Mixed Race Studies

The stories of the ‘War Brides’ of Japan need to be told

International Examiner
Seattle, Washington
2016-07-21

Yayoi Lena Winfrey

One day in the early 1980s, my Japanese mother took my sister and me to an International District gift shop. A middle-aged Japanese American man working there glanced briefly towards us, before turning away apathetically. His body language seemed to indicate a reluctance to wait on us. I looked at my mother and, without the necessity of my uttering a single word, she said, “He not like me.”

Then, pointing at us, her two half-black daughters, she declared in her broken English, “He see I have you two. He know I am war bride.”

Even though I’d heard her use that phrase before, I knew it was not something she was proud to be called. As I stood there reflecting, I realized my mother meant that the Japanese American man didn’t like the fact that she had obviously married someone outside of her race, likely an American G.I. But the irony was he wasn’t living in Japan. Might not the Japanese in that country have considered him as much a traitor for living in America as he thought my mother was for marrying a non-Japanese? Or maybe it wasn’t the same if you left your home country, but married someone of the same ethnicity. I’ve often wrestled with those thoughts in the decades following that 1980s incident.

In the case of Japanese “war brides” like my mother, women who wedded American military men, they were guilty of both marrying an outsider and leaving their country. Considered disloyal by some Japanese nationals for wedding their former enemies, they were also considered disloyal by some Japanese Americans for marrying Americans that were not Japanese. It’s a complicated issue that my documentary War Brides of Japan will address. I also want to eradicate the stigma attached to the term “war bride,” often fallaciously interchangeable with “prostitute.”…

Read the entire article here.

These 2 Ads Might Say Everything About How Global Racism Really Is

Multiracial Asian Families: thinking about race, families, children, and the intersection of mixed ID/Asian
2016-06-26

Sharon H. Chang

sigh.

SIGH.

Siiiiiiiiigh.

Alright that’s done. I want (pause) — well I don’t want, but feel like I need to show you two TV ads recently posted to YouTube literally within days of each other. Both are out of east Asia, Japan and China respectively. The first is a Toyota commercial out of Japan. It portrays a shiny techno-future funneled through the nostalgic eyes of a white father and happy memories of his mixed race Japanese family/children:

Not super hard to read the messaging here right? Japan is changing. Got it. Changing for the better. Got it. Symbolized by this mixed race family. Got it. And importantly, symbolized by this mixed race family with a white father. Got it. Now let me pause and give nod to something super important here. It is rare to see mixed families portrayed at all in Japan, a nation with an impressive history of racial-ethnic purity rhetoric, xenophobia, violent discrimination and practice. So yes I completely get that this Toyota commercial is a step forward.

At the same time it isn’t.

Now, check out this second commercial for Qiaobi laundry detergent out of China which has been airing at least since April…

…

Read the entire article here.

Bridging Asian and Asian American Studies through Critical Mixed Race

UCLA International Institute
Asia Institute
2016-05-25

Samantha Fletcher (UCLA 2016)

Professor Emma Teng of MIT recently examined mixed-race identities in the U.S., China and Hong Kong as part of the Taiwan Studies Lecture Series of the Asia Institute.

UCLA International Institute, May 25, 2016 — The most recent UCLA Taiwan Studies Lecture examined a wide range of ideas, laws and constructs that were instrumental in shaping mixed-race identities in the United States, China and Hong Kong.

On May 10, 2016, Professor Emma Teng of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology delivered the presentation, “Traversing Boundaries: Bridging Asian and Asian American Studies through Critical Mixed Race.” The event was jointly sponsored by UCLA’s Asia Institute and Dean of Humanities, with funding from the Taipei Economic and Cultural Office in Los Angeles. The Center for Chinese Studies cosponsored the event.

Professor Teng shared issues raised by critical and mixed race theory that are detailed in her recent book, “Eurasian: Mixed Identities in the United States, China and Hong Kong, 1842–1943” (University of California, 2013).

