Beauty Pageants: Japanese Women and Beauty

Beauty Pageants: Japanese Women and Beauty

In the country of Japan there has been a rise to a new culture of female beauty in the twenty-first century, it is what I like to call the beauty pageant culture, where Japanese women are breaking out of the box of being undesirable and unwanted. For example, In the year 2007 the second Japanese woman in the history of the Miss Universe pageant won, this was accomplishment of Riyo Mori, a 20 year old dancer from Shizuoka Prefecture, and thousands of Japanese women. This win by Mori came one hundred years after the first full-fledged beauty contest was held in Japan to choose the nation’s most beautiful woman in 1908 won by Hiroko Suehiro, a student and daughter of the mayor of Kokura. This is consider to be a triumph for Japanese women as they were not seen as beautiful, prior to the pageant in 1908, most beauty competitions limited participants to being geisha and actresses, according to “A Hundred-Year History of Beauty Contests,” by Shoichi Inoue a professor at the International Center for Japanese Studies. These contests in 1908 were open to all women nationwide except geisha and actresses, designed to choose a “beauty with worldwide appeal,” a response to requests from a U.S newspaper for selecting the “fairest of the fair of the world.” However there have been more and more Japanese women participating in beauty pageants.



This rise in the number of Japanese women participating in beauty pageants has started a new cultural practice that has in a lot of ways shed the kimonos of the Japanese geisha culture, and has now taken on the western garments and notions of beauty. As there has been a shift in the notions of beauty throughout the years, Japanese women have now more and more been recognized as beautiful by way of cosmetic campaigns, and media. The notion of female Japanese beauty has come a long way, as the western aesthetic of beauty labeled Japanese women as undesirable. Through figures like Riyo Miro Japanese women are practicing a new type of beauty, the beauty that liberates the women of Japan. The new notion of Japanese beauty is a cultural practice that is taking place on a grand stage, where Japanese women are walking in stride exhibiting their beauty. There has also been a rise in other Asian cultures where women have been deemed undesirable in the past, like Korean, Indian, and Chinese women for example.

The new Japanese female notion of beauty by way of participating/practicing beauty has shaped Asia in extreme fashions, as Japanese women are taking more progressive steps towards world acceptance and acknowledgement of their beauty.

Redefining the lines of beauty that Japanese women are expected to accept as they were once deemed undesirable. Japanese women now have a notion of beauty through participation in the practice of beauty pageants, placing themselves amongst other beautiful and desired women.

Yomiuri, Kyoji Maeda, Yomiuri Shimbun Staff Writer, 2007. “Beauty's 'Japaneseness' criteria.” The Daily Yomiuri(Tokyo), June 6 http://0-www.lexisnexis.com.helin.uri.edu/us/lnacademic/frame.do?reloadEntirePage=true&rand=1273223746237&returnToKey=20_T9286278968&parent=docview&target=results_listview_resultsNav&tokenKey=rsh-20.191651.46644516417 (Accessed May 7, 2010).