Is Japan becoming more welcoming to mixed-race people?
TOKYO — Just over 40 years ago, when my family moved from California to Tokyo, the fact that my mother was Japanese did not stop schoolchildren from pointing at me and yelling “Gaijin!” — the Japanese word for foreigner — as I walked down the street.
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’s house.
When we moved back to California two years later, I entered fourth grade and suddenly, I was the Asian kid. “Ching chong chang chong ching!” boys chanted on the playground, tugging at the corners of their eyes. Classmates scrunched their noses at the onigiri — rice balls wrapped in dried seaweed — that my mother packed in my lunch bag. When our teacher mentioned Japan during a social studies lesson, every head in the class swiveled to stare at me.
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.
In the past few weeks, covering local reaction to the tennis champion Naomi Osaka, the daughter of a Japanese mother and Haitian-American father, and Denny Tamaki, who is the son of a Japanese mother and a white American Marine and was elected governor of Okinawa last weekend, I have wondered whether Japanese attitudes toward identity are slowly starting to accommodate those of us with mixed heritages.
For the past two decades, roughly one in 50 children born in Japan each year have had one foreign parent. Here we are known as “hafu,” which comes from the English word “half,” and our existence challenges the strain in Japanese society that conflates national identity with pure-blooded ethnicity.
During Mr. Tamaki’s campaign for governor in Okinawa, some on social media insinuated that he wasn’t really Japanese. Others likened his candidacy to that of Barack Obama in 2008. “A ‘hafu’ child is going to become a leader,” someone wrote on Twitter. “Let’s see a dream in Okinawa, too, just like people saw when Obama became the president in America.”
When Ms. Osaka arrived in Tokyo last month shortly after winning the United States Open playing for Japan, a Japanese reporter asked her what she thought about her identity, setting off a contorted debate in traditional and social media about whether the question was appropriate.
