Japanese-Indian crowned Miss Japan is getting no love in Tokyo

MissUniverse.com says that the pageant "empowers women to develop the confidence they need to achieve their personal best. A confident woman has the power to make real change, starting in her local community with the potential to reach a global audience."

How they achieve this by asking the same versions of "how will you positively affect the world?" or bringing attention to their bikini bodies is actually worth a decent enough research grant.

On the September 5, Japan selected a young girl to represent the nation in the Miss Universe pageant set for this year.

Priyanka Yoshikawa is a 22-year-old, confident, half-Indian Japanese. She was born in Tokyo to an Indian father and Japanese mother. Her victory comes a year after Ariana Miyamoto was crowned Miss Japan. She was bi-racial too and was the first black Japanese woman to wear the crown.

Now, Miss Universe isn't really a relevant event. It's not as glitzy as it used to be and its TV ratings have been going down every year. But as the event entails a certain sense of nationalism and attractive women, news cycles tend to care about the event.

Nonetheless, Priyanka's victory has recieved backlash from hyper-nationalists in Japan.

The reaction has been similar to that after Miyamoto's victory last year. On the Girls Channel website, for example, one poster wrote, "The idea is to have a Japanese representing Japan."

"I think it's bad that a 'haafu' has become the Japanese representative," added one commentator, while another posted: "I don't understand this selection criteria."

Priyanka's response?

"Before Ariana, 'haafu' girls couldn't represent Japan", she told AFP, using the Japanese term for children born to mixed marriages.

"We are Japanese," she said. "Yes, I'm half-Indian and people are asking me about my 'purity'. Yes, my dad is Indian and I'm proud of it. I'm proud that I have Indian in me. But that does not mean I'm not Japanese."

This is a confident, measured response from a confident, measured young girl, but the question really isn't what she thinks. Rather, it's why a country as economically and socially evolved as Japan cannot accept a Japanese citizen, albeit of mixed heritage, representing it's "pride" on a world stage.

Interestingly, even as the Japanese authorities are trying to keep up with the times, and accepting bi- and multiracial persons born to Japanese parents as one of them, the purity zealots are not impressed. Unfortunate, isn't it?

Crowning mixed-race beauty queens has attracted trolling even in the United States, when Indian-American Nina Davuluri was chosen as Miss America 2014 and was racially abused by white supremcists. United States' first black president Barack Obama is trolled online on a daily basis from equally unpleasant and politically backdated lunatics, who'd probably vote for Donald Trump this November.

Coming back to Japan and its over-emphasis on national culture and tradition, beauty pageants become the frontiers of such cultural politics in which past and present collide head on. Just like a section of hypernationalist and racial purist Japanese people created a ruckus after Ariana Miyamoto was crowned Miss Japan, Priyanka Yoshikawa's victory is not being celebrated as much as it ought to be.

Biracial beauty queen challeneges Japan's self-image, the New York Times had said during Miyamoto's case. But editorials in global media cannot do what awareness at a ground level does to challenge perceptions that do not accept the ethnic centrifuge that is the 21st century. 

Also read: Why we don't need to talk about an India-China race

Also read: Oops! When Miss Universe 2015 pageant became the butt of all jokes