{"id":30336,"date":"2013-04-12T18:04:25","date_gmt":"2013-04-12T18:04:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/wordpress\/?p=30336"},"modified":"2013-04-12T18:04:25","modified_gmt":"2013-04-12T18:04:25","slug":"the-new-normal","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=30336","title":{"rendered":"The New Normal"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><strong><em><a href=\"http:\/\/www.rafu.com\/2013\/04\/the-new-normal\/\" target=\"_blank\">The New Normal<\/a><\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.rafu.com\" target=\"_blank\">The Rafu Shimpo: Los Angeles Japanese Daily News<\/a><br \/>\n2013-04-11<\/p>\n<p><strong>Mia Nakaji Monnier<\/strong>, Rafu Staff Writer<\/p>\n<p><em><a href=\"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/?p=27301\" target=\"_blank\">Hapa Japan Festival<\/a> and <a href=\"http:\/\/www.janm.org\" target=\"_blank\">JANM<\/a> exhibit celebrate mixed Japanese and Japanese Americans<\/em><\/p>\n<p>Outside the newest exhibit at the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.janm.org\" target=\"_blank\">Japanese American National Museum<\/a> hangs a banner. Up close, visitors can make out individual pictures\u2014each about the size of a postage stamp. These are family photos: grinning kids in <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Kimono\" target=\"_blank\">kimono<\/a>, extended families three rows deep posing in the yard, teenagers gathered around Grandpa and his birthday cake. But take a few steps back, and the photos disappear like the strokes of an impressionist painting. Together, they add up, to make <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Enka\" target=\"_blank\">enka<\/a> star <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Jero\" target=\"_blank\">Jero<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>Why Jero?<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/dornsife.usc.edu\/cf\/faculty-and-staff\/faculty.cfm?pid=1038110\" target=\"_blank\">Duncan Williams<\/a>, one of the curators of the exhibit, \u201c<a href=\"http:\/\/www.janm.org\/exhibits\/visible-invisible\/\" target=\"_blank\">Visible &amp; Invisible: A Hapa Japanese American History<\/a>,\u201d says Jero represents the future: not just the of Japanese America, but of America in general. Born Jerome White in <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Pittsburgh\" target=\"_blank\">Pittsburgh, Pa.<\/a>, Jero is mixed\u2014 three quarters African American, one quarter Japanese. Yet he\u2019s become famous in Japan for singing traditional enka songs, which he grew up hearing from his Japanese grandmother.<\/p>\n<p>Jero, to Williams, represents the complex identity of a growing group of Americans, whose looks and cultural identifications don\u2019t fit into neat or expected categories. Up close, in those stamp-sized family photos, the kids in kimono have light skin, dark hair; black, white, Latino features. They don\u2019t fit the typical image of Japan, or Japanese America, and yet, statistically, they\u2019re fast becoming the new norm.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cThe Japanese American community is now on the cusp of becoming majority multiracial,\u201d said Williams, while leading a tour of the exhibit. By the 2020 Census, the majority of Japanese Americans will be mixed, or <a href=\"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/?p=329\" target=\"_blank\">Hapa<\/a>, making \u201cVisible &amp; Invisible\u201d relevant\u2014and, to many Japanese Americans of mixed race or ethnicity, a moving affirmation of their place in the community&#8230;<\/p>\n<p>Read the entire article <a href=\"http:\/\/www.rafu.com\/2013\/04\/the-new-normal\/\" target=\"_blank\">here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The New Normal The Rafu Shimpo: Los Angeles Japanese Daily News 2013-04-11 Mia Nakaji Monnier, Rafu Staff Writer Hapa Japan Festival and JANM exhibit celebrate mixed Japanese and Japanese Americans Outside the newest exhibit at the Japanese American National Museum hangs a banner. Up close, visitors can make out individual pictures\u2014each about the size of [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1649,12,16,33,8,394,20],"tags":[5609,14356,14355,3436,5248,14247],"class_list":["post-30336","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-anthropology","category-articles","category-asia","category-census","category-media-archive","category-socialscience","category-usa","tag-duncan-williams","tag-emily-folick","tag-greg-kimura","tag-mia-nakaji-monnier","tag-rafu-shimpo","tag-the-rafu-shimpo"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30336","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=30336"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30336\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=30336"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=30336"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=30336"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}