Growing Up Twice
Rina Sawayama grew up in Niigata—a city on the Japan Sea coast of Honshu, quiet, defined by rice and heavy snow—and was then transplanted to London young enough that she had to figure out both places from scratch. As the child of East Asian immigrants navigating a Western city, she spent a significant portion of her adolescence in the company of a PlayStation and a copy of Final Fantasy IX, running through its world with friends instead of performing whatever version of herself the world outside seemed to be waiting for. There are worse ways to survive school.
She spoke to i-D about the country she left early and had to rediscover as an adult—which turns out to be a stranger experience than simply returning, because the Japan she encounters now is partly a construction built from distance and memory, as much interior landscape as actual place. She talked about the specific clichés that Asian women in Western spaces are still expected to either embody or spend their energy actively dismantling. And she talked about the games—about the particular comfort of vivid, elaborate fantasy worlds when the one you’re actually living in keeps asking you to be simpler than you are.
What she’s built from all that is a music and modeling career expanding steadily across continents, and a sensibility that refuses to settle into any single category. The work sounds like Y2K pop colliding with something more abrasive and self-aware—nostalgia for an aesthetic that was never actually hers, reshaped until it is. There’s a term that gets applied to Asian women who push back against expectations—"Angry Asian Girl"—and like most such labels it flattens more than it explains. What Sawayama actually seems to be is someone who found the edges of her assigned box, walked out, and discovered other people standing there looking equally done with the whole arrangement. Colorful, individual, difficult to file neatly.
She’s twenty-seven. She’s already interesting. I expect she’ll get more so.