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The singer and TV host Gwen Stefani faced widespread backlash after claiming: “I’m Japanese.”
In an interview with Allure magazine released on Tuesday, Stefani, who is of Irish and Italian descent, was promoting her GXVE beauty brand when she said: “My God, I’m Japanese and I didn’t know it.”
The 53-year-old described the influence Japanese culture had on her childhood, when her father, who is Italian American, worked for Yamaha and traveled between California and Japan.
“That was my Japanese influence and that was a culture that was so rich with tradition, yet so futuristic [with] so much attention to art and detail and discipline and it was fascinating to me,” Stefani told the Allure editor Jesa Marie Calaor, who is Filipino American.
Stefani described her father’s stories of Japanese street performers cosplaying as Elvis Presley and women with colorful hair and said that when she grew older, she traveled to Harajuku, a district in Shibuya, Tokyo, known for eclectic clothing stores and cosplay shops and which eventually served as the inspiration for her fragrance line, Harajuku Lovers.
