Naomi Osaka Became a Mega-Celebrity in Japan Overnight. Then the Questions Started Coming.

The rising sun reached Nemuro at 4:50 a.m. on Sunday, Sept. 9, 2018, illuminating the small fishing town on the northeast edge of Hokkaido before anywhere else in the country. Within 10 minutes of the morning light reaching his window, Tetsuo Osaka was watching another distant, ascendant star that he’d seen before the rest of Japan: his granddaughter Naomi, who was winning her first major title at the U.S. Open as a new day dawned in the country she represented.

Hours after her win, with a media storm already brewing a world away in New York, 73-​year-​old Tetsuo had a far more tranquil media scrum outside his home on a cool, crisp day in Nemuro. “I still don’t grasp that my grandchild has become the best in the world,” a beaming Tetsuo told gathered reporters.

Unlike when Serena Williams had to ask the weeping Naomi if she was crying happy tears during the trophy ceremony, there was no ambiguity around emotions caused by her victory in Japan. Naomi’s face was on the front page of major Japanese newspapers for days, with headlines like “The Top Feat of a Japanese Player” and “Overnight Queen—Powerful and Stable.” Longtime Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe congratulated Naomi on her breakthrough victory and thanked her “for giving Japan energy and excitement at this time of hardship,” referring to an earthquake that had hit southern Hokkaido three days earlier, killing dozens. Kei Nishikori, the longtime standard-​bearer of Japanese tennis, sent Naomi a congratulatory tweet written solely in the universal language of emojis. The U.S. Open final had only been broadcast live in Japan on Wowow, a premium cable channel with limited reach, but the news of Naomi’s win dominated all the biggest media platforms in Japan—print, television, web, electronic billboards—for a full week after her win. Naomi, who had only been well known in Japan to tennis fans, was suddenly a sensation across the culture.

In various man‑on‑the-street interviews, a popular genre for vloggers in Japan, dozens expressed their admiration for Naomi’s achievement. The average Tokyoite had little interest in or understanding of why Serena had been upset or why the crowd had been booing. Some suggested, not entirely erroneously, that the American public had foremost been upset that their player was losing; one man wistfully suggested that the anger directed at a foreigner’s success reflected the xenophobia that had taken over America during Donald Trump’s presidency.

Thanks to a coincidence of the tennis calendar, Naomimania would soon pick up pace on the ground: The next big tournament on the WTA calendar after the U.S. Open was the mid-​September Toray Pan Pacific Open in Tokyo, meaning Naomi was Japan-​bound at the peak of national interest in her. Despite the facts that she had never resided in Tokyo and had only spent a few sporadic months in Japan since leaving the country at age 3, Japanese media billed Naomi’s arrival as a homecoming.

After a stopover in Los Angeles to film appearances on Ellen and The Steve Harvey Show, Naomi, her parents, and her managers flew to Tokyo Haneda Airport. A throng of fans and photographers were waiting for Naomi as she walked out. It was the breathless beginning of the pop-star treatment that Naomi would experience for the rest of her Tokyo trip. One night in her Tokyo hotel room, Naomi’s mother, Tamaki, decided to run an experiment: Could she flip through all the channels without seeing her daughter’s face at least once? She could not.

Naomi had already done satellite interviews from New York with major Japanese networks NHK and TBS the day after her U.S. Open win, answering some questions in Japanese—most often when talking about her favorite foods. Others she answered in English, like when a TBS interviewer asked her how it felt to be the first Japanese major champion. “I am very honored,” Naomi said. “I don’t know how to say that in Japanese.”

The nation was enchanted. “She is such a lovable character,” Seiji Miyane, an NTV talk-show host, said after his interview with Naomi. The Associated Press wrote that Naomi’s “broken Japanese works as an asset, apologizing occasionally for getting the wrong word—or not knowing the Japanese word at all.” When the publisher Jiyū Kokumin Sha announced its candidates for the words and phrases of the year in November 2018, they included Naomi-bushi, or Naomi-​esque, describing her “shyly delivered, simple Japanese phrases.”

