Mike Shinoda - growing up hapa
The Rafu Shimpo Online has an interview with hapa musician Mike Shinoda of Fort Minor and Linkin Park by Cathy Lim: Getting Back to His Roots I posted previously about it within the Nikkei Review section, but since part of it dealt with his multiracial identity, I thought it should be repeated here. Below are some excerpts from the article that deal with being hapa...
MS: Mixed kids always have a very unique experience with the race subject because we are many times not obvious members of any group. For example, when I was younger, I would hear people make jokes about Asians around me because they wouldn’t know that I was half Asian, so they assumed that I was maybe Hispanic or maybe Middle Eastern and they’d make a joke about Asians and I was the spy. I was the undercover receiver of this joke. RS: Growing up multi-racial, with a Japanese father and a Caucasian mother, did you ever go through an identity crisis? MS: I think it was probably in college that I realized that there was a difference between Japanese and Japanese American. That’s important to realize. It’s not the same thing and then eventually with Linkin Park, I toured in Japan. I’ve been there now I think four times. I remember the first time I went, how familiar it seemed, just getting out of the plane, it smelled like my aunt’s house, in the airport, it smelled like Japan. I don’t know if anybody else even noticed it but I walked out of the plane and thought this is definitely familiar to me, didn’t even see anything yet. And then going to Tokyo, Osaka, Kyota, Nagoya, you just recognize things about the way people act, the small things that people do such as how you’ll grab a piece of paper. There are things that are more obvious like taking somebody’s business card with two hands. You don’t do that in the States. When I saw somebody do that I went, "Oh yeah, my uncle always does that," you know. There are little things that culturally come from Japan but they also exist in Japanese American culture and it made me feel like the connection was there and I kind of hadn’t realized how much of it was there. |
