Yumi Sanada has already acquired a fan club with a membership of about a hundred. No mean feat for the 23-year-old, even if most of the members are middle-aged men.
Sanada, who grew up in Hong Kong as the daughter of a Japanese father and Chinese mother, is slowly becoming a star after having achieved reasonable success in the burgeoning beauty contest craze sweeping China.
"When I was a little girl, I wanted to be a teacher or psychologist when I grew up," she tells Sunday Mainichi (3/19). "Now, I want to be a model or an actress."
Women like Sanada are hardly rare, according to the weekly. The Chinese beauty contest scene and the businesses surrounding it have exploded in popularity, and Japanese women are flocking to the Asian mainland to get their piece of the action.
Since holding the Miss World Contest in 2001, then Miss Universe three years later, beauty contests have skyrocketed in number across China. China Central TV's CCTV Model TV Contest, the country's biggest pageant, attracts hundreds of thousands of contestants, including the tens of thousands from regional auditions.
Companies and local governments across China are running all sorts of contests targeting beautiful women. I'd say there are more than 1,000 running yearly.
Merely performing well is often good enough to secure lucrative sponsorship deals from companies wanting nubile nymphs promoting their products.
One of these contests is the Miss Tourism Queen. It's a virtual traveling beauty contest, operating in several areas to find pretty women who can promote tourism to certain areas. Noriko Ono, a woman in her late 20s, was Japan's representative in the Miss Tourism Queen last year. She had won a couple of beauty contests in Japan and normally works as a secretary to a Tokyo University research lab.
Ono arrived in China in June last year, not long after there had been fierce anti-Japanese riots across the country. She was sent out in an area where feelings against Japan ran strong and paraded through a city center in a convertible.
When people learned she was Japanese, many gave her dirty looks, booed her and flashed rude signs in her direction. She replied by simply smiling and giving warm greetings, but received only glares in return, the weekly says.
Ono didn't win anything in the contest, but certainly felt triumphant.
"Taking part in a beauty contest overseas kind of made me feel like a private sector diplomat. I think Japanese have too narrow a view about the meaning behind beauty contests," Ono tells the Sunday Mainichi. "Simply winning a contest is nearly always the be-all, end-all in Japan. And beauty contest winners nearly always end up as models or in the entertainment world because they're about the only jobs where winning a beauty contest is recognized."
There're far broader options available in international beauty contests, with many competitors aiming to enter such professions as politics, diplomacy, teaching or law enforcement.
Emi Suzuki, Japan's 2004 representative in the Miss Tourism Queen contest, says the world is an oyster for Japanese beauty queens.
"I learned when I was in China for the beauty contest there that people, frankly speaking, fancy Japanese women," she tells Sunday Mainichi. "I want more women to take part in international beauty contests." (By Ryann Connell)
March 7, 2006
http://mdn.mainichi-msn.co.jp
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