Tokyo (AFP)

Emili Omuro was thrilled with Naomi Osaka's performance at the opening ceremony of the Tokyo Olympics, but the mixed-race Japanese teenager believes her country needs to do more to accept people from mixed couples.

Friday night, 23-year-old Naomi Osaka, of Japanese mother and Haitian father, four-time Grand Slam winner in tennis, climbed a replica of Mount Fuji in the Tokyo Olympic Stadium to light the cauldron, highlight of the opening ceremony of these Games overshadowed by the pandemic.

Japan's Osaka was not the only athlete from a mixed couple to represent the host country.

Basketball star Rui Hachimura, a Japanese mother and Beninese father, was one of the Japanese standard bearers.

Osaka and Hachimura are adored in Japan and can boast of having made lucrative sponsorship and advertising deals for everything from noodles to cosmetics.

But many young people of black and Japanese origins still have to face prejudices in an often conservative and largely homogeneous society.

Born to a Japanese mother and a black American father, Emili Omuro, 14, says she regularly faced discrimination growing up in a town north of Tokyo.

"There were many difficult times," she told AFP.

"People whispered behind my back and laughed at me in clubs or when I was walking in the streets."

Seeking to draw attention to the bullying, Emili Omuro applied to carry the Olympic flame in the relay ahead of the Games.

She also hoped to highlight Japan's growing but often overlooked racial diversity.

- "Ignorance, not hate" -

When sanitary measures resulted in restrictions on the Olympic Torch Relay, Emili Omuro doubted, but ultimately decided that her participation was important.

"We have to create a society where people can feel comfortable, even if they are different".

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Black Canadian Kinota Braithwaite is directly aware of the effects of discrimination on children of mixed couples in Japan.

His daughter Mio, a Japanese mother, suffered racist remarks at school in Tokyo.

"It happened to me when I was a kid in Canada" and "it really broke my heart" here, he told AFP.

This year he published a children's book called "Mio The Beautiful" about his daughter's experience.

Mr. Braithwaite, himself a teacher, believes that discrimination in Japan is largely due to "ignorance, not hatred".

He considers athletes like Osaka and Hachimura as "role models" for his two children.

"For the Japanese, it also opens their eyes, which is a good thing."

- Representation "counts" -

Japan remains a largely homogeneous society.

An analysis of government data by the Kyodo news agency found that only 20,000 of the 1.02 million babies born in 2014 had Japanese and non-Japanese parents.

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And it is only recently that the image of Japanese people of mixed couples has started to include those of black origin, says Sayaka Osanami Torngren, professor and specialist in migration and ethnic issues at the University of Malmö.

“Historically, mixed people have always existed (in Japan), but the image of mixed people has always been white or Caucasian and Japanese,” says Torngren.

Today, more people of mixed Black and Japanese or Asian origin "speak openly about their experiences of discrimination or racism."

In 2019, Naomi Osaka sponsor Nissin Foods was at the center of controversy over a cartoon ad depicting the fair-skinned young woman, and a Japanese comedy duo apologized after joking. that she was "too sunburned" and needed a "bleach".

Hachimura revealed earlier this year that he receives racist messages "almost every day".

“There are people who say there is no racism in Japan,” his brother Aren Hachimura wrote, posting a hate message he received online.

"I want people to pay attention to the issue of racism."

For Ms. Torngren, seeing Hachimura and Osaka thus representing Japan is important.

"Even if it may be symbolic, it matters."

© 2021 AFP