FormerlyHemlock
Hero
I would say that your view is...rather unusual, shall we say. Though it might, in point of fact, be influenced by your culture! That is, I know a great many people in the United States who look at characters in anime and manga and ask, "Why are these characters all being called Japanese? They look white to me...blonde or even red hair, blue or green or even purple eyes, fair skin..." Even when you ignore works that feature justifiably strange hair or eye colors (e.g. people with 'magical' ancestry or whatever), there are still a great many depictions which Japanese readers are perfectly comfortable considering as "clearly Japanese," while people from the States are perfectly comfortable considering "clearly Caucasian."
Anecdote: when I was living in the Philippines, every once in a while we'd come across a Filipino with a startlingly light complexion, sometimes to the point where we weren't sure if they were actually American expatriates. 80+% of the time they turned out to be part-Japanese.
Japanese people are pretty light-skinned compared to Filipinos, and presumably compared to many other peoples as well. So it doesn't really surprise me that their anime characters are pretty light-skinned as well.