Gwen Stefani draws backlash for saying ‘I am Japanese’ in interview | 24CA News
Gwen Stefani raised eyebrows this week and drew fierce backlash for claiming throughout {a magazine} interview that she is Japanese.
The pop singer made the feedback throughout a dialog with Allure journal whereas selling her magnificence model Gxve. But the dialog turned to her previous magnificence enterprise, a 2008 perfume line referred to as Harajuku Lovers.
The fragrance model was named after the Harajuku district in Tokyo, Japan. During the interview, Stefani denied that she was appropriating Japanese tradition, saying as a substitute that she was impressed by it due to her father’s frequent business travels to the nation throughout her childhood, which she later visited as an grownup.
“I said, ‘My god, I’m Japanese and didn’t know it,'” Stefani mentioned of visiting Harajuku for the primary time. “I am, you know.”
Later within the interview, she claimed that she is “a little bit of an Orange County girl, a little bit of a Japanese girl, a little bit of an English girl.”
It is disappointing that Gwen Stefani is selecting to double-down on her Orientalism in 2023. I keep in mind how uncomfortable her “Harajuku Girls” period made me nearly 20 years in the past, but it surely wasn’t really easy to share these emotions pre-social media. <a href=”https://t.co/oCmU38Bu55″>https://t.co/oCmU38Bu55</a>
—@EricaKanesaka
Allure reported that Stefani’s crew reached out the subsequent day to say that the journalist had misunderstood what the singer was attempting to convey along with her remarks, however declined to ship an extra assertion or give a follow-up interview.
24CA News has reached out to Stefani’s consultant for remark.
It’s cultural appropriation, critics say
The feedback reignited a longstanding criticism that Stefani, who was born and raised in California and isn’t ethnically Japanese, is appropriating a tradition that isn’t her personal.
Stefani typically performed up her affinity for the Harajuku aesthetic in the course of the peak of her 2000s stardom. After releasing her album Love.Angel.Music.Baby in 2004, she employed 4 Japanese and Japanese-American backup dancers (named Love, Angel, Music and Baby) to seem in her music movies and accompany her to public occasions.
Harajuku Lovers, the perfume line, was a set of 5 fragrance bottles designed to appear like caricatures of Stefani and her backup dancers. Stefani went on to launch a Harajuku Mini youngsters’s clothes line for Target in 2011.
“If [people are] going to criticize me for being a fan of something beautiful and sharing that, then I just think that doesn’t feel right,” she mentioned within the Allure interview. “I think it was a beautiful time of creativity…a time of the ping-pong match between Harajuku culture and American culture.”
“[It] should be OK to be inspired by other cultures, because if we’re not allowed, then that’s dividing people, right?”
The singer was equally criticized this summer season for carrying dreadlocks and the colors of the Jamaican flag in a music video for Sean Paul’s music Light My Fire.
Stefani, who can be the lead singer of pop-rock band No Doubt, has been accused of tradition appropriation up to now for utilizing reggae and ska influences in her music.
