Looking Japanese: representing gender, privilege, and multiracial beauty queens in the media

ABSTRACT

In 2015 and 2016, Ariana Miyamoto and Priyanka Yoshikawa became the first and second “hāfu” (half; multiracial) contestants to be crowned Miss Universe Japan and Miss World Japan respectively. Following their win, they were alternately ignored in mainstream media, lambasted online for not being “jun-nihonjin” (pure Japanese), and celebrated for heralding a multiracial and multiethnic Japan. I explore these discourses by examining how the two beauty queens were represented in Japanese-language and English-language news media and Girls Channel, an online forum popular among young women. Drawing on discourse analysis, I argue beauty pageants are important sites for understanding how race, gender, and ethnicity are complexly constructed in Japan. On one level, this stems from Japan’s racialized ideologies of nation and long history of subjugating racioethnic minorities, but on another level, it is intertwined with classist and gendered beauty ideals of looking Japanese in beauty pageants. Looking Japanese is also informed by what I call “racialized privilege,” invisible unearned advantages conferred upon jun-nihonjin based on their racioethnicity and, for women, tied to lineage (one’s ancestors) and colorism (preference for lighter skin). Ultimately, this article aims to decenter EuroAmerican-centric media research on gender, beauty, and racioethnicity.

KEYWORDS:

• hāfu
• mixed race
• gender
• beauty pageants
• Miss Japan

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to Laavanya Kathiravelu, Saroja Dorairajoo, Renyi Hong, and Padma Chirumamilla for their invaluable comments on earlier drafts. A version of this article was presented at “Does ‘Invisible Privilege’ Travel? Looking Beyond the Geographies of White Privilege,” a 201 symposium organized by the National University of Singapore’s Asia Research Institute, where it benefited from participants’ insights. I also thank the journal editors and the anonymous reviewers for their productive suggestions.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. All names are rendered surname last.

2. All translations are the author’s.

3. Despite “jun-nihonjin” being problematic for insinuating some are “purer” than others, I retain the term because many Japanese people self-identify with it.

4. Jinshu (race) and minzoku (ethnicity) are often used analogously in Japanese (Koichi Iwabuchi and Yasuko Takezawa 2015). In this article, I discuss them together because “hāfu” indexes both race and ethnicity.

5. Although GC is anonymous, I will assume based on demographic data that 95% of users are jun-nihonjin.

6. MUJ 2006 Chibana is likely popular due to her being a news anchor on Nippon Television’s News Zero. MUJ 2017 Abe is famous because her father is a well-known television reporter and actor.

7. Generally, there is little publicity on judging panels. This information comes from Missology (n.d.), a pageant-related community forum.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Michelle H. S. Ho

Michelle H. S. Ho is an Assistant Professor of Feminist and Queer Cultural Studies in the Department of Communications and New Media at the National University of Singapore (NUS). Her research interests lie broadly in gender and sexuality and their intersections with media, popular culture, race/ethnicity, and affect/emotion in contemporary Asia. She has previously published on race and gender in Japanese media, such as in Japanese Studies and Communication & Sport. She is currently at work on a monograph, under contract with Duke University Press, which traces the relationship between trans/gender issues and capitalism through an ethnographic study of josō (male-to-female crossdressing) and dansō (female-to-male crossdressing) cafe-and-bars in contemporary Tokyo. More information can be found at: michellehsho.com.