Sabrina Carpenter's SNL Performance Is Called Out For Cultural Insensitivity
A fellow pop star pointed out a glaring oversight.
Not everyone was flipping for Sabrina Carpenter’s recent Saturday Night Live performance. The pop star’s live debut of her Man’s Best Friend track “Nobody’s Son” has been criticized for a lack of “respect and care” for Japanese culture. Singer Rina Sawayama pointed out why the staging was culturally inappropriate in a post about one piece of wardrobe.
During her stint as both host and musical guest on SNL’s Oct. 18 episode, Carpenter added an extra kick to her second musical number by singing “Nobody’s Son” live for the first time, channeling the track’s angsty rage into stylized karate choreography. Throughout the song, martial artists sparred with one another behind Carpenter, until the singer got involved herself by nonchalantly chopping planks of wood in half and landing blows on the dancers.
However, Sawayama felt that Carpenter’s team should have done more research before allowing the dancers to wear shoes while performing on traditional Japanese tatami mats. “Big love to Sabrina,” Sawayama wrote in an Oct. 19 Instagram story, clarifying that she did not blame the singer for this oversight. “But fellow artists creative teams… If we are clearly referencing a culture please can you do so with the research, respect and care it deserves. Shoes on tatami is jail.”
In Japanese culture, it’s considered very rude to wear shoes on a tatami. It’s customary for people to remove their footwear and either step onto tatami barefoot, with socks, or with specific slippers. The reason behind the tradition is due to these mats’ multi-purpose uses in Japanese dwellings, since people will eat, sleep, and socialize on their tatami. Since the soft flooring material is so important to everyday life, Japanese people take great efforts to keep the mats pristine, which includes never wearing shoes when walking on tatami.
Of course, the tatami used in Carpenter’s SNL set wasn’t being used in anyone’s dwelling. But Sawayama’s point still stands, since anyone familiar with Japanese culture would very likely clock this sartorial mistake right away and feel a bit uneasy about it.