Teng’s book explores the place of mixed-race children in Chinese society by examining the stories of their families and patterns of labor migration among merchants and students between China and the United States. The endpoint of her study is 1943, when the Chinese Exclusion Act was lifted in the U.S — a time when China and the U.S. were allied against Japan in World War II…

Read the entire article here.

Spotlight: Beneath Japan’s polite veneer lies secret codes of racial hatred aimed at minorities, foreigners

China.org.cn (China Internet Information Center)
State Council Information Office and the China International Publishing Group (CIPG), Beijing, China
2016-05-21

Xinhua News Agency

Is Japan a gentle nation? For many people who have little knowledge about the island country or just take a week-long vocation here, the answer would be a resounding “yes.”

But for the ethnic minorities and some foreigners who live here for a long time, their bitter tales would tell a totally different story behind the iconic Japanese smile — a real Japan with an underground social code of inherent racial discrimination.

Japan has a long history of discriminating “burakumin,”or hamlet people as they’re known here in English. This group, brandished an”underclass”of people comprise those perceived as having impure or tainted professions such as workers in abattoirs or those in the leather industry. They were seen as “untouchable” and also known as “eta,” an ancient name for burakumin, and were “worth” one seventh the regard of an ordinary person in the Feudal era, and in some cases regarded just slightly higher than animals.

However, such discrimination was not eliminated with the Meiji Restoration, the Japanese Enlightenment in the 19th century, and still impacts people with burakumin ancestry…

…”There was a lot of bullying when I was at school, particularly when I was an elementary school student. They used to throw garbage in my face but I had no idea why,” Ariana Miyamoto, the first Afro-Asian to be crowned Miss Universe Japan, told Xinhua.

“There was this one time when a whole class of kids refused to get in the swimming pool with me, because my skin was a different color,” remembered Miyamoto, who was born in Nagasaki Prefecture but was accused of not being Japanese.

A spiteful remark on one social media after Miyamoto’s won the hard-fought competition read that “they should do blood tests before such events and if a contestants’ DNA is less than 100 percent ‘Japanese’ they should not be allowed to participate.” Another claimed that being “hafu,” which represents “half” in English used by Japanese people referring to people of mixed-race, meant that the “other” half was “less than human.”…

Read the entire article here.

Negotiating Identities: Mixed Race Individuals in China, Japan, and Korea

University of San Francisco
McLaren Complex – MC 250
2130 Fulton Street
San Francisco, California 94117-1080
2016-04-14 through 2016-04-15

The University of San Francisco Center for Asia Pacific Studies is pleased to announce its spring symposium Negotiating Identities: Mixed-Race Individuals in China, Japan, and Korea, a conference to be held at the University of San Francisco on Thursday and Friday, April 14-15, 2016.

The highlight of the conference will be a keynote address by Emma Teng, Professor of History and Asian Civilizations, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

With this conference, the Center plans to provide a forum for academic discussions and the sharing of the latest research on the history and life experiences of mixed-race individuals in China, Japan, and Korea. The conference is designed to promote greater understanding of the cross-cultural encounters that led to the creation of interracial families and encourage research that examines how mixed-race individuals living in East Asia have negotiated their identities…

For more information and to register, click here.

“Born With It” – Screening and Discussion with filmmaker Emmanuel Osei-Kuffour, Jr.

University of Southern California
East Asian Studies Center
University Park Campus
Leavey Auditorium (LVL) 17
Tuesday, 2016-03-29, 16:15-17:45 PDT (Local Time)

Emmanuel Osei-Kuffour Jr., Filmaker

“Born With It” follows the story of a 9-year-old Ghanaian-Japanese boy, Keisuke. Keisuke begins at a new school in rural Japan and contends with discovering his own identity as well as earning the acceptance of his classmates. The film highlights the experience of mixed race individuals and their families in Japan.

For more information, click here. View the flyer here.

A Blackanese Beauty Queen

Contexts
Volume 15, Number 1 (Winter 2016)
pages 73-75
DOI: 10.1177/1536504216628844

M. Nakamura Lopez
M. Nakamura Lopez is a writer living in Tokyo, Japan. She studies mixedness, migration, and transnational families.

