Gender and racial depictions in television commercials provide insight into a society’s views of minorities. Gender inequality in contemporary Japanese society is a major social concern and more research is required to combat it. Advertising provides one avenue to observe what society considers to be normal, as well as ideal, regarding gender representation and roles. Further, internationalization in Japan is generally accepted as a fact, yet there are few measures of the extent of it. The examination of Japanese television commercials can be one such measure, since the depiction of race in advertising reflects, as well as contributes to, societal opinion. Accordingly, this content analysis of two samples of Japanese prime time television commercials (recorded sixteen years apart) examines gender and racial representations in TV advertising in Japan. The main character from each of 231 prime-time television commercials recorded in 2002, and from 242 recorded in 2018, was identified by two coders of different race and gender. These main characters were then categorized by gender and race, each category’s total was tallied and converted into percentages for comparison, and Chi-squared calculations were performed to check significance. Results from both the 2002 and the 2018 samples indicate accurate quantitative representation of society, based on population percentages, regarding Males and Females. However, analyses of both samples reveal an over-representation of Non-Asians compared to Japanese residency statistics. Amongst the Non-Asians, White actors appeared more frequently than Black actors. Comparing the results of the two analyses, the over-representation of Non-Asians was more significant in the commercials recorded in 2002. However, results from 2018 revealed that foreign actors, and White actors in particular, were still over-represented 16 years on. Such findings contribute to the expanding literature on minority representation in Japanese television commercials.