Ask anyone what “home” means to them, and surely, you’ll get different answers. Ask anyone what “homesick” means to them, and you’ll experience the familiar feeling of secondhand longing and fondness. For mikah, he’s an expert in dwelling on those feelings, and now he’s ready to release his Homesick trilogy for the world to hear.
“I want to write music that doesn’t just connect to me,” the 26-year-old artist says over Zoom. “Not just like writing for myself as a journal and a diary, but also to help other people cope with something and help them.”
Born Mika Hashizume, to a Japanese mother and German father, mikah had no problem fitting in his hometown of Honolulu. The Hawaiian island is a melting pot of people who grew up with diverse cultural experiences, and a hub for first-gen immigrants. Once he moved to Japan and subsequently China, the search for home became an aching feeling that he couldn’t break free from.
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mikah remembers the day he left home with crystal clear precision. His family and many of his closest friends gathered and bid him a heartfelt goodbye at the airport when he was 16 years old. “It made me really sad to see what I was leaving behind at that point,” the singer recalled. “It hit so much harder.”
From there, he pursued his dreams–becoming the leader of the Japanese-American boy group Intersection and participating in the Chinese survival show Chuang 2021, where his cover of “So Sick” by Ne-Yo became ultra viral in Asia. His efforts culminated in his debut in the 11-member group INTO1. Both groups disbanded after their contracts ended, but mikah’s relentless drive for creativity had just begun.
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“Since I moved to areas and countries where I was pretty much like a foreigner or an outsider, I do think that that added to the concept of homesickness,” he reflects. “I’ve always felt like after I moved and left Hawaii, I’ve been kind of like an outsider, where I had to accept that and try to prove myself to be not an outsider.”
After two years of solo fanmeets, singles, and fashion shows, mikah is ready to present these complicated feelings in his mellow and introspective music. It all started when he was recording the trilogy in Los Angeles with his producing team. The Southern California city serves as an inspirational haven for him. He says it’s a place that makes him detach from his current life and forces him to “dig deeper into my subconscious and my own self that I don’t really get to be in touch with a lot.”
To fully understand and grasp the topic, he wanted to connect with his collaborators on a familiar level. “I would also ask the other people in the room about their experiences, and if they understood homesickness,” he recalls. “I’ve talked about it in the past to a lot of people, and I knew this concept was something that more people could understand and connect with.”
mikah wanted to align his goals with reaching an inclusive audience. Moving isn’t just the act of physically moving somewhere, but also sitting in the unending angst of what’s going to happen next, and if you made the right decision. “I tried my best to write it openly and a bit more broadly, so that other people can listen to the songs and relate them to their own lives,” he says, whether it be moving for college or the next step in their career.
To mikah, homesickness doesn’t hold him back from anything. “It expands my horizons,” the singer reflects. “It teaches me more about myself, and it teaches me more about other people as well. And I think that through moving and traveling to all these different countries and meeting new people, I’m able to understand it all.”
The first release in the Homesick trilogy, “Escape,” begins his long journey. It’s a clear representation of risking it all to pursue your dreams, but that lingering reluctance to leave the familiar. “ So what if I take thе leap / Might miss all my innocence / Tеrrified of something different / I’m at home sick and I’m sick of it.” The final line of the verse strikes a particular feeling for mikah, who loves wordplay and tries to incorporate it in his works.
To make it hit home a little harder, mikah wanted to pull back the curtains on his public persona in the visuals for the single. Lush greenery surrounds him and his childhood friends when they walk in a precise line and drive around with no care in the world. They laugh, share fond memories playing soccer and swimming, and for a second, you’re not sure what age they are. mikah described the importance of showing his hidden vulnerable side, especially as someone who’s been in front of the camera a lot. “I’m kind of playing this character that I’ve put up just for image,” he said. “I wanted to be a lot warmer and a lot more real. I wanted my actual friends to be in it, and to not look like a music video.”
Gentle guitar strums introduce the second song, “In Between,” where mikah paints a specific picture in his head. “It’s just me and my suitcase passing through places / It’s starting to feel like an endless vacation,” he sings in the chorus. It’s a song that he constantly ponders upon in airplanes, as in the second verse, he wrestles with the idea of his friends’ aging and inevitably, the distance that grows. “I get further away from that past that I used to live in—the past that I always compare my current life to,” he says.
Moving in this sense makes one feel more adrift, but the final song “Dream” gives home a solid and definite meaning. “Feels like I’m running in place / Dreaming feels like home,” he sings and soars in an epiphanic chorus. In the music video, he roams alone around the crowded streets of Tokyo and the famous crowded Shibuya crosswalk. There’s a moment of solitude, but it flashes back to those tender moments with his childhood friends and serves as a constant reminder that those memories are everlasting and always there.
The singer-songwriter is currently settled in Shanghai, and though he’s busy making music or showing off trailblazing fashion at events like Vogue Forces of Fashion, he takes a lot of time to ground himself. “I think that through everywhere I’ve gone, I was able to find some way to make that area a home for me. Mainly that was through my friends that I had at those times,” he says. “Especially now, through my friends, my staff around me, even like the level of Chinese that I have right now, I feel like I’m able to actually be myself, which helped me feel like I’m more at home as well.”
It’s helped him prepare for an aspirational 2026 where he aims to become a mature, well-rounded artist and storyteller. Overall, he wants to link all his passions of music and fashion together and dive into more experimental and alternative genres (“A bit further from pop, like Mk.gee and Nami,” he says.) Of course, he wants to bring his fans along for the ride into the expansive horizon. “I also want to start to do more global things—to see my fans that are in different countries and to learn from more global experiences, whether that’s making music, traveling, performing there too.”
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
