Gwen Stefani Repeatedly Claims That She’s Japanese During Interview, Gets Called Out By Writer

AP/NDZ/STAR MAX

Gwen Stefani got called out in a new magazine feature for repeatedly claiming she’s Japanese.

The No Doubt singer made the claim in a recent interview with Allure magazine. Writer Jesa Marie Calaor asked Stefani about her once popular line of perfumes, Harajuku Lovers — named after the area of Tokyo known for its distinct fashion and cultural movements.

Calaor asked Stefani what lessons she learned from that venture in light of her new makeup line.

Stefani shared a story of her Italian-American father working in between both California and Japan when she was a child. “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.

Stefani said that as an adult she was able to travel to Japan and experience its culture for herself.

“I said, ‘My God, I’m Japanese and I didn’t know it,’” Stefani said. “I am, you know.”

She continued by defended the sharing of cultures:

If [people are] going to criticize me for being a fan of something beautiful and sharing that, then I just think that doesn’t feel right. I think it was a beautiful time of creativity… a time of the ping-pong match between Harajuku culture and American culture. [It] should be okay to be inspired by other cultures because if we’re not allowed then that’s dividing people, right?

Calaor couldn’t help but express shock at the singer apparently declaring herself to be Japanese.

“I spent 32 minutes in conversation with Stefani, many of them devoted to her lengthy answer to my question about Harajuku Lovers. In that time, she said more than once that she is Japanese,” Calaor wrote.

Stefani also reportedly said she was “a little bit of an Orange County girl, a little bit of a Japanese girl, a little bit of an English girl.”

The singer has long been criticized for cultural appropriation when it comes to her use of Harajuku culture. Earlier in her career, Stefani featured a group of four Japanese-American backup dancers during her performances known as the Harajuku Girls. She eventually wrote a song by the same name and would appear in Harajuku fashion during her concerts.

In a 2021 interview with Paper Magazine, Stefani defended her adoption of Japanese culture.

If we didn’t buy and sell and trade our cultures in, we wouldn’t have so much beauty, you know? We learn from each other, we share from each other, we grow from each other. And all these rules are just dividing us more and more. I think that we grew up in a time where we didn’t have so many rules. We didn’t have to follow a narrative that was being edited for us through social media, we just had so much more freedom.

Now Stefani appears to be taking it a step further: by claiming to be Japanese herself.

Calaor noted that she didn’t believe Stefani made the claims in a “malicious or hurtful” way. Allure even reached out to Stefani to follow up on the comments:

A representative for Stefani reached out the next day, indicating that I had misunderstood what Stefani was trying to convey. Allure later asked Stefani’s team for an on-the-record comment or clarification of these remarks and they declined to provide a statement or participate in a follow-up interview.