Of course Gwen Stefani can be Japanese

By Jason Lim

Gwen Stefani caused a minor ruckus recently when she proclaimed in an interview that she identified as Japanese. She was referring to the time in her childhood when she lived in Japan due to her father's work with Yamaha. "That was my Japanese influence and that was a culture that was so rich with tradition, yet so futuristic [with] so much attention to art and detail and discipline and it was fascinating to me," Stefani said, adding that her own visit to Harajuku led to an epiphany. "I said, 'My God, I'm Japanese and I didn't know it.'" Expectedly, charges of cultural appropriation were leveled at her.

Growing up in the Riverdale section of the Bronx and going to a private high school with a very high well-to-do Jewish population, I inevitably grew up with many of the sensibilities and cultural mannerisms of my fellow students. I cursed in Yiddish, cracked the latest Jackie Mason jokes, commiserated over my best friend's difficulties in memorizing the Torah verses for Bar Mitzvah and thought it was natural to go to the Hamptons over the weekends and summers, although I could never go since my parents ran a drycleaner in Yonkers. I also shared instinctive sympathies towards Israel, knew the stories of all the major Jewish holidays and, one spring, even gave up leavened bread in solidarity. This isn't surprising since you are who you hang out with.

Before getting to the U.S. and the Bronx, I lived for three years in Paraguay, hanging out with the local indigenous kids who lived the lives that my parents told us they lived when they were young and poor in colonial Korea; that is, they went hungry as a rule unless there was a village festival, walked with bare feet everywhere except when going to school with clean rubber sneakers, played outside until the sun went down, regularly got beaten with wooden sticks for not doing their chores, etc. While living there, I played soccer every single day with my indigenous buddies ― called Guarani ― and learned the cultural mannerisms that characterized my circle.

Of course, before Paraguay, I was born and raised in the 1970s in Seoul, as the country slowly but inexorably began its rise and was well on its way to realizing its "Miracle on the Han River." My family moved into one of the earliest apartments in Gangnam from a typical single-family house in Gangbuk and I was raised with the idea that school and study were the be-all and end-all for life itself. Moreover, I remember riding buses bursting with passengers, movie theaters mobbed by eager audiences, first-ever modern department stores, escalators and elevators that seemed magical, etc. Basically, my early childhood sensibilities came from that era of dynamism, youth, crowds and dawning modernization that largely defined the soul of Korea in the late 20th century.

Back in the U.S., while being Jewish in school, I was also a Korean American for the rest of my life outside of school. Helping out my parents at their store on Saturdays, trying to resolve any family issues that required English fluency, shopping for Korean groceries in Flushing on Sundays and other activities that you don't think twice about but were defining experiences for a 1.5-generation Asian immigrant.

And that's just my childhood. A lot of other things ― experiences and influences ― have happened to me since then that also shaped who I am and how I identify myself. Based on all that, who am I? Am I a New York Jew, first-generation Asian immigrant or indigenous South American kid? None of them. And all of them.

Who we are is a simple question with a complex answer. However, there is a right answer: it depends. It depends on who's asking, what's the context in which the question is being asked, how old you are when you are asked the question and all the other countless variables that collide with our internal reservoir of life experiences and identities that shape that answer for that specific place and time. Of course, there are tendencies that are consistent across different identities, but even those are relative variables in the larger, ever-changing "who am I" equation, rather than defining conditions.

This is why I don't like terms like "true self" or "authentic self"; they presuppose the existence of some core, unchanging self that remains constant and consistent in the center, expressing itself in diverse ways through the mantle and surface layer that lay on top. Well, human beings are not celestial bodies. Our psychology is a lot more malleable and agile than the tectonic plates.

Just because Stefani identifies as Japanese when in Japan doesn't mean that she's appropriating Japanese culture. That's how she feels at that moment, in that location, faced with that question, by that reporter. She can come back to the U.S. and identify herself as something else in the spectrum of her formative experiences and be just as authentic. She has the right to choose her cultural label because that's how she feels. Who's to say that she's wrong?

Jason Lim (jasonlim@msn.com) is a Washington, D.C.-based expert on innovation, leadership and organizational culture.