Mixed Race Studies

Children of the Occupation: Japan’s Untold Story

NewSouth Books (American Edition coming soon from Rutgers University Press)
July 2012
352 pages
234 x 153mm
Paperback ISBN: 9781742233314

Walter Hamilton, Journalist and Author

This is a beautifully written, deeply moving and well-researched account of the lives of mixed-race children of occupied Japan. The author artfully blends oral histories with an historical and political analysis of international race relations and immigration policy in North America and Australia, to highlight the little-known story of the thousands of children that resulted from the unions of Japanese women and Allied servicemen posted to Japan following WWII. It is a powerful narrative of loss, longing and reconnection, written by the ABC’s long-time Tokyo correspondent, Walter Hamilton.

Visit the website here.

The Hafu Project: October Newsletter

The Hafu Project Newsletter
The Hafu Project
October 2012

The Hafu Project talking at a multicultural family workshop organized by TIPP in Meguro

We hope this email finds you well. This year the summer was harsh in Japan. We do hope you got to enjoy summer wherever you are in the world!

This volume of the newsletter features an interview with hafu writer, Sandra Häfelin, who recently published a book titled “Hafu ga bijin nante mousou desukara!!” (Translation: “It’s only a myth that hafus are beautiful!!”). Sandra was one of the many supporters who kindly participated in The Hafu Project in 2009 in Tokyo. Her website “Hafu wo kangaeyou” explores the topic of hafus through everyday experiences and stories. It is such a joy to read with plenty of real episodes, we highly reccommend her website!

If you happen to live in Japan, you may have noticed a surge of media exposure of hafus. To start with, Nippon Television interviewed a dozen young hafu girls in Harajuku to discuss some of the unexpected cons of being a hafu in Japan (Zoom In Saturday, aired on Sep 15). Weekly magazine SPA also had a dedicated feature on hafus, which included the ins and outs of why hafus are often considered to be a “gaikokujin” (foreigner). In addition, Nagoya Television covered three hafu individuals with varying stories (UP!, aired on Sep 27). Each of these three media exposures had different approaches but certainly added to the current dialogue of being a hafu in Japan…

Read the entire newsletter here.

The Heart of Hyacinth

University of Washington Press
2000 (Originally published in 1903)
288 pages
5-1/2 x 8-1/2
Paperback ISBN: paperback (9780295979168

Onoto Watanna (Winnifred Eaton) (1875-1954)

Introduction by:

Samina Najmi, Professor of English
California State University, Fresno

The Heart of Hyacinth, originally published in 1903, tells the coming-of-age story of Hyacinth Lorrimer, a child of white parents who was raised from infancy in Japan by a Japanese foster mother and assumed to be Eurasian. A crisis occurs when, 18 years after her birth, her American father returns to Japan to reclaim her just as Hyacinth has become engaged to a Japanese aristocrat, and she forcefully asserts her Japanese ties only to find that her prospective father-in-law will not tolerate a white wife for his son. Onoto Watanna creates in her protagonist a young white woman who not only claims a Japanese identity but shifts between her Japaneseness and her whiteness as expediency dictates. In this novel Watanna is on the cutting edge of what we now call race theory, using that theory-of racial constructions and fluidity-in the service of an avant-garde feminism.

Onoto Watanna (pen name for Winnifred Eaton) was a popular writer of American romance novels. Daughter of a Chinese mother and English father, she used her own mixed heritage to explore diverse social issues and exploited the Orientalist fantasies of her readership to become a best-selling author. Samina Najmi is visiting assistant professor in English at Wheaton College and has written extensively on women and race in Asian American literature.

Embodying Belonging: Racializing Okinawan Diaspora in Bolivia and Japan

University Of Hawai‘i Press
May 2010
272 pages
Cloth ISBN: 978-0-8248-3344-2

Taku Suzuki, Assistant Professor of International Studies
Denison University, Granville, Ohio

Embodying Belonging is the first full-length study of a Okinawan diasporic community in South America and Japan. Under extraordinary conditions throughout the twentieth century (Imperial Japanese rule, the brutal Battle of Okinawa at the end of World War II, U.S. military occupation), Okinawans left their homeland and created various diasporic communities around the world. Colonia Okinawa, a farming settlement in the tropical plains of eastern Bolivia, is one such community that was established in the 1950s under the guidance of the U.S. military administration. Although they have flourished as farm owners in Bolivia, thanks to generous support from the Japanese government since Okinawa’s reversion to Japan in 1972, hundreds of Bolivian-born ethnic Okinawans have left the Colonia in the last two decades and moved to Japanese cities, such as Yokohama, to become manual laborers in construction and manufacturing industries.

