WHAT DOES IT MEAN TO BE JAPANESE?
An easy way to look at it is to consider the case of a university professor who took Canadian citizenship, forfeiting her Japanese nationality as a result. (The country bans dual citizenship, though in practice often turns a blind eye to those who possess it.)
Legally, the woman, who went unnamed in a Mainichi Shimbun interview, said she found herself being treated as an illegal foreign resident while staying in her home country. The law says one thing; most, however, would surely still think of her as Japanese.
Similarly, the accomplishments of Syukuro Manabe, joint winner of the 2021 Nobel Prize in Physics, are still celebrated as achievements for the country as a whole despite his having switched his citizenship to the United States years ago.
There are vast swathes of grey in this debate. Japanese-ness clearly can be something more than a piece of paper. While there’s no doubt that much of the Miss Japan criticism comes from racists and online trolls, some of it is more considered, such as that of the manga author Mayumi Kurata.
“The person chosen as Miss Japan is very beautiful. However, I had interpreted Miss Japan as someone whose beauty represents the Japanese people,” she wrote on Twitter. “She doesn’t fit that definition; her beauty is different from Japanese beauty.” In another post she added, “‘Japanese-ness’ and ‘Japan-ness’ exist in a strict sense.”
At a time when, in much of the Western world, celebration of racial identity is encouraged like never before, it seems somewhat incongruous to say that there is something wrong with the Japanese taking pride in their inherent cultural traits and combined history.
Though there might not be a strict definition of Japanese beauty or even what it means to be Japanese, that’s true of any ethnicity; these groupings might be social constructs rather than measurable genetic differences, but as Kurata notes, that doesn’t make them any less real.
Before you settle on a stance on this question, what are your views on Brooke Bruk-Jackson, a blonde, white woman who won Miss Universe Zimbabwe last year? That triggered a backlash in some sectors despite Bruk-Jackson being born in Harare.