Mixed Race Studies

Bilal Kawazoe’s film ‘Whole’ tackles the experience of being mixed race in Japan

The Japan Times
2021-09-30

Mark Schilling, Film Critic

In Bilal Kawazoe’s ‘Whole,’ Usman Kawazoe (left) and Kai Sandy (right) play two biracial men who bond over coming to terms with their identity while living in Japan.

In Japanese, the word “hāfu” — a colloquial term for people who are half-Japanese — is a label that some accept, but others reject, preferring such terms as “daburu” (double) or “mikkusu” (mix).

So seeing the title of Bilal Kawazoe’s new film “Whole,” which tells the story of two biracial men of radically different backgrounds in Kobe who become friends, my first thought was that Kawazoe, who is of Japanese and Pakistani parentage, had come up with yet another alternative to the hāfu label.

Not so, as he explains in a video call. The title instead refers to the characters’ quests to become “whole” in terms of their identity. Kawazoe says his brother, Usman, came to him with the idea of “making a film based on the identity crises and the experiences of mixed people in Japan.”

“We did a lot of research and realized there wasn’t really a narrative film (on that theme),” he continues. Instead, they found films that were “quite stereotypical or just one-sided.”

“So we kind of felt this sense of responsibility to make an honest film on this whole mixed-race experience,” he says…

Read the entire review here.

Celebrating Japan’s multicultural Olympians

The Japan Times
2016-08-17

Naomi Schanen, Staff Writer

Meet the athletes flying the flag and challenging traditional views of what it is to be Japanese

Japan and Brazil’s ties go back to the early 20th century, when the first Japanese immigrants arrived as farmers in the South American country. Brazil is home to the largest Japanese community outside Japan — 1.5 million of the country’s 205 million people identify themselves as Japanese-Brazilian, including a handful of members of the Brazilian Olympic team.

But although the host countries of the current and next Summer Olympics share cultural bonds, compared to Brazil, where nearly half of people consider themselves mixed-race, multiculturalism remains elusive in Japan, where ethnic homogeneity is often held up as something to be proud of.

Though Japan is home to the second-largest Brazilian community outside of Brazil, only 2 percent of the country’s population was born overseas. Compared to most other developed countries, immigration to Japan is negligible. However, despite having to deal with an aging, shrinking population, the majority of Japanese seem to prefer it this way. In a recent Yomiuri Shimbun poll, only 37 percent said they felt that more non-Japanese should be accepted to fill the gaps in the country’s labor market…

Read the entire article here.

“I was born in this country and I grew up here, and I could only speak Japanese. This is my home country; it’s not a matter of ‘likes’ and ‘dislikes,’ ” she said simply. “Since my dad is an American, I look like a foreigner, so I used to think, ‘It’s cool having U.S. citizenship,’ and so I went there. But in America I couldn’t understand the culture, and it was then that I realized, ‘Without a doubt, I’m Japanese.’”…

…“There are lots of people from all kinds of countries (in America), so I felt relaxed,” she said. “My family is all black, so I felt relieved. I was like, ‘Wow, these people are the same color as me!’ Over there, I definitely felt a sense of peace — it was easy to live there.”

“I’d like Japan to be an easier place to live,” she added, “but Japan has some fundamental problems that it still hasn’t solved, in my opinion. These problems need to be dealt with right now. One thing is that the Japanese population is shrinking, and if foreigners come and aren’t accepted, I’d be concerned about what will happen to Japan, and so I’d like to see Japan adopt a more global outlook…” —Ariana Miyamoto

Bay McNeil, “Meeting Miss Universe Japan, the ‘half’ who has it all,” The Japan Times, (April 19, 2015). http://www.japantimes.co.jp/community/2015/04/19/general/meeting-miss-universe-japan-half.

Meeting Miss Universe Japan, the ‘half’ who has it all

The Japan Times
2015-04-19

Bay McNeil

Star-struck: Baye McNeil meets Miss Universe Japan, Ariana Miyamoto, at The Japan Times offices in Tokyo. | OLGA GARNOVA

I felt an almost star-struck excitement at the chance to interview the newly crowned Miss Universe Japan, Ariana Miyamoto. I mean, she’s all the rage, right?

