Japan officially crowned its next Miss Japan on Monday, Jan. 22, and she is already facing some controversy.

Carolina Shiino will be 2024’s Miss Japan, and her win is historical for many reasons. First and foremost she is the oldest woman ever to win the beauty pageant, at 26 years old, according to Ukrinform.

But the larger conversation surrounding Shiino’s win is one about racial diversity and tension in Japan. Not only is she the oldest winner, Shiino is also the first naturalized Japanese citizen to win the Miss Japan Grand Prix title.

Shiino was born in Ternopil, Ukraine in 1998 and moved to Nagoya, Japan when she was only five years old after her mother married a Japanese man, according to BBC. She became a citizen in 2022, per Japanese naturalization law which requires someone to live in the country for five consecutive years and be over the age of 20.

After she was announced as the pageant winner, Shiino made a speech about how important this was for her and all other naturalized Japanese citizens. She shared that despite being able to speak Japanese and write in Japanese and celebrating Japanese culture, she often felt she fell short. She said that through her victory she had finally been accepted as a Japanese person.

Despite her gratitude, the model was not met with acceptance by a lot of Japanese citizens online. Many people believe that because she doesn’t look Japanese she doesn’t best represent the beauty standard for Miss Japan. This conversation mirrors the one many people had when the first bi-racial Miss Japan was crowned almost a decade ago, according to the San Fransisco Chronicle.

Ariana Miyamoto was Japanese-born with a Japanese mother and an African American father. Despite having lived in Japan all of her life, speaking Japanese, and celebrating Japanese culture many still felt that she wasn’t Japanese enough to represent Miss Japan, says The New York Times. The same conversation came up when Priyanka Yoshikawa, a half-Indian, half-Japanese woman was crowned Miss World Japan in 2016, according to NDTV.

Some people believe that since Shiino isn’t even a percentage ethnically Japanese, she shouldn’t even be liable for the title. Others are convinced that the Ukrainian model’s win is a political statement regarding the conflict between Ukraine and Russia.

Whether they want to be or not, women like Shiino, Miyamoto, and Yoshikawa are often the jumping-off point for the age-old question of what it means to be Japanese. As Shiino shared in her speech, that is something she feels the weight of often, but her title and her career have helped her become confident that she has a place as a Japanese person.

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