In Japan, 97.5% of the population is Japanese, and the country considers itself to be a racially homogenous society. However, there is an increasing mixed-race Japanese population in Japan. In fact, “two out of every 100 babies born in Japan have one Japanese parent.” Unfortunately, these people, known in Japan as hāfu (from the word ‘half’ in English), despite being citizens of Japan, regularly experience discrimination in their lives.
The history of the mixed-race population in Japan began shortly after World War II, during which American troops occupied Japan. In the following years, many mixed-race babies were born from American soldiers and Japanese women.
Photo showing American GIs fraternising with Japanese women.
These babies faced widespread discrimination and were treated terribly. The babies, known as konketsuji, (literally meaning mixed-blood child) were often seen as a reminder of Japan’s humiliating loss in WWII and detested by the Japanese people, as many of them saw the konketsuji as the tainting of their blood, as shown by the translation of the term. Furthermore, there was mass paranoia in Japan as the Japanese press reported that “Allied soldiers had sired and abandoned over 200,000 ‘mixed-blood’ orphans in Japan,”leading to nationwide fear of the konketsuji taking over the Japanese population. Although surveys across the country eventually discovered that there were only a few thousand konketsuji in the nation, it did little to change the Japanese people’s outlook on them. The children of black American soldiers faced the most discrimination due to their visible mixed race. One story tells of “a train passenger (who) unwrapped a cloth bundle she spotted on the luggage rack to discover the corpse of a black Japanese baby.” These horrifying stories occurred all around Japan as many black Japanese babies were left to die at birth. Due to the abandonment of the konketsuji, their living conditions were especially appalling. Ethel Payne (a pioneering journalist known as the ‘First Lady of the Black Press’) worked at the Army Special Services Club in Tokyo from 1948 to 1951. During her time there, she visited an orphanage in Yokohama.Payne says, “Here were 160 foundlings of all mixtures, about 50 of them ‘Spookinese,’ Negro and Japanese. Some beds had three babies, they were so crowded.”
The issue of the mixed-race babies, known as the konketsuji mondai, came to a head in 1952, when many of them began to go to school, and questions were raised on whether the konketsuji children should be taught separately, segregated from the ‘pure’ Japanese children. Although the Japanese government decided to teach the konketsuji together with the other Japanese children, the lives of the mixed-race children didn’t improve. They were often bullied and many of them, especially the black Japanese children, were subject to unwanted stereotypes. These stereotypes were not just racial, but also social, as there was a widespread view that the konketsuji were all born to panpan, a derogatory term used to describe the “street prostitutes who served the soldiers of the occupying (American) forces” in WWII. Thus, despite these children being somewhat integrated into Japanese society through being allowed to enter the Japanese education system, they were still shunned and discriminated against.
The average experience of a mixed-race individual in Japan has undergone great change since the 1950s. The term konketsuji is now considered to be a derogatory term, and mixed-race people are no longer abandoned nor put into inhumane living conditions. However, they experience more subtle yet still harmful discrimination. Students of mixed-race origins are sometimes bullied at local Japanese schools, especially at a young age when other children don’t understand why they might look different to them. Young children often then become confused about their identity and blame themselves, something which can be incredibly detrimental to their emotional development and self-esteem. This confusion over their own identity is not helped by the fact that many mixed-race children are not recognised as Japanese. Tanaka Thomas, a mixed-race man in his 30s with a Ghanian mother, recounts: When I was around seven years old, I was just walking along when an elementary school student on a bicycle stopped in front of me and said, ‘Wow, a foreigner.’ Another time I was going home from soccer practice when I was nearly hit by a car. ‘That was close,’ I was thinking, when the driver wound down the window and said, ‘Hey, foreigner. Go back to your own country!’
Even when other people find out the heritage of a mixed-race person, they’re often still not treated as a Japanese person but instead as a foreigner. Comments such as ‘You speak good Japanese’ or ‘You use chopsticks very well’ which may seem harmless, can have long-lasting effects as they separate ‘mixed-race’ people from ‘Japanese’ people, since these comments would never be said by a Japanese person to someone who ‘looks’ Japanese. This is especially pertinent in Japan due to the Japanese idea of uchi (home) and soto(outside). These words are “applied to members of one’s house (who are uchi) as opposed to members of the outside world (who are soto), and to members of a person’s wider groups, (uchi) such as the community, school or place of work, as opposed to other people outside those groups (soto).”The biggest group that can be considered as one’s uchi is their country, where in this case foreigners are soto. Therefore, due to this Japanese emphasis on either being part of a group or being an outsider, mixed-race people might feel that they are considered soto and that they don’t belong in their own country.
A photo from Tetsuro Miyazaki's photography book, Hāfu2Hāfu, which explores what it means to be hāfu. The text reads: ‘Do you prefer to eat with chopsticks or cutlery?’ and ‘Why are we more lighthearted around other hāfu?’
