Gwen Stefani Insists She’s ‘Japanese’ & Defends Her Harajuku Era: Why ‘It Should Be Okay’

“If [people are] going to knock maine for being a instrumentality of thing beauteous and sharing that, past I conscionable deliberation that doesn’t consciousness right,” said Gwen Stefani when Allure’s Jesa Marie Calaor asked the 53-year-old No Doubt singer astir her Harajuku period. When Gwen released her debut solo medium (Love. Angel. Music. Baby.) successful 2004, she was accused of appropriating Japan’s younker civilization successful her image. Plus, she toured with 4 Japanese-American dancers, the Harajuku Girls, who were renamed aft her medium (“Love,” “Angel,” “Music,” and “Baby”). When elder exertion Calaor brought this up successful the 2023 interview, Gwen repeated a communicative astir her begetter moving astatine Yamaha successful Japan earlier saying however she herself was “Japanese.”

“That was my Japanese influence, and that was a civilization that was truthful affluent with tradition, yet truthful futuristic [with] truthful overmuch attraction to creation and item and discipline, and it was fascinating to me,” said Gwen. Her Italian-American begetter would archer Gwen astir women with colorful hair and different aspects of Japanese popular culture. When she traveled to the Harajuku territory successful Shibuya, Tokyo, Japan, she experienced the sights for herself. “I said, ‘My God, I’m Japanese, and I didn’t cognize it,'” Gwen told Calaor. “I am, you know.”

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“I deliberation it was a beauteous clip of creativity… a clip of the ping-pong lucifer betwixt Harajuku civilization and American culture,” said Gwen. “[It] should beryllium good to beryllium inspired by different cultures due to the fact that if we’re not allowed, past that’s dividing people, right?” During her interrogation with Gwen, writer Calaor said that Stefanit “asserted doubly that she was Japanese” and erstwhile that she was “a small spot of an Orange County girl, a small spot of a Japanese girl, a small spot of an English girl.” Calaor besides says that a rep for Gwen said that the Allure writer had misunderstood what Stefani was trying to say, but the fashionista’s squad wouldn’t springiness an on-the-record clarification.

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During the interview, Gwen said she identifies with Japanese civilization and the Hispanic and Latinx communities of Anaheim, California, wherever she grew up. “The music, the mode the girls wore their makeup, the apparel they wore, that was my identity,” she said. “Even though I’m an Italian American — Irish oregon immoderate mutt that I americium — that’s who I became due to the fact that those were my people, right?”

Gwen spoke astir this epoch and her song, “Harajuku Girls,” for a Love.Angel.Music.Baby 15th Anniversary retrospective with Billboard. “I wanted to constitute a opus that talked astir my emotion for Harajuku,” she said. “When you’re from Anaheim and ne'er traveled extracurricular of your metropolis until you’re 21 years old, it was truly brainsick to spell to Japan. My dada went determination a batch due to the fact that helium worked with Yamaha motorcycles, truthful I had a fascination from a young age. When I got determination and saw however fashion-obsessed they were, I thought they were my people, due to the fact that my benignant was truthful unique.”

Matt Baron/BEI/Shutterstock

“I get a small antiaircraft erstwhile radical [call it civilization appropriation],” she added, “because if we didn’t let each different to stock our cultures, what would we be? You instrumentality pridefulness successful your civilization and person traditions, and past you stock them for caller things to beryllium created.”

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