Japanese × Non Asian = 1/2 = Good looking”.

Not too long ago you read Loco’s guest post on what it’s like to be a “half child” in Japan. By reading that article you’ll learn it’s not always great to be a “half” child in Japan, sadly. However, many Japanese girls long for the appearance of a “half”; big eyes, long eye lashes, tall and sharp noses, etc… Since I married a Canadian, I bet you can guess the most common reaction I get from Japanese people.

“Oh, you married a Canadian (a white guy)? Then your child will be”half” and most likely be so cute. Jealous!”

Actually, whenever I talk to someone about my marriage for the first time, 90% or more of their reactions are the same. I personally think that it’s fairly ridiculous to say that your baby will be good looking before knowing other things, like if my husband is attractive or not, but it’s probably just a form of small-talk that people come up with.

“Half” Taking Over Television

This “half=cute” belief has probably been strengthened by those good looking idols on TV who are know to be “half”. I wouldn’t be going too far if I were to say that there has recently been a “half” baby-boom rippling across Japan. In fact, there have been so many “half” celebrities on TV over the passed few years that people often get confused who is who. Some of those celebrities even complain about how commonly it occurs. In fact, check out this “Half” special that was aired recently.

Not only TV viewers but also those who work in television sometimes believe that there are too many “half” girls and some are worried about losing their position to them. The famous comedian Hiroyuki Ariyoshi, who is known for flat-out-mean jokes, discussed this concern on his own radio program called SUNDAY NIGHT DREAMER and he said some nerd-comedians (“Nerd” because that is the actual style they attempt to portray) are losing their positions on television to these “half” girls.

The rise of cute “half” girls’ exposure is partly because there are more mixed-race kids in Japan than there used to be. According to this “List of Statistical Surveys conducted by the Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare”, the number of international marriages in Japan (Japanese with non-Japanese) in the 70’s was just 5,500, but it rapidly increased in the 80’s when the Japanese economy started bubbling up. Although it peeked in 2006 (nearly 45,000 couples), there were still 23,657 international marriages last year which is over 4 times that of the 70’s.

But, this doesn’t necessarily explain the disproportionate amount of “half” celebrities on television. Some of it probably comes from the number of “half” children out there, but I wonder if some of it comes from the multi-racial families that they come from. Japanese people are generally known to be fairly shy and timid, which isn’t very good for television. However, many non-Japanese ethnicities are known to be much more outgoing and “friendly”, which is good for television. The way that “half” children are raised probably makes more of them more outgoing than the average Japanese (as we saw in Loco’s article, mentioned above). So, not only are they especially “good looking” with their “half”-look, but they’re also more outgoing too. What a perfect combination for a television personality! Of course, this is only just me thinking out loud, but it seems fairly plausible in some situations.

Transformers

The more that pretty “half” girls are exposed, the more that Japanese girls will want to look like them. Although there may be some Japanese guys who pine for that “half” look, most of them don’t put makeup on themselves, so it’s harder for them to change their appearance (unless they want to be made fun of for wearing makeup).

Girls, on the other hand, are very makeup capable and some of them are very persistent in their quest look like “half” girls. Those wanna-be-half girls have created various ways to look like like they’re “half” or non-Japanese and keep posting how-to videos on Youtube, some being quite popular. I’d like to introduce some of their makeup methods today. It’s pretty impressive how drastically they can change their appearance!

God Make Ayano Saito’s “Half” Face Makeup

nuts×GODMakeup.

Naokoの秋のハーフ顔メイク！(Naoko’s “half” face makeup for fall)

“Half” face makeup

After watching these videos it’s clear that the features you have concentrate on are the eyebrows and the eyes. Since Asian faces are flatter compared to non-Asian people’s, it’s important to make your facial features more 3D. Here’s some things that they tend to do to achieve this:

• Drawing their eyebrows thicker.
• Make the space between their eyebrows and eyes narrower.
• Make the inside tip of the eyebrow a little thicker so that it looks less flat.
• Apply many grades of eye shadow, thickener.
• Create longer eye-lines.
• Apply highlight to their nose lines to make them appear taller.

