According to the Japanese Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare, one in thirty babies born in Japan today are born to a couple where at least one parent is a non-Japanese. An upcoming documentary follows several of these biracial Hafus. Here’s a synopsis of the film :

With an ever increasing movement of people between ‘places’ in this transnational age, there is a mounting number of mixed-race people in Japan, some visible others not. “Hafu” is the unfolding journey of discovery into the intricacies of mixed-race Japanese and their multicultural experience in modern day Japan. The film follows the lives of six hafu–the Japanese term for people who are half-Japanese. By default of living in Japan, they are forced to explore what it means to be multiracial and multicultural in a nation that once proudly proclaimed itself as the mono-ethnic nation. For some of these hafu, Japan is the only home they know, for some living in Japan is an entirely new experience, and others are caught somewhere between two different worlds.

The documentary is slated to be released late 2011. For more info on the film, you can go here. This film reminds us of another biracial documentary “Left By The Ship“.

Hafu : documentary film about mixed Japanese