japanese.

After all, written by Japanese, produced in Japan, characters speaking Japanese, etc….
It’s the same thing when you open a fiction book in the States - unless it’s been explicitly stated, most people assume the characters are white until something points to otherwise.

Look, pal. Outside the States, Australia, Canada, etc, the default isn’t white :)

See the cast of the live-action Naruto musical below?

Not a single white person.

Exactly like in the manga.

Where’s this 99% of characters look white stat you’re talking about?
Where did you pull that little nugget from?

I think you should just accept the reality: not everything is about white people.
We Asians can be the heroes, villains, champions, fighters, evil-doers in our own stories, thank you very much.
No white saviors needed!

Can all you white people who constantly think anime characters look white stop trying to make yourselves the main characters of OUR stories and OUR experiences?

You guys already have the power of Hollywood behind you and in many parts of the world, white people’s experiences are considered universal. Just watch all those movies where savvy, powerful white men save the world (and everybody else) on the silver screen.

Can you just lay off manga and anime and allow us Asians to be the heroes and stars in our own stories for once? Let us have this one little thing for ourselves. Please? Pretty please? I don’t think it’s too much to ask - we do make up 60% of the global population. If anything, on the global stage, you guys are the minorities.

Not everything has to be about you, you know.
I mean, why do you guys have to keep on asking this question?
Is it some kind of deep, dark, obsession?
I’ve been here 2 years, and all the “why are anime characters all white?” seem to hold that same level of hubris.

The entire premise of your question is false.

Anime (and colour) manga use hair colour as visual short hand. More often than not a characters hair colour is tied to the characters personality than their “actual” hair colour if they was “real”

Characters with black hair are “everymen” they might not be “normal” but their “us” character like this will typically powerful through training. Characters with red hair will be passionate and “firery”

That brings us to blonde or more accurately “yellow”, these characters are special in some way. It also used to show a character isn't Japanese (if the anime set in japan).

because according to mangakas, drawing big eyes and other varieties of eyes are easier to show expression to

huge eyes in anime also play a larger role in identifying the age

since 2D characters we all love are basically a bunch of curves, lines, and colors, to humanize them they need more expression which usually works

anyways uh, stay you-nique and drink chocolate milk 🥛🍫

🦢 Hay

1. They are not.

This is a question asked mainly by Americans in my experience, and that's because American cartoons tend to have a lot of “racial markers”

Japanese cartoons do not have that. Most anime characters are meant to read as Japanese but do not include overt racial markers Americans and westerners in general are used to.

Let's use some pictures to illustrate my point

Do you see how over the racial markers are? The Chinese person is literally yellow.

Compare that, to this

These characters are explicit Japanese. They live in Japan and all are explicitly shown as being born there. Do you see the lack of overt racial markers? That's because for the average Japanese viewer, these characters read as Japanese. For a person who is used to overt racial markers, they read as the people who have the least over racial markers in the media of their culture. And those are white people.

Now this isn't to say that anime do not include racial markers. In fact when the character is not Japanese, those racial markers come into play ( though still not to the level of American cartoons)

This guy is so obviously coded as American or at least white. In fact almost all American characters in anime have blue eyes and blond hair.

TL/DR : Japanese anime do not use racial markers for Japanese people and Americans and other westerners mistake those characters for the characters that don't have racial markers in their media, aka white people

Why do you deny that you have a biased perception of anime characters you see on screen?

Anime just doesn't have overexaggerated Asian features on Asian characters, like Disney movies do so westerners can immediately identify them as Asian. An average anime character's face can "pass as" either white or Asian. Real people don't have such big eyes, such weird hair, and such tiny noses anyway. Your brain just fills in the small facial details that aren't there, to see them as more white or Asian, depending on which types of faces you're more used to seeing.

Even black and white manga looks a bit better with half of the characters having lighter hair color, rather than everyone being drawn black, doesn't it?

Then, you look at skin, eye, and hair color to determine an anime character's "race". While forgetting that it's done solely to easier distinguish between characters because usually they lack the detailed facial features that real humans have. Also, sometimes to save on ink and drawing time because only dark hair have to be filled in in manga.

If brown, blonde, and orange hair on some anime characters are supposed to pander to white people, then who are red, white, blue, green, pink, and purple hair pandering to? Space aliens? Or maybe genetically modified humans from the future?

As you go north into Europe, the more blonde and blue - eyed people you are going to see. This has to do with people evolving to adapt to colder climates. The lighter the skin, the better it is for Vitamin D absorption in colder climates. So in the evolution of mankind in Europe, the lighter or paler ones outlived darker ones. Initially humans were darker - skinned and as they move more north into cooler or colder, their skin color lightened over time to compensate for faster absorption of Vitamin D, so did their hair as well. Finland is the blondest nation.

Finns!

They don’t. I don’t know whether this is trolling, seeing how many times this question has been asked and answered, but people genuinely don’t seem to get it.

That said, I have a feeling that anime art style is seen as some sort of stylistic choice, but it reality, it reflects the bone structure of Japanese people—which is so wildly different than European bone structure that it blows my mind that people can’t see it.

It’s opposite, in many ways. This image is originally from 2ch, illustrating these differences. The way the Japanese character, Chie, looks is not merely a stylistic choice, but a reflection of the way Japanese people look naturally. The same for Wonder Woman. Her deeply set eyes, the shape of her brow, nose and jaw reflect broadly European features. Can we stop this foolishness now?

A word to the wise—skin tone is not the most salient ethnic characteristic—by far.

One I can think of is Ria's Gregory from High school dxd

Other is Kushina Uzumaki from Naruto.

These are two that come to mind.

You should respect the creators of anime and manga and pose this question to them.

You know, to the people who actually created these characters.

Many bloggers and articles have already covered this issue over the years.

Back in 2010, blogger Julian Abagond asserted:
"The Japanese see anime characters as being Japanese. It is Americans who think they are white."

When Japanese see anime characters, they think they are Japanese—even if they have purple hair or blond hair—or they don't even think about it that deeply.

I mean it’s normal, right?

Just like when you read a book written by a white American author - unless the writer points to the contrary, the default characters are always white. You imagine them as white, until you see an adjective that tells you differently.

In a book written by a white American author, the default is white.

Why should that be any different to manga and anime?

Often, it is only when characters have exaggerated Western features (big nose, angular face, huge tufts of chest hair, etc.) or speaks with silly, goofy-sounding Japanese that viewers are clued in that they are looking at a non-Japanese character.

Again - the best person to pose this question would be to the Creators of the Manga/Anime, the people who actually conceptualized and designed these characters.

Why? It’s called Respect.

Here’s the live-action cast of Naruto.
Look at how gorgeous they all are.
All of them are Asians.
Are you going to seriously tell me that they all “look white” ?

Close-up of some of the Naruto Live Action cast.
Are you going to say they “look white” ?

Japanese superstar Gackt was the model for Genesis Rhapsodos in Final Fantasy VII Crisis Core.

Are you going to say that he “looks white” ?

This is Sato Takeru as Himura Kenshin.
Are you going to say he “looks white”?

Here is Nanao as Kijima Matako.
Are you going to say she “looks white” ?

There are, but they are often not the majority in an anime and rarely are they the main characters.

It is understandable because most Japanese manga/anime creators are not in a predominantly black society nor one international enough to have a significant portion of blacks.

However, I personally want to see an extremely intelligent black main character in a psychological thriller full of mind games.

This is probably my favourite black character

I cried a lot when she had to leave us.

They should have given her more bonding with the MCs.

She is Sister Krone from Promised Neverland.