In addition to “3D-ifying” their face, color contacts and fake eyelashes seem to be a staple of their tool kit. If you think about it, there’s nothing that says “half” or “not Japanese” like eyes that aren’t dark brown.

When Makeup Isn’t Enough

I’m not totally sure how much time they spend putting their makeup on, but it seems to be quite a lot. I don’t typically use makeup myself, except for special occasions, so I admire their passion for this and the time and effort they put forth. However, there are some people who want to look like a “half” but consider it too troublesome to spend so much time on makeup. For those people, there are many plastic surgeons who provide “half-looking” or “foreigner-looking” facial reconstructive surgeries. Takasu Clinic is one of them and you can see their ad for that kind of surgery.

But, paying for these surgeries can be expensive. It is surgery after all! This woman paid over $100,000 to look more Western. It turned out fairly well, but I find it hard to believe that there aren’t many problems or mistakes that get made along the way.

I’m really not sure if I can agree with doing this – you should enjoy how you look and be happy with what you’ve been given. But, I can’t pretend to know how people think, it is their bodies after all. I mean, there are some surgeries that make you look more “Western” but also have some practicality as well. For example, getting a surgery to change your eyelids to a double lid is fairly popular. This makes your eyes bigger which makes you look more Western. Plus, when you get older you’ll be able to see because your eyelids won’t be drooping so much as they start to sag.

Beyond things like that, though, it’s taking this craze a little too far, I think. What if one day you wake up and you’ve suddenly changed your mind? Or what if you go into surgery and they mess up completely? The negatives are just too great. Plus, you should be happy with how you look!

Giving It A Try

After getting all judgemental on you, it’s time to make a U-turn and try some of this myself. I don’t usually put makeup on (as I mentioned above), but we’ve just seen a lot of tips so I thought “why don’t I try one of them.”

There’s a problem, though… I don’t have any of those makeup staples, such as color contacts or fake eyelashes. Thankfully there is Photoshop, though, so I hit up my virtual makeup artist Aya. Are you ready? Here I go, I’m about to become “half”.

Here’s without makeup

Here’s a little makeup “added”

Now I look half?

Two thirds?

The first thing I did when I looked at the pictures above was to say “OMG!” and then laugh. I felt very strange to see myself looking like that. Well, I like the second one, but in the last two pictures where I put the color contacts in and dyed my hair….they looked kind of scary. I forwarded them to my parents and they laughed, too. This experiment turned out to be a great excuse for me to stick with black hair and brown eyes. I like being “natural”, after all.

The second picture also made me imagine our future daughter. I don’t have any kids now, but if I had a daughter, she might look kind of like her. Thank God my husband doesn’t have blue eyes or blond hair, so I guess she won’t look like the scary ones…as long as she doesn’t put this kind of make-up on!

Bonus Wallpapers!

[1280x800] ∙ [2560x1600]

One of the most significant challenges of being an English teacher in a Japanese junior high school, for me, has been deciding how to deal with students who aren’t Japanese– in the strictest sense. In particular, those of biracial or multiracial heritage, or what are known among the Japanese as Haafu (Japanese for “half”, meaning half Japanese, half another race or ethnicity).

In the ten years I’ve taught here, I’ve taught a number of these kids. Some were blended with Caucasian, some with African, some with even other Asian ethnicities like Chinese and Korean. And I’ve found that though their experiences here in Japan had some similarities, that each child presented a different set of challenges.

In my new book, Loco in Yokohama, I describe in detail the situations that arose, both positive and negative, out of their being classified different from the rest of the student body. I also go into my thought process as I addressed these varied issues, as well as the emotional toll this can have on the teacher even when s/he is endeavoring to keep a certain emotional distance.

As a bonus to Tofugu readers I have submitted the following excerpts:

The first is the tale of “Terrence” (not his real name) a biracial first-year student who’d never stepped foot out of Japan.

