“There have been racial barriers, and it has been challenging to be accepted as Japanese.”
That’s what a tearful Carolina Shiino said in impeccable Japanese after she was crowned Miss Japan on Monday.
The 26-year-old model, who was born in Ukraine, moved to Japan at the age of five and was raised in Nagoya.
She is the first naturalised Japanese citizen to win the pageant, but her victory has re-ignited a debate on what it means to be Japanese.
While some recognised her victory as a “sign of the times”, others have said she does not look like what a “Miss Japan” should.
Right but the history behind Native American beauty pageants takes place in the aftermath of ethnic cleansing and subjugation. You simply can’t divorce the two subjects because they affected everything in their culture and way of life.
Ethnic cleansing, put simply, is the form the whitewashing took form of, and it took everything from the Native Americans. Their homes, their land, their history, their identity, their cultures were either all gone or held on by a thread.
It has taken so fucking long for them to rebuild even a fraction of what they had, and the pageants were part of that process, an attempt to rebuild an ethnic identity from the ashes.
Japan never had that history. The Japanese were not nearly wiped out by European colonialists, they were not hunted to the point of extinction and cultural death. Their issues right now stem from their own societal failures.
So when you invoke native American history as a comparison, you should consider the context. In your example, it would be understandable that people might be offended if a white person won a native American beauty pageant because their entire race and culture was pretty much completely wiped out by white people, and this could be seen as someone trying to take yet another thing from them.
Japan doesn’t have that history with white people, so that comparison with Native Americans simply does not stand, and trying to make it stand is kinda belittling to the native Americans.