Karolina Shiino is a 20-year-old student at Waseda University in Tokyo. Her mother is Japanese and her father is Brazilian. She was born and raised in Japan, but she also speaks Portuguese and English fluently. Karolina loves studying languages and cultures and she wants to be an interpreter or translator one day.

She is very proud of her mixed heritage and she believes that people should be free to choose their own identity. “I am both Japanese and Brazilian,” she says. “I don’t see any reason why I have to choose between the two.”

In 2024, Karolina will represent Japan in the Miss Universe beauty pageant. She is excited about this opportunity to meet women from different countries and learn about their lives. However, not everyone is happy about her decision to take part in the competition. Some people think that she is not ‘Japanese enough’ to be Miss Japan.

Karolina is not worried about what other people say. She knows that she is not the first mixed-race person to represent Japan. In 2015, Ariana Miyamoto, who has a Japanese mother and an African American father, won the Miss Japan competition. Like Ariana, Karolina has also had to deal with racism and discrimination. “When I was a child, I was often teased for being different,” she admits. “But my parents always taught me to be proud of who I am.”