Another issue faced by the mixed-race population in Japan is discrimination by employers. Companies often don’t hire mixed-race people as they are worried about their image or that mixed-race people won’t fit in at their company. Two accounts of such discrimination in Japanese working life are below:
Miller Ethan Seki (twenty-something with an American father):
“I arrived at an interview with my resume at the agreed time, but from their reaction when they saw me, I clearly wasn’t who they were looking for. I’d applied using the name Seki, you see . . . The atmosphere was quite negative. ‘Yes, thank you, that will be all. We have lots of other people to interview,’ they brushed me off. As I was heading out of the room, I saw my laces were loose, so tied them by the door. The interviewers must have thought that I was gone and made some comments about how I was a foreigner and they couldn’t hire me. I quietly opened the door, so they wouldn’t notice me . . .”
Tanaka Thomas (thirty-something with a Ghanaian mother):
“When I arrived, the interviewer asked me in surprise, ‘What, are you Tanaka?’ I replied, ‘Yes, I’m a hāfu raised in Japan, but probably I look more black than Japanese. Is that OK?’ ‘Please wait a moment.’ The interviewer talked to a superior for about two minutes before telling me I couldn’t be considered for any of the security jobs. ‘We can’t hire a black guard. I’m sorry but it’s impossible. Our customers would wonder why our company was hiring foreigners.’ The interviewer thought a black guard would be bad for the company’s image.”
These accounts not only exhibit the casual xenophobia in Japan but also show the difficulty of finding a job for a mixed-race person in Japan. They are often also subject to numerous background checks regarding their nationality and may be constantly questioned on their ability to speak Japanese fluently. All of this contributes to the idea of mixed-race people feeling as if they are soto and don’t belong. From an economic standpoint, they will also be less likely to stay in Japan due to their decreased employability.
One point of controversy regarding mixed-race people in Japan is what to call them. Currently, the most common term used is hāfu. However, many people find hāfu negative or even discriminatory. Tamaki Denny, a mixed-race man elected as the governor of Okinawa in 2018, described the fundamental problem with the word to be that “it carries a sense of condescension and discrimination from the people using words to categorize toward those being categorized.”There is also the argument that hāfu emphasises that one is only half Japanese, suggesting that they are incomplete and inferior to a ‘real’ Japanese person. Hāfu also doesn’t mention the other half of one’s nationality, making it seem as if it doesn’t matter. That being said, a large proportion of mixed-race people don’t take offence to the term and simply see it as a way to succinctly summarise their heritage. Recently, the term daburu (from the word ‘double’ in English) has become more popular. Daburu emphasises one’s dual nationality; they are not 50% Japanese (hāfu) but instead 100% Japanese and 100% another nation. However, it can often be inconvenient to explain the meaning of the more uncommon daburu, so hāfu has remained the commonplace term.
On the international stage, the fame and success of mixed-race Japanese people have led to arguments about whether they can be representatives of Japan. For example, in 2015, Ariana Miyamoto, who has an American father and Japanese mother, won Ms Japan. Although many Japanese people were happy with the result and congratulated her, there were many negative comments online, such as ‘Is it okay to select a hāfu as Miss Japan’ or ‘It makes me uncomfortable to think she is representing Japan.’
Ariana Miyamoto at the 2015 Miss Universe beauty pageant
The tennis star Naomi Osaka’s victory in the 2018 US Open also sparked debate on what it means to be Japanese. Whilst the country of Japan praised Osaka for her victory, many were quick to point out the double standards. “I’m sorry, but people who say Naomi Osaka is Japanese or call her Japan’s pride make me sick. You can’t just embrace ‘hāfu’ (biracial people) as Japanese when it suits you. You usually discriminate against us,” one user online said. This comment could be said to have come true in 2021 during the Olympic Games in Tokyo. After Osaka’s loss in the third round of the competition, where she was a favourite to win, she was faced with massive criticism and negative comments online. “I still can’t understand why she was the final torchbearer (referring to how Osaka lit the Olympic cauldron at the opening ceremony). Although she says she is Japanese, she cannot speak Japanese very much,” said one comment which received over 10,000 likes online. Naomi Osaka’s case is an example of how difficult it is to be a Japanese person of mixed-race heritage on the international stage, where you are under more scrutiny than a ‘normal’ Japanese person. It is difficult to give your all for your country when the people of your own country might turn their backs on you the second things start going wrong.
Ultimately, I think that Japan is still very far away from making the country a comfortable place for mixed-race people to live in. One key issue that must be overcome is the government’s lack of recognition of the mixed-race people in Japan. The Japanese government currently only tracks the nationality of their population and not the ethnicity. However, it needs to stop this active denial of the growing diversity in Japan. As the number of mixed-race people in Japan increases, what it means to be Japanese will change. Rather than putting these people into boxes and defining them as hāfu or daburu and separating them from the rest of Japan, the nation needs to be more accepting of the complex identities of mixed-race people and how these identities don’t stop them from being Japanese.
