Gwen Stefani Slams Critics Accusing Her Of Cultural Appropriation

Former celebrity coach of “The Voice,” Gwen Stefani, fired back at criticism that she has been appropriating Japanese culture since the launch of her solo career in 2004.

Stefani cast four Japanese-American backup dancers to appear in the music videos for her debut album “Love. Angel. Music. Baby.,” dubbing them the Harajuku Girls after Tokyo’s Harajuku fashion district, and costuming the women in Japanese street fashion.  

Though Stefani has gone on to develop both a perfume line and animated series based on the characters, she denies that her interest in the culture is exploitive.

Her love of all things Japanese started from a young age when her father would travel to Harajuku on business trips and tell her stories about teenagers there “taking all these American things and making them Japanese. “As a result, my whole life, like my whole life. I had a deep fascination,” Stefani said. 

Comedian Margaret Cho once compared Stefani wearing a Japanese schoolgirl uniform to putting on “blackface.” 

“Even though to me, a Japanese schoolgirl uniform is kind of like blackface, I am just in acceptance over it, because something is better than nothing,” Cho wrote in 2006. “I want to like [the Harajuku Girls], and I want to think they are great, but I am not sure if I can. I mean, racial stereotypes are really cute sometimes, and I don’t want to bum everyone out by pointing out the minstrel show.”

Stefani still bristles at the comparison years later. “If we didn’t buy and sell and trade our cultures in, we wouldn’t have so much beauty, you know?” she said. “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.”

Stefani is, after all, “just a girl in the world,” and touring around the globe as the frontwoman of a male-dominated band was limiting, so when she went solo, she decided to create her ideal scenario.   

“I never got to have dancers with No Doubt. I never got to change costumes. I never got to do all of those fun girl things that I always love to do. So I had this idea that I would have a posse of girls — because I never got to hang with girls — and they would be Japanese, Harajuku girls because those are the girls that I love,” Stefani commented. 

“Those are my homies. That’s where I would be if I had my dream come true, I could go live there and I could go hang out in Harajuku.”

Marie Finn