Half or Double

[bushpig 0]

well tell that to the kids who are bullied and teased being called "half". Are the bullies not using it to make them feel bad about themselves and point out that they are not part of the same group? Surely in these cases it IS being used in a negative sense. Don't get me wrong here bobby12, I don't think it is always used like this, but it can be and is, which means it is not simply a neutral word.

[number9 0]

Lots of misinformation in this thread.

 

Bullies will call the haafu kids "gaijin", "America-jin", etc. From the stories I heard from haafus, the bully usually tries to make the point of alienation even stronger by making the target completely foreign, makes sense.

 

Go to any country where 99% of the population is of one ethnicity and see how mixed children are treated. Kids will find any reason to pick on another kid, be it glasses, weight, etc (ie. this isn't about developed world vs developing world, it's more aobut immigrant nation vs not). Being visually different (like all non-East Asian haafus) guarantees that the kid will be different from the majority. Still though, this doesn't mean that every haafu kid will be a depressed bullied child, a lot depends on the environment and the personality of the haafu kid. I know sisters that went to the same school, the introverted sister got bullied, but the extroverted sister was popular, involved in many clubs, and a class representative. I reckon most haafus who grew up in Japan are well adjusted, at least from the people I met that seems to be the case, doesn't seem to be any more or less than regular Japanese people. Growing up haafu in Japan isn't an automatic recipe for disaster, bullying, and depression.

 

Vast majority (something like 90% if I remember correctly) of international marriages in Japan are between Japanese men and non-Japanese Asian women. They're just often not visible (and many are in farming communities where young people escape to the cities, especially women), so many people assume that the white guy with Japanese woman is the most common international marriage.

[misorano 1]

Thanks for all the comments. As I've said the use of the word "half" grates at me.

Even when it's used is the common "half ha kawai ne" manner, which is what I mostly hear, it still bugs me. Why do they need the "half" in there, when "kawaii ne" would do the job.

 

I may be being over sensitive, but everyone has their pet peeves.

[Ocean11 0]

misorano, you have to laugh though when you see a young couple sitting in a car in a traffic jam, and the girl is pointing straight at your family without any sense of 'enryo' at all, and you can read her lips saying "Yappari half ha kawai ne", and the bloke is nodding with a shit-eating grin and you can see him thinking, "But it's all Japanese lead in my pencil..."

[misorano 1]

O11:

Always good to have lead in the pencil isn't it.

 

Lately it's been getting off the ski lift with the kids and all the girlies learning to snowboard are planted on their backsides. As the kids go wizzing past you get the "YHHKN"(Yappari...)

[sanjo 2]

 Quote:

Why do they need the "half" in there, when "kawaii ne" would do the job.

Things like that annoy me as well. I have no kids but I can imagine it. It's like whatever happens, the fact that you are gaijin needs to be emphasised before anything else.