Mixed Race Studies

Hybrid Identities and Adolescent Girls: Being ‘Half’ in Japan

Multilingual Matters
2009-12-03
280 pages
210 x 148 (A5)
Paperback ISBN: 9781847692320
Hardback ISBN: 9781847692337

Laurel Kamada, Lecturer Professor
Tohoku University, Japan

This is the first in-depth examination of “half-Japanese” girls in Japan focusing on ethnic, gendered and embodied ‘hybrid’ identities. Challenging the myth of Japan as a single-race society, these girls are seen struggling to positively manoeuvre themselves and negotiate their identities into positions of contestation and control over marginalizing discourses which disempower them as ‘others’ within Japanese society as they begin to mature. Paradoxically, at other times, within more empowering alternative discourses of ethnicity, they also enjoy and celebrate cultural, symbolic, social and linguistic capital which they discursively create for themselves as they come to terms with their constructed identities of “Japaneseness”, “whiteness” and “halfness/doubleness”. This book has a colourful storyline throughout—narrated in the girls’ own voices—that follows them out of childhood and into the rapid physical and emotional growth years of early adolescence.

Hybrid Identities and Adolescent Girls: Being ‘Half’ in Japan

Social Science Japan Journal
Published Online: 2012-01-19
DOI: 10.1093/ssjj/jyr053

Stephen Murphy-Shigematsu
Stanford University

Hybrid Identities and Adolescent Girls: Being ‘Half’ in Japan, by Laurel D. Kamada. Bristol, UK: Multilingual Matters, 2009, 272 pp., (hardcover ISBN 978-1-84769-233-7), (paperback ISBN 978-1-84769-232-0)

I hated it when I was little … the school trip photo … only MY face was somehow different, so I hated that, and now … it’s like it’s good, I guess.

Hybrid Identities and Adolescent Girls captures the raw voices of teenage girls, revealing their intimate feelings about being ‘half ’ in Japan. Laurel Kamada gives us a rich account of adolescent development and identity construction, based on group interviews with six girls of mixed ancestry, presenting their actual voices in conversations with her and each other. Kamada takes up three central questions: (a) tensions and dilemmas of hybridity, (b) celebration of hybridity, and (c) the intersection of hybridity and gender. Her study is informed and inspired by her insider knowledge of the data collection site of Western Japan, and her long residences living, working, and raising her own mixed-ancestry child there. She is careful to position herself as a white, Western woman and acknowledges how she influences the research through reflexive commentary.

The girls are a population rarely heard from—public school students from intact families, with one Japanese parent and one non-Japanese (white-foreign) parent. They are from families who made a conscious decision to raise them by integrating them into Japanese society through education at regular local Japanese schools, rather than sending them to private international schools. Historically, this is a major dilemma for mixed-ancestry children, going back to Miki Sawada’s famous Saunders Home, where she raised and educated children after World War II, and continuing up to the recent Amerasian School in Okinawa. The controversy of whether mixed-ancestry children should be educated in public schools or in special schools has been not only an issue of race but also of class, with those whose families could afford it opting for the friendlier, more comfortable environment of international schools,…

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Mixed-ethnic girls and boys as similarly powerless and powerful: embodiment of attractiveness and grotesqueness

Discourse Studies
Volume 11, Number 3 (June 2009)
pages 329-352
DOI: 10.1177/1461445609102447

Laurel D. Kamada
Tohoku University, Japan

An ongoing study examining the discursive negotiation of ethnic and gendered embodied identities of adolescent girls in Japan with Japanese and `white’ mixed-parentage is extended to also investigate and compare boys . This study draws on Feminist Poststructuralist Discourse Analysis which views women and girls as `simultaneously positioned as relatively powerless within a range of dominant discourses on gender, but as relatively powerful within alternative and competing social discourses’ (Baxter, 2003: 39). Here, this is taken further by also giving voice to boys. Furthermore, ethnic discourses are examined alongside of gender discourses. Not only girls constructed the `idealized Other’, within discourses of femininity, but boys similarly viewed their bodies against a model of idealized masculinity within discourses of masculinities. The boys revealed a feminized, narcissistic body consciousness where they struggled to resist a `discourse of foreign grotesqueness’ and instead worked to embody themselves within a positive `discourse of foreign attractiveness’, as did the girls.

 Read or purchase the article here.