The Life of Haafu

I turned on the TV tonight in attempts to search out the end of the Tigers/Giants game, but to no avail (the Tigers won, 1-0, with a nice play by Toritani). Instead, I stumbled across a show on MBS that, initially, looked like your standard “host/man on the street” show. The host approached a grocery store, I heard him say, “You can find foreigners here! Look, look at all the English on everything. Here it says “entrance” and 入口 together!” This is enough for me to stick with the program.

What the host is looking for, apparantly, is ハーフ (haafu) or “half” kids. Haafu is a term used to describe a person that is half Japanese and half… well, non-Japanese. While this can speak volumes about how race is percieved in Japan, that wasn’t (explicitly) the point of the show. The host stumbled about the store for a while, accosting random foreign men with Japanese women next to them, until he found a man (from Michigan) and his Japanese wife that indeed had a teenage haafu daughter.

The show, Bari Bari Value Around The World, is a celebrity panel show that deals with how much things cost based around a specific story. The story, in this case, was of haafu kids turning “sweet 16,” and the kinds of lives they lead. The first girl, Laura, is an American-Japanese living in Tokyo and attending an American high school. Her father is (as best as I could catch) the president of a company… which was pretty stunningly obvious when the host toured their condo, which had square footage that would put your standard American suburban house to shame, except for the fact that it was appointed in antiques and, don’t forget, in the middle of Tokyo.  The space in this house/condo had me gasping, which is probably a mixed sign of me being in Japan too long and reading <u>Nickled and Dimed</u>, where a woman is examining if it is possible to live on minimum wage in America, and recording her experiences (a post on that later).

I laughed at the host’s reactions to a lot of the matter-of-fact answers offered up by the Americans, all of whom could speak Japanese. “What is this other couch for?” he asks Michigan Dad. “For sitting,” Michigan Dad says. “Can you all speak Japanese?” he asks Laura and her band-mates, as she is the singer for an American-style rock band. “Um, yeah,” they all answer in turn. “We do live in Japan,” one snarks, and if I was there I would have punched him. I live in Japan too, but if the Japanese start to think that all the gaijin can speak their language… well, I’m in huge trouble!

Anyway, the host asks Laura about the customs surrounding the Sweet 16 birthday party, and Laura says that her friend in New York City is having one soon. Enter Ariel, who is so svelte and dippy that I want to punch her as well. Another haafu of privilege, the host flies to New York City to attend her party. The world this girl buzzes through makes Laura look like she could be living out of a cereal box – the show even goes so far as to label Ariel a “Park Avenue princess” (literally – they used パークアベニューブリンセス、paaku abenyuu purinsesu, as a caption). The rest of the show involved following Ariel and her fashion designer mother around to their trendy condo, and their 22-acre “country house” somewhere upstate, then looking through the house and talking about how much things cost.

What irked me about the show was the constant yammering by the voice-over about “this is how haafu/Americans live!” Obviously it’s not, but it still got to me after a while… there are certain things about daily American life that my students are already flabbergasted by: how far we’ll drive to go somewhere on a daily basis, what kinds of food we eat and don’t, that school begins at 7:30, finishes by 2:00, and we only have to attend for an average of 180 days out of the year (in comparison, the Japanese school year is 240 days). Far be it for the responsibility of television to portray things accurately – it’s a business, same as any other, and sensation sells – but it still rubbed me the wrong way, especially with the focus on haafu kids, a term that is bothersome in its own right.

So I dealt with this in the time-honored tradition of my father: when confronted with annoying TV, he will fling some choice words at said TV, then stomp out into the backyard for a cigarette. I did have choice words (I think tonights were mainly snorts and mutters of “What crap”), but as I am neither a smoker nor in possession of a backyard, I had to make do with stomping to the kitchen and cooling my faux rage with gummi peaches. Did the trick quite nicely, I dare say.