And how accurate is its portrayal of deafness in general?
Summary:
- People have been wondering how realistic A Sign of Affection is in portraying hearing impairment.
- The sign language used is the Japanese Sign Language, which is shown in extreme detail — the authors actually researched the subject matter a lot.
- The anime adaptation has some issues with realism, but it’s still good.
If you’ve been watching A Sign of Affection (Yubisaki to Renren), you might have been wondering how realistic the anime actually is. After all, the romance deals with a very delicate topic of disability, and a realistic portrayal would make it much better.
While the anime is still essentially a shoujo romance, it doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be realistic. As such, let’s look at the most important part of the series, which is the sign language used.
Realistic portrayal of sign language
Obviously, most viewers would be confused by the sign language in the series and not understand it — even if they dealt with it before. However, that’s not because it’s made up: A Sign of Affection actually uses JSL (Japanese Sign Language), which probably wouldn’t be known by people outside Japan in most cases.
That said, the anime’s portrayal of it is incredibly accurate. In reality, JSL is used by roughly 60,000 people across Japan. It seems that people familiar with it have been involved with both the manga and the anime, and we couldn’t be happier about that.
In fact, the portrayal of hearing impairment in the manga is incredibly realistic. According to an interview with the mangaka duo behind the series, they actually had a person with hearing loss help them make the portrayal more realistic — which signifies the attention to detail the series has.
Issues with the adaptation
That said, not all fans are happy with how deafness is represented in A Sign of Affection — specifically, in the anime adaptation. Many fans have complained that Yuki having a fully formed inner voice doesn’t make a lot of sense and breaks their immersion.
Another complaint some fans had is the fact that people who are deaf from birth still have voices. They just don’t use them that much — most of the time, they aren’t actually able to speak — but they still are capable of vocal expressions, which the anime seems to be forgetting.
The anime is still mostly good
However, outside of the aforementioned complaints, the anime is still very well-made and treats its subject in a very respectable manner. Some viewers might not have been fond of Itsuomi at first — understandably so — but he got better.
It is rare that we actually get anime that deal with disabilities. It might be hard to portray them in a way that doesn’t offend people, of course, but we want more of them. They are a break from the norm and give anime as a medium more diversity and representation