Based on the author’s multisited field research on the work, education, and community lives of Okinawans in the Colonia and Yokohama, this ethnography challenges the unidirectional model of assimilation and acculturation commonly found in immigration studies. In its vivid depiction of the transnational experiences of Okinawan-Bolivians, it argues that transnational Okinawan-Bolivians underwent the various racialization processes—in which they were portrayed by non-Okinawan Bolivians living in the Colonia and native-born Japanese mainlanders in Yokohama and self-represented by Okinawan-Bolivians themselves—as the physical embodiment of a generalized and naturalized “culture” of Japan, Okinawa, or Bolivia. Racializing narratives and performances ideologically serve as both a cause and result of Okinawan-Bolivians’ social and economic status as successful large-scale farm owners in rural Bolivia and struggling manual laborers in urban Japan.
 
As the most comprehensive work available on Okinawan immigrants in Latin America and ethnic Okinawan “return” migrants in Japan, Embodying Belongingis at once a critical examination of the contradictory class and cultural identity (trans)formations of transmigrants; a rich qualitative study of colonial and postcolonial subjects in diaspora, and a bold attempt to theorize racialization as a social process of belonging within local and global schemes.

Table of Contents

• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Racializing Culture and Class in a Transnational Field
• 1. Modern Okinawan Transnationality: Colonialism, Diaspora, and “Return”
• 2. The Making of Patrones Japonesas and Dekasegi Migrants
• 3. From Patrón to Nikkei-jin Rodosha: Class Transformations
• 4. Educating “Good” Nikkei and Okinawan Subjects
• 5. Gendering Transnationality: Marriage, Family, and Dekasegi
• Conclusion: Embodiment of Local Belonging
• Notes
• Glossary
• References
• Index

Setting Assumptions Aside: Exploring Identity Development in Interracial Intercultural Individuals Growing up in Japan

University of Toronto
2001
280 pages

Penny Sue Kinnear

A thesis submitted in conformity with the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts Department of Curriculum, Teaching and Learning Ontario Institute for Studies in Education of the University of Toronto

This research attempts to understand the experience of interracial/intercultural individuals growing up in Japan. Their experiences do not fit current minority identity development models. Much of the tension in their experience appears to be between the individual’s own experience and the stereotypica1 experience he or she is supposed to undergo as a mixed individual. Identity was not a question of either/or, but took shape from dialogues that reflected a complex relationship between community, individual, language, and culture. One factor determining the tenor of the dialogue is its grounding in commonalities or in differences. The experience was profoundly different for individuals who attended international schools or Japanese schools. The difficulty that the international school attendees articulated, in contrast to those attending Japanese schools, appears as a clash of boundaries, not values. This is reflected particularly where “Japaneseness” fits in the hierarchy and the degree of rigidity or permeability of those boundaries.

Read the entire dissertation here.

hafu (half Japanese)

Lakeland Lectures
Lakeland College
5-7-12 Shinjuku, Shinjuku-ku, Tokyo, 1st Floor
2012-03-07, 19:00 JST (Local Time)

Marcia Yumi Lise, Researcher and Co-Founder
The Hafu Project

Lakeland College is pleased to present our ongoing lecture series, free of charge, for scholars, students and members of the public to discuss contemporary issues. You are cordially invited to our next lecture.

This lecture asks the very question of what it is to be a Hafu in Japan from a sociological perspective. We will explore the complex nature of the Hafu experiences, which are often a result of the racially designated society surrounding us, as well as the various individual factors ranging from physical appearance, upbringing, or education. Ultimately, it seeks to characterise the negotiation and self-definition of ethnic/racial territory & identity in relation to the cultural and racial discourse in Japan.

Marcia was born in Kanagawa, Japan to a Japanese mother and an Italian-American father. She moved to London in 2001 where she studied Sociology and completed an MA in Social Research at Goldsmiths College, University of London in 2008. She is now based in Tokyo and is the thematic advisor of the Hafu Film.

For more information, click here.

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,…

Read or purchase the review here.

My Transnational, Hapa Identity in Question

Stephen Murphy-Shigematsu
2012-02-19

Stephen Murphy-Shigematsu
Stanford University

I like to say that I have a transnational, multicultural, multiethnic identity. I am hapa, haafu, I am both/and, Japanese AND American. But I know that many others still see the world in dichotomies, as either/or, Japanese OR American.
 
I know what I look like. I’ve seen my face in the mirror before. But I forget that others might see me differently than I see myself. And I know who I am. But I am aware that others usually do not know me.
 
I was reminded of this while riding in a taxi with my 108 year-old grandmother in Matsuyama, a city on the island of Shikoku. Incredibly, she still likes shopping and chatted excitedly as we drove downtown to Mitsukoshi, her favorite department store. The taxi driver eyed me for a while in the rear view mirror before asking the inevitable question, “Where are you from?” I tried to dampen his curiosity. “Tokyo,” I answered curtly. But he was not easily discouraged, “I mean which country?” “Country?” I repeated, as if it was a dumb question. “I think Tokyo is in Japan, isn’t it?”
 
