{"id":56899,"date":"2018-10-08T03:48:45","date_gmt":"2018-10-08T03:48:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/?p=56899"},"modified":"2018-10-08T03:48:45","modified_gmt":"2018-10-08T03:48:45","slug":"naomi-osaka-a-new-governor-and-me","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=56899","title":{"rendered":"Naomi Osaka, a New Governor and Me"},"content":{"rendered":"

Naomi Osaka, a New Governor and Me<\/strong><\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

The New York Times<\/a>
\n2018-10-06<\/p>\n

Motoko Rich<\/strong><\/a>, Tokyo Bureau Chief<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\"\"<\/a>
\nThe Japanese newspaper Yomiuri Shimbun<\/em><\/a> printed a special edition when Naomi Osaka<\/a> won the United States Open tennis championship in September. Yomiuri Shimbun, via Associated Press<\/em><\/small><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n

Is Japan<\/a> becoming more welcoming to mixed-race people?<\/em><\/p>\n

TOKYO<\/a> \u2014 Just over 40 years ago, when my family moved from California<\/a> to Tokyo, the fact that my mother was Japanese did not stop schoolchildren from pointing at me and yelling \u201cGaijin<\/a>!\u201d \u2014 the Japanese word for foreigner \u2014 as I walked down the street.<\/p>\n

After seeing my red-haired, blue-eyed father, a shopkeeper in the suburb where we lived asked my mother what it was like to work as a nanny in the American\u2019s house.<\/p>\n

When we moved back to California two years later, I entered fourth grade and suddenly, I was the Asian kid. \u201cChing chong chang chong ching!\u201d boys chanted on the playground, tugging at the corners of their eyes. Classmates scrunched their noses at the onigiri<\/a> \u2014 rice balls wrapped in dried seaweed \u2014 that my mother packed in my lunch bag. When our teacher mentioned Japan<\/a> during a social studies lesson, every head in the class swiveled to stare at me.<\/p>\n

Now, back in Tokyo as a foreign correspondent for this newspaper, I am no longer pointed at by people on the street. But I am incontrovertibly regarded as a foreigner. When I hand over my business card, people look at my face and then ask in confusion how I got my first name. My Japanese-ness, it seems, barely registers.<\/p>\n

In the past few weeks, covering local reaction to the tennis champion Naomi Osaka<\/a>, the daughter of a Japanese mother and Haitian-American father, and Denny Tamaki<\/a>, who is the son of a Japanese mother and a white American Marine and was elected governor of Okinawa<\/a> last weekend, I have wondered whether Japanese attitudes toward identity are slowly starting to accommodate those of us with mixed heritages…<\/p>\n

Read the entire article here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Is Japan becoming more welcoming to mixed-race people?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,16,33,8],"tags":[28994,1793,21579,22759,2640,2327],"class_list":["post-56899","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-asia","category-census","category-media-archive","tag-denny-tamaki","tag-japan","tag-motoko-rich","tag-naomi-osaka","tag-new-york-times","tag-the-new-york-times"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/56899","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=56899"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/56899\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":56900,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/56899\/revisions\/56900"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=56899"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=56899"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=56899"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}