From April 2-6, 2013, Hapa Japan will be celebrating the emerging global HAPA community through concerts, exhibits, comedy nights, film screenings, and academic conference in Los Angeles! Featuring musicians like YouTube sensations, Kina Grannis and Justin Nozuka, writers like American Book Award-winners Ruth Ozeki and Sesshu Foster, comedians like KT Tatara and Dan Nainan, film directors who will be screening the LA premier of Hafu: The Mixed Race Experience of Japan, and scholars from Stanford, Kyoto University, UCLA, and USC, the 5-Day Festival is free and open to the public.

In Japan, a country known for its homogeneity, one in twenty-five babies born today has a non-Japanese parent. And in America, according to the 2010 U.S. Census, nearly half of all Japanese Americans also identify as multiracial. Well before the next census in 2020, the majority of the Japanese American community will be mixed race. In an increasingly global age, “Hapa Japanese” individuals, or mixed roots and mixed race persons of Japanese ancestry, live around the world!

Hapa Japan 2013