Miss Universe Japan gets online abuse 'because she doesn't look Japanese enough'

When the first mixed-race Miss Universe Japan was crowned at the end of March, she was greeted by a critical public.

Ariana Miyamoto quickly became the focus of attacks on Twitter, calling her “hafu”. The term literally translates as “half”.

With a Japanese mother and African American father, Ms Miyamoto is considered in Japan not to be foreign, but also not fully Japanese and according to some Twitter users, unworthy of winning the competition.

One Twitter user wrote that “Even though she’s Miss Universe Japan, her face is foreign no matter how you look at it”, while another said “Miss Universe Japan is… What? What kind of person is she? She’s not Japanese, right?”

“If I say I am Japanese, people reply: ‘No you can’t be’. They don’t believe it,” Ms Miyamoto told the BBC.

Ms Miyamoto, who grew up in a small city in western Japan, said that the treatment of mixed-race citizens contributed to her best friend’s death at school.

She told the BBC: “He wanted to talk about why we are excluded from others three days before he died.”

She added that she got significantly more attention from the foreign media compared to at home in Japan, where she could walk in the street without anyone recognising her.

The BBC reported that her treatment was due to a myth in Japan that they were special and unique, despite being an ethnic “hotchpotch” the result of different migrations over thousands of years around the Far East.