“Terrence”

Terrence wasn’t the only so-called haa-fu (what Japanese call people mixed with some other ethnicity or race) in Mendokusai, but he was the only black one among the third-year students.

His father was Kenyan and his mother Japanese, but as far as who he was, how he carried himself, and how he interacted with the world, he wasn’t half-anything. He was all Japanese. It had taken me several months to get that through my thick skull, but eventually it got through.

Terrence was tall, lanky, and fairly dark-skinned with a curly Afro. He had a scratchy husky voice that was going through adolescent changes, but I imagined at the far side of that vocal maturation would be a Barry White baritone that’ll drive the girls wild.

Terrence and I had the strangest relationship I’d ever had with a student and, trust me, that’s saying a lot.

Our relationship began my (and his) first day of class back in 2007. I had just begun my tenure at Mendokusai Junior High and he had just arrived, fresh from the local elementary school, along with more than half of his classmates. Thus most of the students already knew or knew of one another while I knew nobody, students nor faculty. Kawaguchi-sensei (my co-worker) introduced me to the class while I scanned this sea of young, nervous, excited Japanese faces. That’s when I came upon an island in this sea, Terrence’s black face. He was just as nervous, just as excited, and just as “Japanese” in every respect aside from his color and features.

My shock was conspicuous.

The class turned to see what had given me the jolt, and saw Terrence. Some shrugged with indifference, as if to say, ‘whatchagonnado’. Some smiled with comprehension, like this was well-traversed territory. He gets that a lot, they seemed to say. Terrence rolled with it, though. No more or less embarrassed than any student would be if put on the spot on the first day of class. And that was when I realized, abruptly, what I had done. I had done to him what has been done to me ever since my arrival here in Japan, I’d singled him out as different.

I tore my eyes off of him and ordered myself not to set them on him again in any significant manner or in any way different from the way I set my eyes on any of his presumably full-blooded Japanese classmates for the rest of his days in the school.

But, because of his blackness and my delusional pleasure at being around someone who I thought could vaguely identify with me, I had immediately taken a liking to him, which made it all the more difficult to treat him like everyone else despite my efforts.

And I seemed to be having the same effect on some of the other students, particularly Terrence’s friends. They tried to push us together at every opportunity. If I asked any of them a question, whether in English or Japanese, and Terrence happened to be in the vicinity, they’d turn to him as if to say, “hey T, any idea what this guy’s rambling about?” They’d probably never seen him interact with another black person so they were probably curious as to what would happen. Would Terrence suddenly shed this veneer of Japanese-ness that he’d been masquerading since they’d met him and become the gaijin he appeared to be, the one that surely lurked within him?

To be honest, after meeting him a couple of times on his own, and seeing how Japanese he appeared to be, I’d secretly hoped the same thing!

Editor’s Commentary: The most interesting part of this excerpt, to me, is that Loco (who stands out) looked at Terrence in the same way that people look at him. It’s a super interesting phenomenon, where when you spend some time in Japan you automatically start to try to fit in, because that’s just what everyone does. In a sense, he was doing this so well that he was shocked by someone else who stood out, even though they were both in the same shoes.

“Risa”

There was a cute little haafu, all of 13 years old, among my first-year students. She was half-African-American, half-Japanese, and went by the name of Risa. She spoke both English and Japanese fluently. She was tall and had light brown skin, with what my mother would call good hair—long and curly straight like a professional hair weave, only natural. Her eyes were an alluring mix of Asian and African. One day she was going to have to carry a baseball bat to keep the boys at bay, and an industrial-sized can of mace in her purse for the pervs!

She was born in Yokohama, and after having lived in Mississippi for several years, her family returned to Japan. She then, mid-semester, was enrolled at Mendokusai and, by all appearances, was adjusting to life back in Japan and at the school fairly well.

That is, until that day.

There was another English speaker, a returnee (had spent a significant amount of time abroad), in the same class. He, however, was 100% Japanese, but his family had lived in Saudi Arabia for several years and he’d attended an international school there, so his English was fairly fluent, as well. His name was Hideki.

