Hāfu

The word hafu/haafu (ハーフ, hāfu (half)^?) is used in Japanese to refer to somebody who is biracial, i.e., ethnically half Japanese. The label emerged in the 1970s in Japan and is now the most commonly used and preferred term of self-definition. The word hafu/haafu comes from the English word "half" indicating half foreign-ness.

Fashionable images of the half-Japanese people have become prominent especially with the increased appearance of hafu/haafu in the Japanese media.Hafu/Haafu models are now seen on television or fill the pages of fashion magazines such as Non-no, CanCam and Vivi as often as newsreaders or celebrities. The appearance of hafu/haafu in the media has provided the basis for such a vivid representation of them in the culture.

One of the earliest terms referring to half Japanese was ainoko, meaning a child born of a relationship between two races. It is still used in Latin America, most prominently Brazil (where spellings such as ainoco, ainoca (f.) and ainocô may be found), to refer to mestizo (broader Spanish sense of mixed-race in general) or mestiço people of some Japanese ancestry. Nevertheless, it evolved for an umbrella term for Eurasian or mixed Asian/mestizo, Asian/black, Asian/Arab and Asian/Indigenous heritage in general. At the same time it is possible for people with little Japanese or other Asian ancestry to be perceivable just by their phenotype to identify mostly as black, white or mestizo/pardo instead of ainoko, while people with about a quarter or less of non-Asian ancestry may identify just as Asian.

Ainoko, however, encountered social problems such as poverty, impurity and discrimination due to the negative treatment of hafu/haafu in the 1940s in Japan. The word was gradually replaced from the late 1950s by konketsuji (混血児) which literally means a child of mixed blood.

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