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  • Pure Beauty: Judging Race in Japanese American Beauty Pageants
  • Wendy Rouse Jorae
Pure Beauty: Judging Race in Japanese American Beauty Pageants. By Rebecca Chiyoko King-O'Riain. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006. xiii + 276 pp. $20.00 paper.

Rebecca Chiyoko King-O'Riain examines the construction of race, ethnicity, community, and gender in the Japanese American beauty pageants of San Francisco, Los Angeles, Seattle, and Honolulu. Employing a unique combination of archival research, personal interviews, and participant-observation fieldwork, the author explores the shifting boundaries of Japanese American identity. More specifically, she argues that the increasing numbers of mixed-race Japanese Americans has elicited controversy over the definition of Japanese American-ness. Beauty pageants often become contested sites where these controversies erupt since Japanese American beauty queens are supposed to serve as "symbolic representations" of their community. Thus, the debate over Japanese American-ness is personified through the beauty pageant queen. In these pageants, King-O'Riain concludes, "race, which one might think would not be a criterion given the high levels of mixing within the community, persists, and people work hard to maintain its preeminence" (p. 17).

The author contends that since their inception, Japanese American beauty pageants have been arenas for battles over concepts of nationalism, feminism, and multiraciality. She traces the evolution of these pageants through three distinct stages. During the earliest period from 1935–1950s and amid anti-Japanese sentiment, the pageant highlighted the American-ness of Japanese Americans in an effort to justify their claims to citizenship. In the 1970s and 1980s, feminist critiques of beauty pageants led to significant changes in the contests as organizers responded to complaints from feminist organizations and contestants who protested the objectification of women. In response, Japanese American pageants in places like San Francisco deemphasized beauty-judging criteria by eliminating bathing suit contests and body measurements. Instead, the focus shifted to the community and professional service of the candidates. Beginning [End Page 291] in the 1990s, the contestants found themselves embroiled in larger debates over the assimilation of the Japanese American community. The presence of an increasing number of mixed-race contestants created a crisis in racial thinking that revealed the continued existence of racial hierarchies in the Japanese American community and the dominance of the biological concept of race. Diehard purists rejected interracial marriages and preferred to restrict membership in community organizations to one hundred percent Japanese Americans. This thinking created barriers, King-O'Riain suggests, to the full acceptance of multi-racial Japanese Americans into the community. Even as some community leaders have made efforts in recent years to reach out to mixed-race Japanese Americans and include them in community organizations, the blood quantum rules in the pageant clearly demonstrate that race, as biology, is linked to ethnicity and gender.

The chapter that perhaps most clearly demonstrates the author's argument is "Cultural Imposters and Eggs," which examines the ethnic strategies that multi-racial contestants adopt while competing in the pageant. King-O'Riain argues that the pageant queen represents the ideal type of Japanese Americanness, and that the pageant enforces Japanese standards of beauty. Mixed-race contestants in the pageant felt discrimination from both within the Japanese American community as well as without and felt the need to emphasize their Japanese American-ness through the pageant. Multi-racial candidates especially felt the pressure physically to appear Japanese American enough to represent their community. There was a general assumption that those of one hundred percent Japanese ancestry would have ethnic and cultural knowledge; however, this was not always the case. Often, those of mixed ancestry spoke Japanese, ate Japanese food, attended Japanese culture school, and practiced Japanese arts, but their non-Japanese physical features led observers to assume that they were less Japanese American than one hundred percent Japanese ancestry contestants. Mixed-race candidates felt compelled to authenticate their claims to Japanese American-ness by using Japanese names, speaking the Japanese language, and altering their physical appearance to seem more Japanese. Others highlighted their Japanese heritage through the speech and talent competitions. The fact that mixed-race candidates felt such compulsions shows how race and ethnicity are still tightly linked. Yet, the gradual...

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