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EASC Film Screening with Producer/ Director: Megumi Nishikura, "HAFU - The Mixed-Race Experience in Japan"

Hafu postcard
January 22, 2016
6:00 pm - 9:00 pm
Ohio Union, Ohio Staters, Inc. Traditions Room (1739 N. High Street)

In celebration of Asian Pacific American Heritage Month at The Ohio State University, January 2016, join the East Asian Studies Center and the Multicultural Center for a screening of "HAFU - The Mixed Race Experience in Japan" (2013, 85 minutes, in Japanese/English/Spanish with English subtitles). Producer/director Megumi Nishikura will introduce the film and hold a question-and-answer session at the conclusion of the screening.

According to the Japanese Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare, one in forty-nine babies born in Japan today are born into families with one non-Japanese parent. This newly emerging minority in Japan is under-documented and under-explored in both literature and media. The feature-length HD documentary film, “HAFU – The Mixed-Race Experience in Japan” seeks to open this increasingly important dialogue. The film explores race, diversity, multiculturalism, nationality, and identity within the mixed-race community of Japan.

Film Synopsis: 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–as they 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.

This event is free and open to the public, sponsored in part by a U.S. Department of Education Title VI grant for The Ohio State University East Asian Studies Center.

For further information, contact Amy Carey of the East Asian Studies Center (carey.189@osu.edu, 614-688-4253) or Jack Nguyen of the Multicultural Center (nguyen.1598@osu.edu, 614-688-8449).