Hafus in Japan

Japanese governmental statistics tell us that there were only 5,545 recorded international marriages in 1980. This more than doubled in 1985 when 12,181 international marriages were recorded. The figure doubled again 5 years later in 1990 with 25,626 marriages consisting of one foreign national. The number has steadily increased since then. It reached its peak in 2001 with 39,727 interracial marriages – this is 7 times the 1980 figure. Multiracial individuals or more specifically Hafus are therefore growing dramatically in Japan. Owing to the fact that data on ethnic/racial background is not collected anywhere in the Census in Japan (i.e. only nationality), it is hard to say exactly how many Hafus or mixed 'race' individuals live in Japan.

However in 2004 we know that there were 39,511 international marriages, which accounted for about 5.5% of all marriages in Japan. A high number of them were between Japanese and Chinese (13,019), Philippines (8,517) and Korean (8,023) individuals. There were only 1,679 American Japanese, 524 Brazilian Japanese, 403 British Japanese marriages. So we can say that visible Hafus are a minority of the minority.

Internationalization in Japan

The number of foreign nationals living in Japan has increased in recently years. In 1985, about 850,000 foreigners lived in Japan. That figure doubled to 1,700,000 in the year 2000. Over the last few years the number has been steadily growing and in 2006 there were about 2,100,000 residents with foreign nationality. Therefore the number of foreigners in Japan in 2006 was almost three times that in 1985. This is a firm indication of Japan’s increasing internationalization.

Hafus in the UK

It is unknown exactly how many half Japanese people live in the UK. According to the 2001 census, people of mixed 'race' made up 1.3% of the population in England with 654,200 people. Those of ‘Mixed: White and Asian’ and ‘Mixed: Other’ origins, which are categories half Japanese people are likely to choose made up about 0.4% (187,200) and 0.3% (154,300) of the population in England retrospectively.

The population of the mixed race is much denser in London with 231,100 mixed race individuals – that is 3.2% of the London population. It is estimated that the proportion of the mixed 'race' has increased slightly in 2005 with about 0.1% increase in most categories. There are many mixed individuals in England and the Half Japanese population is likely to be only a small proportion of these two categories - therefore a minority of the minority.