Her name has lit up social media like the constellations since her coronation. Black media can’t stop talking about her. To many, she is yet another global validation of black beauty in the flesh, a young woman who overcame prejudice and race-based adversity to achieve the previously unachievable. How do you not talk about her? Even some of the big dogs, like CNN and Reuters, have given her the time of day, spreading her name and compelling story to media markets everywhere.

Well, almost everywhere…

Read the entire article here.

Daughters tell stories of ‘war brides’ despised back home and in the U.S.

The Japan Times
2014-10-05

Lucy Alexander

Hiroko Furukawa was working as a sales assistant at the PX U.S. military supply store in Ginza in 1950 when she met a GI named Samuel Tolbert. Shortly afterwards, Hiroko and Samuel found themselves married and on a train to meet his parents in upstate New York. Hiroko, who came from an upper-class Tokyo family, changed into her best kimono for the occasion, to the horror of her husband, whose family were rural chicken farmers.

“When they arrived at the farm, Samuel’s family stared at Hiroko as if she came from Mars,” explains journalist Lucy Craft. “They made it clear to her that she’d better get into Western clothes. So she did, and she began her life as the wife of a chicken farmer.”

According to Craft, herself the daughter of a Japanese “war bride,” this is one of countless examples of the struggles endured by a despised and largely hidden immigrant group. Craft believes that about 50,000 Japanese women moved to America with their GI husbands after World War II — at that time, the largest-ever migration of Asian women to America.

The 1945 War Brides Act allowed American servicemen who had married abroad to bring their wives to the United States, on top of existing immigration quotas. The trickle of new arrivals became a flood with the passing of the landmark Immigration Act of 1952 that lifted race-based barriers on entering the country.

“Hostility to Japan as a nation meant that Japanese women were the last foreign wives to be allowed to move to the U.S.,” says Craft. “This was a time when interracial marriage was prohibited in many states.”…

Read the entire article here.

Double the trouble, twice the joy for Japan’s hāfu

The Japan Times
2013-10-03

Kaori Shoji, Special To The Japan Times

Until about 10 years ago, the standard Japanese image of kids of mixed blood was that they were 1) gorgeous, 2) rich and 3) able to live in Japan with none of the kinks and hang out at Azabu clubs when they were 13. In high school, my girlfriends scorned their own Japanese heritage. The common reply to what we wanted to be when we graduated was “gaijin” (foreigner). Failing that, the next best option was to marry a gaijin and bear hāfu (mixed-race) kids, who would then automatically go on to have brilliant careers as newscasters or supermodels.

Megumi Nishikura and Lara Perez Takagi’s documentary “Hafu” shows quite a different picture. “One of the reasons we made this film,” Nishikura tells The Japan Times, “is that the growing number of hāfu here are not celebrities or models. We wanted to put a hole in the stereotype of hāfu — to show that not everyone is Caucasian, well-to-do and beautiful. There are a lot of people who aren’t like that, who are struggling with the language, with life in Japan and with their own identities.”

Both the filmmakers, who each have a background in documentaries, are mixed-race. Perez Takagi was born to a Japanese mother and Spanish father, and her childhood was divided by vacations spent in Japan at her grandmother’s house in Chiba and daily home life in Madrid…

Read the entire article here.

Prove you’re Japanese: when being bicultural can be a burden

The Japan Times
2013-07-29

Louise George Kittaka

Parents’ decision to add a katakana name can create issues when kids enter the big wide world

Japanese are Japanese and foreigners are foreigners, and never the twain shall meet? In many aspects of daily life in this country, there is one way for the Japanese and another for the rest of us. Like it or not, that’s just how it is. At least foreigners know where we stand.

However, bicultural individuals — the children of one Japanese and one foreign parent — may find that life isn’t quite that simple.

Although they were born, raised and educated in Japan, and as Japanese citizens are entitled to all the legal privileges that entails, society sometimes marginalizes them in ways that their foreign parents may not have anticipated. Japanese television shows and commercials might be full of cute “half” young adults, but back in the real world, being a bit “different” isn’t always such a good thing when you are trying to make your way in this country…

Read the entire article here.