M. Nakamura Lopez on the new face of Miss Japan.

Read the entire article here.

Rising Sun, “Rising Soul”: Mixed Race Japanese of African Descent

University of Southern California, University Park Campus
Los Angeles, California
Montgomery Ross Fisher Building (MRF)
Montgomery Ross Fisher Auditorium (340)
Friday, 2016-02-26, 14:00-17:00 PST (Local Time)

Rising Soul is a documentary film that explores the question, “What is the impact of Afro-Japanese offspring and their origins as children of Japanese war brides?” At the end of World War II, many Japanese women married American men of African descent and immigrated to the United States. While several stories examine the lives of Japanese war brides who married white Americans, none delve deeply into the history of Japanese war brides who married African Americans, and the journeys of their mixed-race children. Rising Soul explores the transnational juncture of Japanese and African American cultures embodied in the African-descent offspring of Japanese war brides, women that not only faced the challenges of life in the U.S., but who also confronted the adversities of interracial marriages to African Americans – hardships that emanated not only from white society, but also from Japanese including other Japanese war brides married to whites, from African Americans, and from Asian Americans. The documentary seeks to de-mystify Asian and Black identity from a perspective that does not see it as an anomaly or a subset of Hapa or Haafu identity but as something very real, primary, and organic to mixed race. Through interviews, glimpses into cultural phenomena, and historical artifacts, the film illuminates the complexity of that identity, and the betwixt and between and fusion that multiple heritages of color can foster. A panel will feature Rising Soul producer Monique Yamaguchi, screenwriter Velina Hasu Houston; and subjects from the film including Linda Gant, Sumire Gant, Kiyoshi Houston, Curtiss Takada Rooks, and Rika Houston. Excerpts from the film also will be screened.

For more information and to RSVP, click here. View the flyer here.

Preview of DREAM OF THE WATER CHILDREN by Wendy Cheng

2Leaf Press: A Small Press with Big Ideas!
New York, New York
2016-01-18

Wendy Cheng, Assistant Professor
School of Social Transformation Faculty
Arizona State University

A Black-Japanese Amerasian reflects on life in the present, with the traces of wars and their aftermaths.

In Dream of the Water Children, Fredrick Kakinami Cloyd delineates the ways imperialism and war are experienced across and between generations and leave lasting and often excruciating legacies in the mind, body, and relationships. The book is particularly good in detailing these costs as experienced by women and children, most vividly in cataloguing the life and emotions of Cloyd’s mother, and of Cloyd himself as a child and young man.

In incident after incident of military violence, sexual violence, social ostracism, intrafamilial cruelty, self-harm, and bullying, Cloyd shows how the social conditions created by war reverberate in our most intimate relationships. At the same time, Cloyd and his mother are never just victims: Cloyd’s spirited mother in particular defies stereotypes of Asian women and war brides as passive and silent. Throughout, Cloyd also traces moments of friendship and communal support among women and children of other mixed-race military families, as they navigated the conditions of multiple societies and cultural norms…

Read the entire preview here.

Both native and foreign: How being of mixed race affects Japanese students

The Cavalier Daily
Charlottesville, Virginia
2014-07-01

Emily Gorham

I have now entered week five of my three month stay in Japan as an intern for the Ibaraki Christian University’s English department. A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about what I’ve termed the gaijin stare — a phenomenon in which, as one of very few foreigners living in the Japanese countryside, I get stares from just about everyone, wherever I go.

This concept got me thinking: what happens when the gaijin stare is misplaced? Japan used to think of itself as a homogenous nation. Some people still think of it this way — though times are certainly changing and interracial marriage is growing increasingly common.

By one statistic, one in every 49 babies born in Japan today is considered “mixed race” — or “haafu,” which natives presumably take to mean half-Japanese and half-foreign. While this number may not sound staggering, it means Japan’s mixed raced demographic cannot be ignored.

After experiencing the gaijin stare myself, I spoke to a few students at the university who are considered “haafu” for their take on racial perception in Japan…

Read the entire article here.