HAFU: a film about the experiences of mixed-race people living in Japan |
HAFU: a film about the experiences of mixed-race people living in Japan
Hafu Film Sneak Preview in Kyoto
Institut Franco-Japonais du Kansai, Kyoto, Japan
Saturday, 2010-10-23. 19:30 – 22:00 (Local Time)
Filmmakers
Lara Perez Takagi
and
Megumi Nishikura
 |
| David Yano (29). David was born in a small village in Ghana, to a Ghanaian mother and a Japanese father. His father, an architect, was in Ghana to build the Noguchi Hideo Memorial when he met David’s mother. After spending 6 years in Ghana, they moved to Tokyo. However due to difficulty of adjusting to their new life in Japan, his parents filed for divorce when he was 10. The next 8 years were spent in an orphanage school in Japan with his two brothers. There he discovered his greatest passion: music and performance. He started modeling when he was a university student and now works as a multitalented TV presenter. Due to his dark complexion, David is regarded by default as a gaijin (foreigner) when people meet him for the first time. However, having spent much of his life in Japan, he feels he acts and identifies as Japanese more than anything else. Despite this claim David, has returned to Ghana once a year since the age of 20. Seeing the dramatic difference between the two countries, David felt the call to use his talents to benefit the people of Ghana. He has set an ambitious goal of raising $30,000 over the course of 8 months in order to build kindergarten back in Ghana. Audiences will watch him as he organizes various fundraisers and events has he struggles to attain his goal. |
With an ever increasing movement of people between places in this transnational age, there is a mounting number of mixed-race people in Japan, some visible others not. “Hafu” is the unfolding journey of discovery into the intricacies of mixed-race Japanese and their multicultural experience in modern day Japan. The film follows the lives of five “hafus”—the Japanese term for people who are half-Japanese—and by virtue of the fact that living in Japan, they are forced to explore what it means to be multiracial and multicultural in a nation that once proudly proclaimed itself as the mono-ethnic nation. For some of these hafus Japan is the only home they know, for some living in Japan is an entirely new experience, and others are caught somewhere between two different worlds.
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Tags: Japan, Lara Perez Takagi, Lara Takagi, Megumi Nishikura