A few months ago, while I was getting my 6-year-old ready for an evening bath, he pointed to his deeply tanned arm and blurted out that he was white because his skin is white. I quickly replied, “Your skin is not white, darling, and being white is not really about the actual color of your […]
Helping my mixed-race kids rethink their ideas about race and privilege
September 29, 2022 by Leave a Comment
Ethnically ambiguous
September 30, 2021 by Leave a Comment
Sometimes it is hard to fully grasp that you have been living on an island until moments after you have left its gravitational pull. Last week, I watched as the place I will always consider home rapidly shrank in size as my plane lifted higher, the blue vastness of the ocean soon overtaking the views […]
Multiracial athletes sparking debate in Japan ahead of 2020 Games
August 29, 2019 by Leave a Comment
TOKYO — Amid a shifting cultural landscape, a handful of talented multiracial athletes are among some of Japan’s best chances to reach the podium at next summer’s Tokyo Olympics and consequently draw attention to an often ignored yet growing segment of the country’s population. At the top of that list is tennis superstar Naomi Osaka, […]
ELUSIVE DREAMS: Proud hapa finds marrow match but loses cancer battle
May 23, 2019 by Leave a Comment
After enduring a year’s worth of treatment for non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, Paul Ota decided to fly home to the Bay Area to pick up his universal passport. A universal passport is a document that symbolizes a person’s goal to travel the world. He had been on the waitlist for one since before he was diagnosed with […]
WALKING THE MIDDLE PATH: USC professor engages hapa identity via Buddhism
May 23, 2019 by Leave a Comment
If there’s one person besides, perhaps, Naomi Osaka, who has reinvigorated the subject of mixed race in the Japanese diaspora, it’s Duncan Ryūken Williams. Born and raised in Tokyo by his Japanese mother and British father, Williams came to the United States to attend Reed College for his undergraduate work before going on to earn […]
Multiracial athletes of Japanese descent and their ascent
May 23, 2019 by Leave a Comment
March 21, 2019, Tokyo Dome in Tokyo, Japan. In the bottom of the eighth, Ichiro Suzuki trotted off the baseball diamond for the last time, waving to an unusually emotional Japanese crowd. Soon after, fellow Seattle Mariners Hall of Famer Ken Griffey Jr. remarked that, during his career, Ichiro was able to “cross barriers.” When […]
Naomi Osaka stayed above the fray to claim first Grand Slam title
September 13, 2018 by Leave a Comment
NEW YORK — As Serena Williams’ U.S. Open final crumbled around her on Sept. 8, Japan’s Naomi Osaka said she had to stay above the fray in order to keep her historic run to Grand Slam history alive. With code violations, broken rackets, tears and accusations of cheating coming from Williams’ end of the court, Osaka […]
Mixed-race JA woman documents first trip to Japan
July 20, 2017 by Leave a Comment
Diary of a Tokyo Teen: A Japanese-American Girl Travels to the Land of Trendy Fashion, High-Tech Toilets and Maid Cafes Written and illustrated by Christine Mari Inzer (North Clarendon, Vt.: Tuttle Publishing, $14.99, paperback) For people with immigrant ancestry, the experience of returning to one’s motherland is all too familiar. While its exciting to reunite […]
Playing hostess to a foreign culture
July 20, 2017 by Leave a Comment
TURNING JAPANESE: A GRAPHIC MEMOIR Written and illustrated by MariNaomi (Minneapolis, Minn.: 2dcloud, 2016, 228 pp., $24.95, hard cover) MariNaomi shares her own journey of self-discovery of her ethnic roots in “Turning Japanese.” Raised in the San Francisco Bay Area, she illustrates her time spent as a hostess in a restaurant and bar in San […]
Raising hope and awareness for mixed-race bone marrow matches
March 30, 2017 by Leave a Comment
As a multiracial American (Japanese-Okinawan, Mexican, and German), I’ve always thought of my mixed-ness as a unique part of my identity. Recently though, I’ve learned that this attribute is a possible health concern if I were ever to be diagnosed with a blood or bone disease. More than 50,000 multiracial patients a year search for […]
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