I learned that day that, beneath my radar, a bit of a rivalry had sprung up between the two.

I had noticed from our first meeting that Risa was a bit outspoken compared to her Japanese classmates, and not shy about her English ability whatsoever. This was remarkable because most of the English-speaking students at my schools would only speak to me in English when their friends were not around or totally buried the ability for fear of appearing outstanding, a no-no in these parts, or even being ostracized. But Risa seemed to be unaware of these consequences and displayed conspicuous pride in her own bilingual-ness. Hideki, however, though he was not as shy as most of his classmates, was much less outspoken than Risa.

Recently, according to Risa, he had taken to teasing and criticizing her. And apparently it had gotten to a point where she felt compelled to bring it to my attention. She caught me in the hallway during the rest period just before English class was to begin, and said, “Mr. Loco, Hideki says I have an accent.”

“Really?” I hadn’t noticed. “Let me hear you talk.”

“What do you want me to say?”

“What does your father do?”

“He’s uh petty offisuh in duh Navy. He’s been in duh Navy since befo’ I was bohn. He’s from Mississippi an’ you kinda reminds me uh him.”

“Well, Risa, I think Hideki might be right. You do have an accent. It’s a Southern accent, kinda like my mother’s. But, big deal! He’s got an accent, too. His sounds British. I have an accent, too. Everyone has some kind of accent.”

“He said my accent was a black accent.”

Now, how the hell would he know that?

“What do you think he means by that?” I asked, curious about how this was affecting her. Outwardly, she wasn’t giving me much to work with, looking just as perky as always.

“I dunno, but he said it was “black” and the way he said it made it sound like a bad thing. Is a black accent bad?”

“There’s no such thing. And if there were, it wouldn’t be a bad thing, so don’t pay him any mind.”

Whenever she and I have a conversation, all the Japanese eyes in the vicinity are riveted and ears are glued. It was so rare for them to see two native English speakers go at it live, especially if one happened to be their classmate, as well. I worried about how this might impact her school life with her being able to communicate with the teacher better than anyone in the school, and all the Japanese English teachers put together, so I’d try to keep our interactions to a minimum. Risa, though, jumped at every opportunity to flash her skill.

As she continued reporting her conversation with Hideki to me, I started picking up on something in the tone of her voice. Though she presented all of this with a nonchalance and a giddiness that I could only attribute to her youth, I knew that what Hideki said had upset her.

So, now this situation was on my radar.

And, now that it was, I could see clearly what was happening.

I’d ask a question and, if it wasn’t too difficult, several hands would rise, but if it was difficult, only two would, Hideki’s and Risa’s. All of the answers were simple for both of them so I avoided calling on them as often as possible. It felt fair, but as far as they were concerned, they had as much right to answer the questions as their mono-lingual’d classmates. Hideki seemed to grasp what I was up to though and refrained from raising his hand every time. But, Risa was oblivious. She continued to raise her hand as often as possible, obliging me to call on her from time to time. Moreover, she’d even raise her hand to ask questions or volunteer remarks, which she’d happily translate into Japanese for her linguistically-challenged classmates—something that other bilingual students I’ve taught would rarely, if ever, do.

Yep, I could see what was going on. It was older than the spiked club. It was probably what prompted the use of it as a murder weapon in addition to hunting and protection from beasts in the first place—good ole’ fashioned jealousy.

Editor’s Commentary: I’ve also seen this as well, so I’m wondering if this is a pretty normal occurrence. Not only with people who speak fluent English, but with exchange students studying abroad in Japan as well. It’s almost as if they’re put in their own group and they have to compete within it. This is pretty true across the board, though. If you’re on a baseball team, you compete to practice the hardest. Or, if you’re taking a test, you compete to get the highest test score. It just so happens that kids who speak English are part of a very small circle. So, when they compete it really, really stands out. At least, that’s what I feel is going on here.

