The Asian characters in Blade Runner were treated so poorly--bullied, jostled on the street. None had real roles (the trope of a future-dystopian Asian megacity in which there are barely any actual Asians is pretty familiar by now, though) and so many lines whether in BR's invented Cityspeak or in Japanese were represented in the subtitles as "[Speaking foreign language]." The question of what constitutes humanness, who deserves self-determination, takes on expanded significance re race.