Gwen Stefani enrages Twitter after declaring: 'My God, I'm Japanese'

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Gwen Stefani has incurred the wrath of social media after proclaiming in a new interview that she thinks she’s Japanese.

In an chat with Allure magazine, Stefani, 53, who is Italian-American and Irish-American, was asked about the “praise, backlash, and everything in between” after she was accused of appropriating Japanese culture to promote her 2008 fragrance Harajuku Lovers.

During the 2000s, Stefani travelled with several Japanese-American dancers and used the visuals of Harajuku subculture to promote her 2004 album Love. Angel. Music. Baby. and the fragrance.

The No Doubt singer said she was influenced by the country’s traditions and spoke about her father’s many trips to the region as she was growing up.

“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,” she said.

When she finally visited the Harajuku district in Tokyo as an adult, Stefani had a realization.

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

In the article, Stefani goes on to refer to herself as a”super fan” who is “a little bit of an Orange County girl, a little bit of a Japanese girl, a little bit of an English girl.”

Stefani didn’t see a problem with her Harajuku era.

“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,” she told Allure. “I think it was a beautiful time of creativity… a time of the ping-pong match between Harajuku culture and American culture.”

A rep for Stefani later reached out to tell the interviewer, who is Asian, that she “misunderstood” what the singer was trying to say. But when offered the chance, Stefani wouldn’t provide any further on-the-record comment.

On social media, Stefani’s remarks were met with derision. “She could have just said she really loves Japanese culture and left it at that, but she had to go and make it weird,” one person wrote on Twitter, with another asking, “Gwen Stefani used Asian-American women as props to help her get rich, and her response is … ‘I’m Japanese’???”

But not everyone found The Voice star’s comments problematic.

“Let the Harajuku girls complain if they’re upset,” one supporter said, while another asked, “If a guy can be a girl, why can’t Gwen Stefani be Japanese?”

“She is an admirer of the culture,” a third defender wrote on Instagram. “Nothing wrong with that.”

mdaniell@postmedia.com