Miss Universe Japan, Ariana Miyamoto

The recently crowned Miss Universe Japan, Ariana Miyamoto, is an unusual beauty queen selection for Japan, as she is hafu, or mixed-race Japanese, having an African-American father and a Japanese mother. After she won the contest, according to a recent NY Times article, some people posted messages criticizing the judges for selecting someone who didn’t look Japanese. However, more Japanese had positive things to say about the selection

Ms. Miyamoto grew up in Japan, where she says other children often shunned her because of her darker skin and tightly curled hair. That experience has driven her to use her pageant victory as a soapbox for raising awareness about the difficulties faced by mixed-race citizens in a country that still regards itself as mono-ethnic. “Even today, I am usually seen not as a Japanese but as a foreigner. At restaurants, people give me an English menu and praise me for being able to eat with chopsticks,” said Ms. Miyamoto, who spoke in her native Japanese and is an accomplished calligrapher of Japanese-Chinese characters. “I want to challenge the definition of being Japanese.” Her self-proclaimed mission has raised eyebrows at a time when race relations are receiving new scrutiny in Japan, which had long seen itself as immune to the ethnic tensions of the United States.

Japan is usually portrayed as an extremely homogenous culture, with age-old traditions characterizing the way of life. In fact, there are still few immigrants, as the government keeps tight restrictions on the flow of immigrants into the country. As the article indicates, Japan’s relative diversity comes from the ethnically mixed children of marriages between Japanese and foreigners, which is a small but growing population. Ms. Miyamoto’s father was a sailor in the US Navy and returned to the US soon after Ariana was born. She reports that she had to endure many taunts growing up, with other children and even parents called her “kurombo,” the Japanese equivalent of the N-word. It remains to be seen whether having Ariana represent Japanese beauty will contribute to changing views on what it means to be Japanese as well as to people with dark skin becoming more accepted in Japanese society.