When Ariana Miyamoto was crowned Miss Universe Japan this year, participants said she stole the show with a saucy strut, an infectious smile and a calm self-confidence that belied her 21 years. However, it was not just her beauty and poise that catapulted her to national attention.
Miyamoto is one of only a tiny handful of hafu, or mixed-race Japanese, to win a major beauty pageant in proudly homogeneous Japan, and is the first half-black woman ever to do so.
Miyamoto’s victory wins her the right to represent Japan on the global stage at the international Miss Universe pageant expected to take place in January next year. She said she hopes her appearance — and better yet, a victory — would push more Japanese to accept hafu. However, Japan might have a long way to go, she said.
Photo: AFP
Even after her victory in the national competition, local journalists have had a hard time accepting her as Japanese.
“The reporters always ask me: ‘What part of you is most like a Japanese?’” said Miyamoto, who has long legs like a foreign supermodel [sic], but shares the same shy self-reserve of many other young Japanese women. “I always answer: ‘But, I am a Japanese.’”
“I had hoped winning Miss Universe Japan would make them notice that,” she added.
That might yet take some time. After she won, some people posted messages online criticizing the judges for choosing someone who did not look Japanese.
“Shouldn’t the Japanese Miss Universe at least have a real Japanese face?” one person wrote.
However, even larger numbers of Japanese seemed to rally to her defense.
“Why can’t a Japanese citizen, who was born and raised in Japan, just be regarded as Japanese?” one post read.
The child of a short-lived marriage between an African-American sailor in the US Navy and a local Japanese woman, Miyamoto grew up in Japan, where she said 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 nation 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 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 US.
However, many in Japan see Miyamoto’s victory as proof that Japan is slowly embracing a more multicolored image of itself.
With outright immigration still restricted to a trickle, much of Japan’s new diversity comes from ethnically mixed children of marriages between Japanese and foreigners. These hafu — a term that comes from the English-language word “half” — have gained increasing social prominence, especially in sports and on television.
Japanese of mixed race also account for a small but growing portion of the overall population: According to the Japanese Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare, about 20,000 children with one non-Japanese parent are now born in Japan annually, about 2 percent of total births.
“Ariana gives us another opportunity to challenge the old assumption that you have to look Japanese to be Japanese,” said Megumi Nishikura, a half Japanese, half Irish-American filmmaker, who co-directed last year’s documentary Hafu.
Miyamoto said she endured slurs growing up in the gritty southern naval port of Sasebo, where her mother’s family raised her after her father left Japan when she was an infant.
In school, other children and even parents called her “kurombo,” the Japanese equivalent of “the N-word,” she said. Classmates did not want to hold her hand for fear her color would rub off on them.
“I used to come home angry at my mother,” Miyamoto said. “I’d ask her: ‘Why did you make me so different?’”
She said everything changed at age 13, when she decided to reach out to her father, who invited her to his home in Jacksonville, Arkansas. She said she will never forget the moment she first saw her father and his relatives.
“They had the same skin and the same face as me,” she said. “For the first time, I felt normal.”
She said that, in the US, she came to speak of herself as black. However, in Japan, she still calls herself hafu. As Miss Universe Japan, she has played down her African-American roots, presenting herself instead as a representative of ethnically mixed Japanese from all backgrounds.
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