Though more than 90 percent of her public speaking was in English, Japanese media and viewers often enthusiastically pointed out the Japaneseness they saw in her presentation. “She’s insanely Japanese in her mannerisms, right down to the head tilt,” one YouTube commenter said under a video of Naomi. The magazine Weekly Toyo Keizai wrote that Naomi “is not the type of person who asserts herself boldly, but she is shy and humble and that makes her look more like a Japanese.” Motoko Rich, the Tokyo bureau chief for the New York Times, said the way Naomi had apologized for her victory during the U.S. Open trophy ceremony had “demonstrated a characteristically Japanese trait.” Naoko Ohno, a Japanese tennis fan interviewed in Rich’s Times story, said that Naomi’s Japanese qualities ran deep. “Her soul is Japanese,” Ohno said. “She doesn’t display her joy so excessively. Her playing style is aggressive, but she is always humble in interviews. I like that.”

These declarations of Naomi’s Japaneseness were particularly meaningful to Japanese people who looked like Naomi and had their own Japaneseness frequently doubted and challenged. The spotlight on Naomi meant more light than ever before was reflecting onto mixed-race people, an often marginalized and overlooked part of Japanese society. In Japan, where around 98 percent of the population is ethnically Japanese, people of mixed Japanese and foreign backgrounds are commonly called hafu, from the English word “half.” The term hafu is divisive among those described by it; many parents of mixed children, in particular, do not like hafu because they consider it to be a pejorative like “half-​breed.” Thinking that hafu makes their children sound less than whole, some have proposed the term daburu, from the English “double”; instead of being only half of something, they can be fully two things.

“The way the Japanese people celebrated her made me think that the media and the people really accept her as pure Japanese,” one darker-​skinned Japanese woman said, before adding caveats. “I’m really happy with her achievement, but from my point of view as a half-​Japanese, half-​Black person myself, I don’t want Japanese people to have this stereotype that we’re more athletic just because we’re Black. … If the Japanese society continues to look at us only as athletic people, then they will never realize issues like racism.”

Several of the most famous mixed-​race Japanese celebrities had also been athletes, like the basketball player Rui Hachimura and the baseball pitcher Yu Darvish. There was also Denny Tamaki, who was elected governor of Okinawa Prefecture around the same time that Naomi won the U.S. Open, and a Miss Universe Japan, Ariana Miyamoto. But those people had all grown up in Japan and developed under a more gradually brightening spotlight, nothing like the on switch that had instantly illuminated Naomi after her major win.

Though identity politics had nowhere near the prominence in Japan as they did in the United States, Japanese people with one foreign parent, like Naomi, suddenly found themselves a topic of some curiosity and interest as the homogenous Japanese society was suddenly foregrounding and festooning a different-looking icon. Joe Oliver, a half-Black, half-Japanese engineer and model, was interviewed by many outlets in the days after Naomi’s win and spoke of the bullying he had experienced as a child—a common theme for mixed Japanese people interviewed. “I think mixed-raced people’s success, such as Osaka’s, can help to bring down the wall most Japanese have between people with different backgrounds,” Oliver told Reuters. Oliver and others also hoped that Naomi’s fame would bring attention to serious issues multiracial people who weren’t sports superstars had faced, like housing and hiring discrimination. When vlogger Max D. Capo asked him how Japanese people on the street would feel about her “if you take Naomi Osaka away from tennis,” Oliver’s answer was quick and blunt. “Oh, she’s a foreigner,” Oliver said. “That’s how Japanese people think.”

Baye McNeil, a Brooklyn-​born Black writer who has lived in Japan for nearly two decades, said that Japanese people’s limited exposure to Black people—the same imprecise Japanese term for “Black,” kokujin, is used to describe dark-​skinned people from places as far-​flung as Senegal and Fiji—made them quick to ascribe positive or negative stereotypes. “Whatever she does has an effect on me, because unfortunately, whatever one Black person does in Japan affects all of us,” McNeil said of Naomi. “If one Black guy robs a Japanese woman, or some Black soldier rapes a Japanese woman in Okinawa, that’s going to affect me. Because of the limited imagination of the racial sense of Japanese people, they can’t see Black people as individuals, they see us as a monolith. And Naomi is included in that now. So whatever she does, her greatness shines on me.”

