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Comment by beachstartup | Hacker News Reader

> There is no word like hafu outside Japan,

uh, what? how about "half", the exact word that 'hafu' is supposed to emulate? you can't borrow a word from another language, and then claim it's unique to yours!

i'm fairly confident nearly everyone on earth knows what it means to be 'half', or just mixed race/ethnicity in general. in fact there are even places on earth where mixed race is the norm. try going to brazil. FUN FACT: the largest japanese population outside of japan is there. i think they might have a concept of hafu there. just maybe.

if you're paying attention, i think the above statement tells us more about japanese culture than the entire article, on many levels.

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>where mixed race is the norm ... brazil ...the largest japanese population outside of japan is there. i think they might have a concept of hafu there

Yes, but I'd bet that the connotations of "hafu" in a society where mixed race is the norm are very different from those where it is unusual.

So much so that you might consider it to be a different word, even if it happens to be spelled the same.

being half japanese in brazil is rare, and the brazilians have a word for it.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_Brazilian

Its not the word; its the meaning. I'm sure we don't appreciate all the subtlety the label 'hafu' brings to a person in Japan. Remember, here classmate committed suicide over it. I don't think the English 'half' would do that.

i think being 'half' racial in the US is an extremely complex and subtle experience of existence, and by entertaining the thought that this is somehow unique to japan is doing a huge disservice to the experience of being biracial or mixed in the US and anywhere in the world.

the reason it is notable is because it is notable almost anywhere on earth.

So, what's the American word that universally summarizes that experience? That was the original assertion, that English has no such word. This wasn't some PC discussion about feelings and such.

It's hard to really answer it based on a relatively short article but I don't think she was being literal in the sense that no other culture has a term for someone of mixed race. My interpretation, and it's just that, is she was saying there's no other country outside Japan that has such a unique situation that you therefore really need a word that describes someone who is Japanese and is yet not Japanese at the same time.

yeah, that's also bullshit.

just off the top of my head, i can name: hawaii, the caribbean, brazil, parts of europe (italy comes to mind), east asia (especially places with large overseas diaspora like china and taiwan) all have identical cultural concepts, especially those with large populations living in america.

"In part that is because this is still such an extraordinarily homogenous society. Immigrants make up just one per cent of Japan's population" - Compare that to Brazil. So again, I don't think she's saying it in a literal sense.

"how about "half", the exact word that 'hafu' is supposed to emulate?"

And in Tokyo Dialect, the 'フ' ('fu') in 'ハーフ' ('haafu') has its 'u' muted to silent or near-silent so the pronunciation is nearly identical to English 'half'.

It's practically an identical borrowing in both meaning and pronunciation; the 'u' is an historical artifact of an obsolete romanization system. Even the glyphs 'フ' and 'ハ' are used -- among other things -- to signify that a word is maintaining its foreign nature and not made Japanese.

>where mixed race is the norm

Humanity may well end up there, given the easy transportation beginning only in the last century. Halfs beget quarters, then 1/(2^n) for ever increasing n.

Not quite true. Genetics isn't just dilution. You can get a grandchild that is very similar to a grandparent and dissimilar to either parent. And so on.

A common, although often derogatory, term here in the UK is "half cast" for people (kids in particular) of mixed race.

It's actually half-caste, caste being an Indian term relating to position in society as far I'm in aware.

You're correct.

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