Multiracial woman named ‘Miss Japan’
Print Edition
Ariana Miyamoto hadn’t planned to enter a Japanese beauty contest because she figured her multiracial origins meant she couldn’t win. Then a close multiracial friend committed suicide.
So Miyamoto, the daughter of a Japanese woman and an African-American man, whose bronze skin and height of 1.73 meters are unusual in Japan, where she was born and brought up, took part in the pageant and won, becoming “Miss Japan.”
“I thought that, for my friend’s sake, if there was something I could do to change Japan, I should,” Miyamoto, 20, a dual Japanese and US national, told Reuters.
Miyamoto’s selection last month as Japan’s representative to the “Miss Universe” contest set off an internet firestorm, despite a push to welcome foreigners ahead of the 2020 Olympics.
“That big mouth, that gaudy face. This is Miss Japan?” one social media commenter wrote.
The carping was not new for Miyamoto, who attended a Japanese public school where children would refuse to touch her because “my color might rub off,” she said. Fed up, she attended a US high school.
But the pull of her birthplace was strong and she returned, though she said she is treated like a foreigner every day.
It’s a frustration shared by a growing number of multiracial Japanese, who may look different in an extremely homogeneous nation.
In 2013, international marriages made up 3.3 percent of the total, government figures show, or four times the 1980 figure.
Miyamoto’s victory was “refreshing,” said Greg Dvorak, a researcher in Asian and Pacific culture and history at Hitotsubashi University.
“My sense is there is a growing shift among younger generations to accept that people with all faces can speak Japanese and function successfully in Japanese society,” he said.
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