Hopeful Signs

While appearance-wise so-called “haafus” might stand out among the masses, I’ve found that they are essentially struggling with the same issues of identity, maturity, and finding a place in society as their presumably full-blooded classmates. Only, their struggle is compounded by this additional burden of fitting in against the odds in a fairly homogeneous society. It is my hope that this kind of classification is removed some day, not only from Japan but from other nations as well so that anyone of any race can live up to their fullest potential. As Dr. Martin Luther King once said I hope they will “…be measured by the content of their character.” I’ve seen a number of hopeful signs of this kind of thinking taking hold in Japan during my tenure teaching here, and I described a lot of them in my new book.

I want to thank Tofugu for allowing me to excerpt my book here, and I hope you all enjoyed this taste of Loco in Yokohama. For more on Terrence and Risa, and a number of other amazing students of both unicultural and multicultural backgrounds, as well as some remarkable educators tasked to introduce the world to them, pick up a copy of Loco in Yokohama. More information on the book is available at locoinyokohama.com.

Tanaka’s win wasn’t just remarkable because he was the first Japanese person to ever win the Boston Marthon (before the Kenyans came along and started kicking everybody’s asses), and not even because Tanaka was a survivor of the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima.

What’s really remarkable about Tanaka is that he didn’t wear conventional running shoes; instead, Tanaka rocked the tabi (足袋), or split-toe Japanese footwear, to his 2:27:45 victory.

We’ve seen the Japanese technique for walking efficiently (see: our guide to walking like an Edo-era long-distance messenger), are there advantages in Japanese footwear too?

What Are Tabi?

Tabi are pretty simple: they’re just two-toed socks. Why are they two-toed? Do the Japanese have some sort of collective foot deformity?

Not quite. Hundreds of years ago in Japan, lots traditional Japanese footwear like zori have straps that fit in between your toes (just like flip-flops), so it makes sense that tabi are designed the same way.

And while a lot of people associate tabi with ninja, it wasn’t just Japan’s silent assassins who rocked the split-toed footwear. People of all walks of life wore tabi when the occasion called for it.

Over time, tabi evolved froms simple socks to so much more. Today, you can find a different type of tabi for virtually any use, and while tabi aren’t regularly worn by your average Japanese person, some professions and hobbies that still regularly make use of tabi.

Occasionally traditional artisans wear tabi, along with some construction workers (who sport the more sturdy jika-tabi); but there are some uses for tabi in the modern world, too.

Running Tabi

After Tanaka won the Boston Marathon, there was an effort by Japanese companies to capitalize on his success. A shoe company named Onitsuka (that later became ASICS) introduced a “marathon tabi” in the early 1950^s but it never really took off.

Nowadays though, people are rethinking the best way to run. Some people think that running barefoot or with shoes that replicate being barefoot (like the “five finger” shoes) are best.

Somewhere in that, shoe companies have decided that tabi-style two-toed shoes might be worth re-examining too. You can buy split-toed shoes from a ton of different Western companies, although I can’t really vouch for their fashionability.

Armored Tabi

Even samurai needed socks; although in the case of the samurai they needed tabi strong enough to deflect (or at least slow down) any threats to their toes. Nothing worse than getting an arrow in the foot.

Some armored tabi were covered in plate armor, some were protected by chainmail, but all of the samurai’s protective footwear were definitely form over function. I wouldn’t imagine that many people would want to wear armored tabi today.

Space Tabi

What’s better than tabi? How about tabi in space?! A few years ago, ASICS started working with JAXA, the Japanese space agency, to create specialty footware for Japanese astronauts heading up to the International Space Station.

The shoes featured a lightweight design, a better grip for zero-g situations, and a shape that helps stretch out the wearer’s muscles to fight muscle atrophy.

Are There Advantages to Tabi?

Despite all of these different uses for tabi, I haven’t found anything that supports the idea that the unique, two-toed design of tabi will make you run faster, jump higher, or look more handsome.

Regardless, for some people tabi are the footwear of choice. Some covet its traditionalism, others just think they’re plain comfy, but whatever the reason, tabi will be around for a long time. We’ll see whether or not the Kenyans ever get around to trying them out.

Thanks to Patrick for the article suggestion!