He looked at me strangely before laughing nervously. He was puzzled. He expected me to say America. Of course I could say America. My father was American and I lived there half my life. But I could also say Japan. I was born here, my mother, wife and children are Japanese and I have lived the other half of my life here. Then again, I could also say that I am multicultural, multilingual, multinational, transnational, international or a global citizen, not just a citizen of any one country…

Read the entire article here.

Negotiating Mixed Race: Projection, Nostalgia, and the Rejection of Japanese-Brazilian Biracial Children

Journal of Asian American Studies
Volume 14, Number 3 (October 2011)
pages 361-388

Zelideth María Rivas, Professor of Chinese and Japanese
Grinnell College, Grinnell, Iowa

Since their arrival in Brazil in 1908, the presence of Japanese immigrants has shaken Brazilian conceptions of race. Narratives of interracial marriages and biracial children in 1930s medical documents and short stories demonstrate the incorporation of the Japanese into Brazil and their subsequent marginalization within the Japanese community. This article compares and contrasts the shifting depictions of biracial Japanese-Brazilian children in Brazil by Brazilians and first generation Japanese immigrants in order to understand how their presence challenges and “negotiates” national identity. The process of othering and marginalizing biracial children upsets the hegemonic understandings of racial categorization in Brazil.

Read or purchase the article here.

The Marginalization of Afro-Asians in East Asia: Globalization and the Creation of Subculture and Hybrid Identity

Global Tides: Pepperdine Journal of International Studies
Volume 5 (2011)
15 pages
Pepperdine University, Malibu, California

Sierra Reicheneker

This article explores the topic of children born of biracial couplings in East Asia. The offspring of such unique unions face severe discrimination and marginalization. The status and future of this minority is especially salient in primarily homogenous states, such as Korea, Japan, and China, where racism varies from social stigma to institutionalized policies. The article will show that they have yet to create a cohesive group identity; they remain vulnerable to negative self-image and socially imposed isolation. In such nations, progress in equality for Afro-Asians will require key Afro-Asian leaders and public figures taking a stand against prejudices, as well as international pressure, and an increase in the number of biracial people due to globalization, in addition to the growing interconnectedness through New Media. Through these actions a hybrid identity and group mentality will form for the Afro-Asians of East Asia.

“All things are possible until they are proved impossible – and even the impossible may only be so as of now.” – Pearl S. Buck

The growing presence of an Afro-Asian population in Asia, particularly in Korea, Japan and China, has recently come to light in the global media. The homogenous nature of these countries exposes its biracial citizens to psychological marginalization. Despite the frequent trend within marginalized groups to create solidarity through a viable counter-culture, the Afro-Asian populations have not done so. However, with the increase in globalization, leading to larger numbers of biracial people born in these states, as well as their ability to connect through the Internet, this small minority will begin to form a group identity. This is furthered by icon-status Afro-Asians leading the way and acting as beacons of aspiration for all Afro-Asians. In addition, with the help of the international community in applying pressure on governments to change racist policies, an Afro-Asian subculture and hybrid identity is likely to emerge.

A Brief History

The first Afro-Asians were the product of American G.I.s during World War II. Starting in 1946, with the occupation of Okinawa and later mainland Japan, as well as the temporary military government of South Korea, Amerasian—including Afro-Asian—children became a visible reality in East Asia. The products of both prostitution and legally binding marriages, these children were largely regarded as illegitimate. When the military presence returned to America, the distinction between the two was, for all practical purposes, null. As the American military departed, any previous preferential treatment for biracial people ended, and was replaced with a backlash due to the return of ethnically-based national pride.

Korea has the largest Afro-Asian population in the Far East, due to increased interracial relationships during the Korean War (1950-1953). Once again, children were the product of both legitimate marriages and prostitution. After the war, the United States Congress passed acts to allow for immigration of biracial children, including the Amerasian Homecoming Act of 1987. The Korean government strongly supported the emigration of Amerasian children to the United States, considering it a “cost-effective way of dealing with social welfare problems,” as they viewed the children, particularly those from Black fathers, as “institutional burdens.”However, American military men looking to bring their Asian families to the states were heavily discouraged from doing so by their superiors; Marines in particular were threatened with court martial. Despite overwhelming support and willing adoptee families in the United States, the majority of Amerasian children remained in Korea. A staggering amount of mothers abandoned their babies, especially Afro-Asian offspring, either to be raised by distant, maternal relatives or to be sent to orphanages—though this is not the case for all of the Amerasian Koreans.

In China, the Afro-Asian people group is a newer phenomenon. They first began to appear beginning with African-American and African students coming to study in China, first in the city of Beijing and later in other larges cities, such as Nanjing, Hangzhou, and Shanghai. Prominent Afro-Chinese have recently been featured in international news, helping to bring to light the growing Afro-Asian population in China and in East Asia, as a whole…

Read the entire article here.