‘She is more Japanese than we are,’ says Miss Nippon Grand Prix organizer of the new

To be a contestant for the annual Miss Nippon (Japan) Grand Prix, there are exactly two requirements: participants have Japanese nationality and are unmarried.

A few weeks ago, Karolina Shiino, an unmarried 26-year-old naturalized Ukrainian, took the title of Miss Nippon 2024. She and her mother emigrated to Japan (of all places) when Shiino was five years old. One cannot possibly miss her, a tall, thin, Central European with long brown hair, among the other contestants who have (as far as we know) Japanese parents.

As a winner, she is acknowledged by the Miss Nippon Grand Prix organization as the “Foremost Beauty of All Japanese Women.” 

Shiino’s face launched a thousand ships. Debate on social media arose: Japanese males acknowledged that Shiino is a beauty but not “foremost of all Japanese women.” Also, if she can win in this low threshold contest, then what is in store for next year? Others debated what it means to be Japanese. Having mastered the language and being naturalized in 2022, Shiino stated that she is “absolutely Japanese” and “more Japanese than we are.” Certainly, she “absolutely” fulfills the nationality requirement.

Hopping a border, being born somewhere, paying taxes, are any of these sufficient requirements to be a national? What are “nations,” anyway? Are they not defined by the collection of peoples who just happen to be within an arbitrarily drawn border? Can’t just one freely pick a “nationality” as one would a shirt, to change it later? Sensible people grasp its meaning, but nationality is one of those slippery nouns that is hard to explain in concrete terms, one of those “I know it when I see it” words.

For its part during this episode, the Western media has nodded approvingly, as progressive Japanese, like their Western counterparts, gradually but steadily dismember the essence of nation and nationality. The media did not lose an opportunity to chastise Japan for not being diverse and for not opening its borders. Rather than explain why Shiino is the “foremost beauty of all Japanese women,” Miss Nippon organizer Ai Wada gave a non-answer, stating that Shiino is a “hard working, yet humble, Japanese woman, with a very strong sense of consideration for others.” She could have been describing the other contestants, perhaps Japanese women in general. At any rate, the judges picked Shiino “with full confidence” and Wada has her back.

Now, the young woman who was chosen with “full confidence” and is “more Japanese” than the Japanese themselves is giving up her crown because she was allegedly romantically involved with a married man with children, a plastic surgeon, and social media influencer who just so happened to have sat as a judge for a previous Miss Nippon contest.

Lest Westerners think that Wada is a fraud, most Japanese women are not adulterers and do indeed have a “very strong sense of consideration for others.” Perhaps the Miss Nippon Grand Prix organization would like to add to their short list of requirements moral candor, something that is sorely lacking in Japanese progressives. And give thought to the nationality requirement as “nationality” is more than a word written in a passport.

Image: Free image, Pixabay license, no attribution required.