Considering how most animes look like, I rarely see the characters as asians... you know, the eyes and so on.
Also, Kusanagi is very cyborg lady, she could be black if she wanted to. :v
Does e.g. Mio from K-On
really look western because of the eyes? :-
I don't really think so. Usually large eyes in anime denote youth and naivety, not being Western. The Japanese stereotype of Americans is ... big
noses, not big eyes. Japanese eyes really do have the same range of sizes as western eyes. Google Japanese women:
One video was pointing out how none of the characters look Japanese, but none of the characters the guy picked to illustrate the issue were intended to portray Japanese people. They included Rias Gremory (Highschool DxD), Sabre (Fate Stay Night), and Chi (Chobits). Two westerners and a robot. Chi is meant to be non-human, so perhaps her exotic appearance is meant to show that? He didn't actually manage to pick
any characters who were unambiguously flesh-and-blood Japanese, which was quite an effort. Similar for early-90s anime, the three big shows were Dragon Ball, Ranma, and Sailor Moon. Goku and Ranma both have big eyes. But I'd say they clearly don't depict anyone Western. Vegeta is blond, but he's a villain from outer space. Sailor Moon is more western/disney looking (but
nobody on Earth has eyes like that), but she's also depicting someone who had an unearthly origin.
Similar for hair colors to eyes. Lots of young Japanese dye their hair. And since their hair is black, this of course involves lightening their hair. This is no more intended to mimick westerners than Goths who dye their hair black want to be Asians. Additionally, a westerner who dyes their hair black made a conscious decision to choose that color, whereas a Japanese person who dyes their hair has much more limited choices as to what to do with it: they can basically
only bleach it, rather than the Western range of choices. It's just a reality of wanting to change your hair color to stand out. So anime represents this. More uninhibited young characters are more likely to have non-standard hair colors (e.g. light brown) because this is common for young people in Japan. Google "kogals", a youth culture, and you'll see they're all Japanese, but very few have black hair. Anime which shows a range of natural hair colors is merely reflecting the cultural reality within Japanese youth culture, not trying to depict non-Japanese people.