On Monday, Carolina Shiino was crowned Miss Japan, but the controversy surrounding her victory is what made the news. Being the first naturalized citizen of the nation to win a beauty contest, the 26-year-old model from Nagoya, who was born in Ukraine to Ukrainian parents and immigrated to Japan when she was five, is sparking discussions about identity and who is truly “Japanese.” In “impeccable Japanese,” Shiino sadly declared upon her victory, “There have been racial barriers, and it has been challenging to be accepted,” according to the BBC.
Shiino’s family moved to Japan after her mother remarried a Japanese man after the Tokyo Weekender. There, Shiino picked up the language and claimed she immediately felt “Japanese in speech and mind.” But because of her appearance, she had also always felt a little odd. In 2022, after obtaining Japanese citizenship, she entered a beauty contest with the intention of “creating a society where people are not judged by their appearance.”
Want to learn more in a matter of minutes? We present the news concisely and objectively, just the way we want it. Become a Newser newsletter subscriber.
Shiino is not the first Miss Japan winner to experience this kind of opposition. Ariana Miyamoto, whose father is African-American and her mother is Japanese, became the first mixed-race woman to win the title in Japan in 2015. The question of whether a person of mixed origin should represent Japan in the beauty pageant scene quickly became contentious, but in that instance, Miyamoto was partially Japanese. Regarding Shiino, one online critic wrote, “This person who was chosen as Miss Japan is not even a mix of Japanese but 100% pure Ukrainian.” “She may be gorgeous, but this is ‘Miss Japan,’ not me. “Where’s the Japanese flair?”
According to the Independent, several others supported Shiino’s victory as a victory for a varied Japan. One person observed that “Japan will run out of Japanese people if people keep assessing Japaneseness based on roots and see only those with pure Japanese blood as their own, instead of embracing multiculturalism.” It appears that pageant organizer Ai Wada agrees with the latter idea. After Shiino’s victory, Wada declared, “There is one thing I am convinced of following today’s result.” “Japanese beauty exists not in the appearance, not in the blood, but it exists firmly in our hearts.”
Leave a Reply