To Kiko Mizuhara, hugs are a novel thing. It's not something she embraced growing up, neither were they offered in abundance. Growing up in Japan, in a country notorious for its lack of public displays of affection, or skinship as they call it, a non-hugging culture was an accepted norm to her. This was until Mizuhara set foot in the US for the first time after the COVID-19 pandemic to visit her boyfriend, keyboardist and record producer John Carroll Kirby.
“It's really beautiful that people are hugging and expressing themselves,” Mizuhara tells me earnestly over a Zoom call. “In Japan, we don't express our emotions. We think that overly expressing our emotions could be overwhelming to others. So, we don't hug. There's no such thing as physical touch as an expression in our culture.
“It is crazy to me that I spend all this time with my family and I never think of hugging
