A beauty contest winner making Japan look at itself
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Re: A beauty contest winner making Japan look at itself
#2Jhene Aiko is my second favorite blackanese now... :)
Re: A beauty contest winner making Japan look at itself
#3> There is no word like hafu outside Japan, but I think we need it here.
Welp, she's Japanese alright, she's even mastered nihonjinron: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nihonjinron
But more or less the same concept elsewhere:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hapa (Hawaiian, and another loan from the English "half")
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luk_khrueng (Thai for "half child")
Re: A beauty contest winner making Japan look at itself
#4Finland, another country that's traditionally been very isolationist -- before the EU came along, it was second only to Albania in having the fewest % of resident foreigners -- had its own version of this in 1996, when a Finn of half-Nigerian descent was chosen as Miss Finland:
Re: A beauty contest winner making Japan look at itself
#5> There is no word like hafu outside Japan,
uh, what? how about "half", the exact word that 'hafu' is supposed to emulate? you can't borrow a word from another language, and then claim it's unique to yours!
i'm fairly confident nearly everyone on earth knows what it means to be 'half', or just mixed race/ethnicity in general. in fact there are even places on earth where mixed race is the norm. try going to brazil. FUN FACT: the largest japanese population outside of japan is there. i think they might have a concept of hafu there. just maybe.
if you're paying attention, i think the above statement tells us more about japanese culture than the entire article, on many levels.
Re: A beauty contest winner making Japan look at itself
#6> There is no word like hafu outside Japan, uh, what? how about "half", the exact word that 'hafu' is supposed to emulate? you can't borrow a word from another language, and then claim it's unique to yours! i'm fairly confident nearly everyone on earth knows what it means to be 'half', or just mixed race/ethnicity in general. in fact there are even places on earth where mixed race is the norm. try going to brazil. FU…
A common, although often derogatory, term here in the UK is "half cast" for people (kids in particular) of mixed race.
Re: A beauty contest winner making Japan look at itself
#7> There is no word like hafu outside Japan, uh, what? how about "half", the exact word that 'hafu' is supposed to emulate? you can't borrow a word from another language, and then claim it's unique to yours! i'm fairly confident nearly everyone on earth knows what it means to be 'half', or just mixed race/ethnicity in general. in fact there are even places on earth where mixed race is the norm. try going to brazil. FU…
It's hard to really answer it based on a relatively short article but I don't think she was being literal in the sense that no other culture has a term for someone of mixed race. My interpretation, and it's just that, is she was saying there's no other country outside Japan that has such a unique situation that you therefore really need a word that describes someone who is Japanese and is yet not Japanese at the same time.
Re: A beauty contest winner making Japan look at itself
#8> There is no word like hafu outside Japan, uh, what? how about "half", the exact word that 'hafu' is supposed to emulate? you can't borrow a word from another language, and then claim it's unique to yours! i'm fairly confident nearly everyone on earth knows what it means to be 'half', or just mixed race/ethnicity in general. in fact there are even places on earth where mixed race is the norm. try going to brazil. FU…
It's hard to really answer it based on a relatively short article but I don't think she was being literal in the sense that no other culture has a term for someone of mixed race. My interpretation, and it's just that, is she was saying there's no other country outside Japan that has such a unique situation that you therefore really need a word that describes someone who is Japanese and is yet not Japanese at the same…
yeah, that's also bullshit.
just off the top of my head, i can name: hawaii, the caribbean, brazil, parts of europe (italy comes to mind), east asia (especially places with large overseas diaspora like china and taiwan) all have identical cultural concepts, especially those with large populations living in america.
Re: A beauty contest winner making Japan look at itself
#9Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's hard to really answer it based on a relatively short article but I don't think she was being literal in the sense that no other culture has a term for someone of mixed race. My interpretation, and it's just that, is she was saying there's no other country outside Japan that has such a unique situation that you therefore really need a word that describes someone who is Japanese and is yet not Japanese at the same…
yeah, that's also bullshit. just off the top of my head, i can name: hawaii, the caribbean, brazil, parts of europe (italy comes to mind), east asia (especially places with large overseas diaspora like china and taiwan) all have identical cultural concepts, especially those with large populations living in america.
"In part that is because this is still such an extraordinarily homogenous society. Immigrants make up just one per cent of Japan's population" - Compare that to Brazil. So again, I don't think she's saying it in a literal sense.
Re: A beauty contest winner making Japan look at itself
#10> There is no word like hafu outside Japan, uh, what? how about "half", the exact word that 'hafu' is supposed to emulate? you can't borrow a word from another language, and then claim it's unique to yours! i'm fairly confident nearly everyone on earth knows what it means to be 'half', or just mixed race/ethnicity in general. in fact there are even places on earth where mixed race is the norm. try going to brazil. FU…
>where mixed race is the norm ... brazil ...the largest japanese population outside of japan is there. i think they might have a concept of hafu there
Yes, but I'd bet that the connotations of "hafu" in a society where mixed race is the norm are very different from those where it is unusual.
So much so that you might consider it to be a different word, even if it happens to be spelled the same.