How Nissin Represented Naomi Osaka: Race, Gender, and Sport in Japanese Advertising

Abstract

In January 2019, instant noodle giant Nissin Foods released two animated advertisements online featuring Naomi Osaka, which elicited backlash over “whitewashing” the multiracial professional tennis player who represents Japan. Although Nissin has since pulled the advertisements and officially apologized for portraying Osaka as lighter-skinned, underlying these issues are also those of gender, especially its intersections with race/ethnicity, nation, and sport in Japanese media. Employing discourse analysis of these two advertisements, this article examines how Nissin represented Osaka and what ideologies these representations reflect in Japanese society. Drawing on intersectional and transnational feminist cultural studies approaches, we argue that the advertisements’ representation of Osaka and the ensuing controversy reflect racialized and gendered ideologies in an allegedly homogeneous Japanese society, informed by local media and popular cultures that regularly portray “racially neutral” characters, celebrate lighter-skinned hāfu (half; multiracial) women, and diminish sportswomen’s athletic abilities. This article contributes to communication and sport studies by situating Osaka within broader contexts of how hāfu and sporting women are depicted in Japanese media and how elite sportswomen and multiracial athletes are portrayed in international media. Our article concludes by offering two suggestions on how to research multiracial sportswomen in the media.

Following Naomi Osaka and Rui Hachimura on Social Media: Silent Activism and Sport Commodification of Multiracial Japanese Athletes

“…Comparing news articles on Osaka and Kei Nishikori, a jun-nihonjin professional tennis player, Bien-Aimé and Kuwahara (2022) found that although both were treated as “Japanese first without much distinction,” journalists often justified Osaka’s Japaneseness to a Japanese readership by referencing her “Japan-born” status and multiracial identity (p. 112). This desire to integrate Osaka into an imagined homogeneous Japanese nation is apparent in Ho and Tanaka’s (2022) analysis of the pulled Nissin advertisements, where they contend the animated Osaka “reflects racialized and gendered ideologies of Japaneseness and nationhood” (p. 607). Fewer studies have so far examined how social media can empower hāfu athletes to challenge such ideologies and elicit conversation on race and sport in Japan and beyond, an important dimension of contemporary sports media, which our study offers insight on.…”

“…Moreover, her self-representation on social media manifests her multiracial identity as someone who plays for Japan but has mostly lived in the United States and still has ties to Haiti. This defies Western and Japanese mainstream media’s frequent monoracial and mononational labeling (Bien-Aimé & Kuwahara, 2022; Ho & Tanaka, 2022; Razack & Joseph, 2021; Roberts, 2022), complicating how her fans and sponsors may differently approach her. Yet, her privilege as an elite Japanese athlete and her zoomer cosmopolitanism potentially limit how far her advocacy can go (McClearen & Nishime, 2023).…”

“…Osaka’s silent activism is apparent in how she visibly embeds such messages that reinforce her racioethnic identity within her brand and commercial. Despite her good intentions, promoting the use of a product to prevent melanated skin from becoming even darker also reinforces misogynoir and colorism—privileging lighter skin over darker skin—the politics of which scholars have discussed along with the intersections of race and gender (Ho & Tanaka, 2022; Razack & Joseph, 2021). Yet, Osaka also weighs in on complex issues of skin color in a more sophisticated way than before.…”

“…Osaka’s Black Lives Matter (BLM) advocacy began in May 2020 when she marched in Minneapolis and Los Angeles (LA) and tweeted about racial injustice, garnering backlash from Japanese conservatives. Prior to this, she had mostly avoided direct discussion about racial issues, except to acknowledge her multiracial identity (Ho & Tanaka, 2022). This careful management of Osaka’s image in her early career has perhaps allowed her to get away with activism—a longtime contentious issue for elite athletes, but especially for sportswomen whose voices are often excluded (Cooky & Antunovic, 2020; Roberts, 2022).…”

Reviewing and problematizing methods and analytical strategies of discourse analysis in sport, exercise, and physical education studies

“…Applying DA to the field of sport, exercise, and PE (broadly) is neither a recent invention (McGannon and Mauws, 2000) nor an exception. For example, certain versions of DA have proven suitable for sociological analysis of conflicting articulations, in tensions, power relations, and effects of power such as different perspectives of masculinity within team sport (Crocket, 2013), discursive practices among users of new media technology in cycling (Rivers, 2020), the representation of gender and race in advertising and newspapers (Ho and Tanaka, 2021; Hunt and Jaworska, 2019), and marginalization of female referees in Canadian soccer (Reid and Dallaire, 2019). Therefore, the purpose of this study was to conduct a review of DA studies in social science research within the field of sport, exercise, and PE.…”