Wednesday, March 25, 2009

Famous ハーフ's

So I was looking into ハーフ's; which means "hafu"s which is the Japanese importation of the word "half" which refers to half-japanese, half-foreign people. It also has derogatory connotations, just like "hapa" used to have. But anyway I was looking them up cause I was thinking about this character in the Japanese TV drama "Hana Yori Dango" or 「花より男子」in Japanese (yes I learned how to type in Japanese on my computer and its wicked fun). But anyway - there is this character, Shizuka, who's like, drop dead GORGEOUS and I didn't really understand what made her stand out so much at first. The more I thought about it - the more I thought that she might be part western, or not full japanese, but there is like no info online about her ethnicity. So she probably she is full japanese, but who knows. 

But anyway thats the long intro to the list of half-japanese famous people I found, and it was really cool. Here is the list: 
Reika Hashimoto
Anna Tsuchiya
Anna Umemiya
Linda Yamamoto
Beni Arashiro
Tadanobu Asano
Meisa Kuroki
Angela Aki
Chieko Kawabe
Megumi Nakajima
Emi Watanabe
Keisuke Ogihara
Masayoshi "Mabo" Kabe
Minami Hinase
Sowelu
Marcus Tulio Tanaka
Lisa (musician)
Koji Murofushi
Yuka Murofushi
Masumi Okada
Takeshi Kaneshiro
Kiyoshi Okubo
Yuu Shirota
Koji Ota
Hiromi Hayakawa

Quite a few, ne? But I looked up all of them actually to see what they looked like (actually thats a lie - only the women I looked up) and I found one that had the same kind of western characteristics as me (though she is like a bajillion zillion times prettier lol). Here's a couple photos:

Its crazy! she looks so not-asian but she is a famous star in Japan. She sings, I guess. Though I read that she is pretty famous here, too. Oh well, I haven't heard of her before. But she has wavy hair (stereotypically not asian), a bigger nose (stereotypically asians have smaller noses), her eyes are not as slanted, and her face isn't as round (stereotypically Asian's faces are rounder). Anyway, all those things I have always noted on why people don't see me as Chinese is because I don't have that. Though its cool cause she is totally accepted and loved in the generally very homogenous japanese society though she doesn't look super asian. Though... when you are famous its true everyone wants to claim you as family... and I recognize that... though its still a cool idea.

1 comment:

  1. Hey there! Welcome to the Mixed world on the web! We'd love for you to check out (and be a guest on?) our podcast: Mixed Chicks Chat www.mixedchickschat.com Also come to our festival celebrating the Mixed experience: www.mxroots.org! Glad to know there's another Mixie sharing experiences with the world!

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