Alice Kazama is a Japanese surfer, writer, and swimwear designer based in Japan. Not only is she a successful writer inspired by surf culture, but she has now launched her own eco-friendly swimwear brand - eit swim. You can find Alice on Instagram @alice_kazama to follow her work.

So if you want to just start off introducing yourself to everyone with your name and maybe like two sentences about you.

Okay. Hello everyone. I'm Alice Kazama. I'm an editor and writer for a magazine website, mostly for beach lifestyle, surfing, healthy lives kind of stuff. Also I'm an owner of my own swimwear brand called eit swim, it spells e-i-t swim. So please check it out.

Just starting off, can you just share a little bit about your upbringing growing up in Japan being mixed race?

Okay. Um, my father is Iranian and my mom is Japanese, but when I was two or three years old, they divorced. So I basically grew up as a hundred percent Japanese mentally, but as you know, my looks are of course not a hundred percent Japanese, so sometimes I had a little struggle.

I mean, I haven't had any school bullying or discrimination, luckily. But I hate it. Everyone that saw me when I walked on the street when I was a child. Japan is such a small country and basically, we're racially, how do you say homo genius? So if you see other people or different behavior, it will stand out. So, there's a word gaijin in Japanese and it means foreigner, but sounds more like other people, not us. And people often use this word and people sometimes would point at me and say this word, but you know, no offense. It's just. I don't know, it's just culture maybe. And luckily my hometown is just next to Tokyo, so it was still okay. But I've heard of some of my friends from the countryside that had terrible bullying or discrimination. So, yeah, I was just lucky. The funny thing is my mom told me I’m half Spanish and half Japanese until I was 20, so I didn't know I was half Iranian.

Yeah. That's because it's a long story, but around the nineties after the Iran, Iraq war or while there was a truce. That kind of situation, or that moment, the relationship between Japan and Iran was really good. Many Iranian people came to Japan to get jobs. And there were more than 40,000 Iranian people* in Japan at the most. And many of them were here illegally. And also they did illegal things as well. So, the image of Iranian people is a little bit, not so good for Japanese people at the moment. So my mom decided to raise me as a half Spanish kid. So that's an interesting story for me. At the time I was kind of shocked because I had taken a Spanish language class in uni because I thought I was half Spanish. So I wanted to, you know, find my roots or something like that. But now, I don't, you know, it's not a big deal for me. I don't know anything, any culture. I don't have any culture of Iran or Spanish in me. I'm just me and I'm just Japanese.

How has this informed your life and how you see others in the decisions that you make?

Yes, as I told you, most Japanese people think I'm not Japanese at first sight. So sometimes people try to talk to me in English and even the tourists from abroad talk to me in English because they think I'm a tourist too. So from those experiences, I thought people expected me to be something different or something special. How can I explain, like, I should be in a little box or little frame, you can’t go outside of the box kind of thing?

So that made me want to live my life more globally. Specifically, I chose to learn international studies in uni and I'm interested in cultural interaction. And I ended up writing a graduation thesis about mixed marriage, like mixed culture. So yeah, it’s like that.

So what's your favorite aspect of surf culture in Japan?

Surf culture in Japan does not have as big of differences as other countries. So I don't know. It's just always following US culture or Australian culture. So it's the same. Everyone's so happy in the water. The only thing is people don’t talk to each other while waiting for the wave. I think it's because of Japanese characters. We don't talk too much to strangers. Yeah, that's it. It's the same, I think. And after I decided to start surfing, my life changed 180 degrees after I graduated uni. I started to work in a publishing company, which had some famous surf magazines. Unfortunately, I wasn't hired as a surf magazine editor, but just magazine sales. I was just happy I could be closer to the surfing world.

So how did you follow your dream of editing and working for a magazine?

So to be working for a surfing magazine was, you know, one of my dreams and I gave up the first publishing company because I couldn't do any editing stuff for surfing stock. So I moved to another, the fashion one. I think you've heard of the magazine Nylon. Nylon Japan, it's totally fashion. And once I got editing skills there, I became a freelancer and tried to talk to Honey magazine, the only one Japanese beach lifestyle magazine for women. And now I'm working for them, every issue as one of the main contributors. So it was just step by step.

So sometimes I see you post when you're entering into your deadline season for the magazine. So I wanted to ask you, how do you find balance for yourself when managing deadlines at the last minute?

You totally understand my feeling, right? But the deadline is always killing me. And the funny thing is, we are trying to tell the readers how to live their life better, how to live your life healthily. But while we're chasing deadlines, the real-life of us is totally opposite and unhealthy. We can't sleep much. We eat junk food snacks and we don't have time to surf. But still, I know I do what I want to do and I write what I want to tell the people. Also after the deadline, I can do whatever I want. So, you know, there's hope so I just try to think about it.

So how do you come up with a vision for the magazine for each issue? And can you tell us about your own personal process?

I'm just a freelancer and one of the contributors. So I'm freer than the people who are working inside of the magazine. Maybe they need to think about what readers want to see or what they want to know for each issue. But for me, I just suggest the topics, what I want to tell of the moment or feel that's it. The ideas pop up in my head when I travel and see different cultures or talk to many people, or when I surf sitting on the board, waiting for the waves it just comes to my mind. Sometimes my idea is too niche for, you know, mainstream, but, you know, everyone has their own roles. I think my role is to tell my feelings as a person who loves surfing. And a person who lives by nature. So I think that's my role and I think it's okay.

What is one of your most favorite articles that you've put together?

Maybe from the latest issue I wrote. The title was Peace and Grace, and it's focusing on surfing with elegance. The way to ride the waves, the way to catch the waves or way to live, or the fashion from that. You can be more elegant as a surfer. Before it was maybe more the Tomboy surfer girls were in the mainstream, right. But the culture is changing and history is changing. So, to be elegant is needed for women surfers.

And how do you feel like you've seen women's surfing in Japan change?

The number is increasing obviously and the long borders are increasing. You know if you're a short border, you need to paddle fast and you know, you need to be boyish and you need to fight with boys. But if you're a long border, as I told you, you can be more elegant. You can catch the wave with grace. So, Japanese surfers are changing to be more peaceful, nice, and elegant.

So how did you decide to start a swimwear brand?

I thought that that's every surfer girl's dream. You can't find any good swimwear that will fit you. Everyone's body is different. So, in Japan, especially the swimwear scene is really small and not good for surfing. So, when we try to buy swimwear we need to buy it from the internet or when we travel somewhere, that kind of thing. So we wanted to have our own. I have my partner, my friend, and we really love surfing, and we really wanted to have swimwear that fits us. So, we decided to make the swim brand fit her and mostly skinny Japanese people.

Thank you to Alice for taking the time to share your story with Sea Together Magazine. Follow the links in the blog or below to read her work and shop eit swim.

https://eitswim.com/

https://honey-mag.jp/search/index

Blog Editing by Sophia Knox

Alice Kazama - Writer & Swimwear Designer