Tag: Japan

  • Isamu was a boy of the East and the West. Born in the United States to a Japanese father and Scotch-Irish American mother, Isamu grew up in Japan. From his earliest years he felt the tug of his biracial heritage, never quite fitting in or thinking he belonged. Pleasure came, however, from the natural world.…

  • “Traveling Texts and the Work of Afro-Japanese Cultural Production” analyzes the complex conversations taking place in texts of all sorts traveling between Africans, African Diasporas, and Japanese across disciplinary, geographic, racial, ethnic, linguistic, and cultural borders.

  • Transpacific Antiracism: Afro-Asian Solidarity in 20th-Century Black America, Japan, and Okinawa New York University Press July 2013 254 pages 4 halftones Hardcover ISBN: 9780814762646 Paper ISBN: 9781479897322 Yuichiro Onishi, Assistant Professor of African American & African Studies and Asian American Studies University of Minnesota, Twin Cities Transpacific Antiracism introduces the dynamic process out of which…

  • My Music Is My Soul, My Language Is My Armor Psychology Today 2014-12-02 Stephen Murphy-Shigematsu, Ed.D. Stanford University Byron’s story of identity, healing, and empowerment “One night at a pub I heard the sound of traditional Okinawan folk music, and it was like being hit in the head with a hammer. The impact was like…

  • Grits and Sushi: Mitzi Uehara Carter muses on being black and Okinawan Metropolis Magazine 2015-09-06 Baye Mcneil Mitzi Uehara Carter Though Mitzi Uehara Carter was born on the opposite side of the Pacific, she’s kept herself anything but distant from her hereditary home. This Texas-native daughter of an African-American father and an Okinawan mother is…

  • Being ‘hafu’ in Japan: Mixed-race people face ridicule, rejection Al Jazeera America 2015-09-09 Roxana Saberi Among Japanese, the perception of pure ethnic background is a big part of belonging to the culture TOKYO — Ariana Miyamoto was born and raised in Japan and speaks fluent Japanese. But she said most people in her homeland see…

  • From Okinawa to Hawaii and Back Again What It Means to Be American: Hosted by The Smithsonian and Zócalo Public Square 2015-08-31 Laua Kina, Vincent de Paul Professor of Art, Media, & Design DePaul University, Chicago, Illinois Kibei Nisei, 30 x 45 inches Oil on canvas (2012) A Painter Follows the Currents of Her Family…

  • Beauty pageants, blackface, and bigotry: Japan’s problems with racism The Wilson Quarterly Washington, D.C. 2015-07-23 Maya Wesby Photograph via Twitter Bearing a false belief of racial singularity and superiority, can Japanese culture ever embrace diversity in an ever-intertwining world? In most developed nations, issues of race occupy headlines and are components, unstated or overt, of…

  • The Japanese women who married the enemy BBC News Magazine 2015-08-16 Vanessa Barford Seventy years ago many Japanese people in occupied Tokyo after World War Two saw US troops as the enemy. But tens of thousands of young Japanese women married GIs nonetheless – and then faced a big struggle to find their place in…

  • How Embracing Your Background Can Empower Your Life: May J. Talks About Her Mixed Race Heritage, Music, and Pursuing Her Dreams. The Huffington Post United Kingdom 2015-07-17 Emma Leverton Achieving a dream career requires determination and drive, and when we look towards success it’s easy to forget that our histories are much more than just…