- Sabrina Carpenter was host and musical guest on Saturday Night Live over the weekend.
- She performed “Nobody’s Son” on a dojo-inspired set, raising concerns of cultural appropriation.
- Rina Sawayama respectfully called out the performance, pointing out a major error.
Sabrina Carpenter pulled double duty on Saturday Night Live this weekend, acting as both host and musical guest. And, as always, her performances got people talking. Specifically, Sabrina has made headlines for singing the f-word a few times on air. But while that may be of note to the FCC, it’s not why we should be talking about Sabrina’s “Nobody's Son” SNL performance. We should be talking about it for its cultural appropriation.
For reasons I don’t quite understand, Sabrina decided to set this performance in a dojo. She sang about her heartbreak as dancers “fought” in the background, doing karate-inspired choreography and wearing gi—the traditional martial arts uniform. And while I wasn’t especially outraged by it, the performance definitely gave me the ick.
Sabrina’s use of the dojo aesthetic didn’t seem especially hateful or even particularly exploitative, but it also had absolutely nothing to do with the song and doesn’t even fit her bombshell aesthetic. It felt a little like a racially insensitive Halloween costume—half-baked at best, offensive at worst. And I’m not the only person that thinks so.
Rina Sawayama—a Japanese British singer, actor, and model—posted about the performance on Instagram. While she sent “big love” to the singer, she called out the creative team behind the performance for a lack of cultural specificity and respect. “If we are clearly referencing a culture please can you do so with the research, respect, and care it deserves,” she wrote on her Stories, adding, “Shoes on tatami is jail 😭.”
In case you didn’t know, a tatami is essentially a woven mat often found in homes in Japan that are very thin and fragile. Wearing shoes on a tatami is a big no-no. You might be thinking that this is too small a detail to really matter—and besides, it’s not like Sabrina’s blinged-out gi is culturally accurate. But the critique here isn’t so much about the misuse of the tatami as it is about who had the power to craft this performance.
When speaking about cultural appropriation in Hollywood, it’s not just about commodification (reducing a culture to a fun gimmick that can be bought and sold)—it’s about the lack of diversity behind the scenes. One implication of Rina’s post is that the creative team could have hired a Japanese expert or designer who might have been able to spot this error in rehearsals.
This could have been a major opportunity for an Asian creative to get their foot in the door. Instead, it feels like Sabrina is profiting off of a culture that neither she nor SNL are supporting—at least not loudly or publicly enough to offset the potential harm of the performance. And that’s what makes it so disappointing.