McNeil devised what he calls an “ABC” rubric for measuring how Japanese someone is deemed to be by three metrics: Appearing Japanese, Behaving Japanese, and Communicating in Japanese. While Naomi would have low scores in A and C, he said, her B score was immense, both from her shy, deferential demeanor and her enthusiasm for Japanese pop culture staples like anime, video games, and Pokémon. “Initially, I think Japanese people were really charmed by her,” McNeil told me. “She was kind of an ideal combination of Western and Eastern qualities. She had this shyness of the Japanese background, but she also had this aggressiveness of her Western influences. That combination is something that people really aspire to. They wish they could get that, capture it, bottle it.”

Sure enough, Japanese brands were lining up to capture, bottle, and sell the essence of Naomi Osaka.

Before her U.S. Open win, Naomi’s annual endorsement earnings were estimated at $1.5 million; that number was now rising exponentially, with buzz that Naomi could soon surpass Serena’s $18 million in annual endorsement income. With the 2020 Tokyo Olympics now thought to be less than two years away, a feeding frenzy had begun among Japanese brands looking for a female face of the Games. Kei Nishikori, who had earned $33 million in endorsements over a recent 12-​month period, according to Forbes, was frequently pointed to as the obvious analog. “We manage Kei so we know how strong that market is for endorsements—the blueprint was there,” Naomi’s agent, Stuart Duguid, told British reporters after her U.S. Open win. “There’s a lot of companies for whom Kei is the male and they are looking for a female, so it couldn’t be better timing.”

While American tennis pundits had often side-​eyed Naomi’s choice to play for Japan, suggesting it had been a cynical cash grab, there was little such sentiment or skepticism in Japan. “I think among non-​Japanese people, pretty much everyone feels it was a power move, it was a monetary decision, because it’s the smart move,” McNeil told me. “But as far as Japanese people are concerned, I haven’t heard anything about any concern with sponsorship. Honestly, I don’t think people think in those terms … I just think it’s a different culture, and Japanese culture isn’t inclined to think that she would choose Japanese as her nationality for financial reasons.”

While most of the spotlight on Naomi focused on what she had done days earlier, there was also sidebar speculation in Japan about what might happen 13 months from now, on her 22^nd birthday: By law, Japanese people who have reached the age of 22 are no longer allowed to hold dual citizenship and are forced to expatriate from other countries if they wish to keep their Japanese citizenship.

Naomi was well known to be a dual U.S.-​Japan citizen, and the topic of Naomi’s citizenship dilemma was the focus of another man‑on‑the-​street video made by the YouTube channel Asian Boss, yielding a wide range of reactions:

“I think she should choose Japan because she’s winning as a Japanese player. I think it’ll be easier to play at the top level with Japanese citizenship. … She’d have more competition in the States.”

“English is her mother tongue, and she’s going to spend more time in America.”

“I feel like she identifies more with her American side, but Japanese people are getting overly excited about calling her Japanese. I think they just want to say that a Japanese person is succeeding.”

“I’d support her, that wouldn’t change. Even if she decides to go with her American citizenship, she still has Japanese blood in her. I just want to continue to support her.”

One 23-year-old woman in the video who had been forced to renounce her dual citizenship with Canada grew emotional as she discussed her experience. “Both countries were part of my identity, but because Japanese law makes you choose one, I feel like my identity is sort of dismissed,” she said. “It’s not accepted here, which makes me sad. I feel bad that [Naomi] has to choose, so I empathize with her … I hope there will be a day when I can get back my lost nationality.”

Naomi expressed rare frustration when asked at a press conference weeks later what her citizenship choice would be. “I don’t really understand why people keep asking me this,” she said. “I’m pretty sure it’s obvious: I’m playing for Japan. Not to be disrespectful or anything, but I don’t really get where the conclusion that it’s a hard choice for me or anything comes from.”

Naomi did indeed keep her Japanese citizenship and continued playing for Japan. But like roughly an estimated million of her Japanese compatriots who have evaded the loosely enforced law, Naomi in fact kept her dual citizenship, too: Naomi’s name has never appeared on the Quarterly Publication of Individuals, Who Have Chosen to Expatriate published by the U.S. Internal Revenue Service in the years before or after her 22^nd birthday.

Though it had long been a focus in the coverage of her in English-​language media, Naomi only occasionally got questions from Japanese media about her multicultural background; some Japanese commenters were critical of this trend, complaining that Naomi was asked too many basic, infantilizing questions about frivolous topics. Indeed, at her big arrival press conference in Japan, she had been asked questions about light topics like eating ice cream and what her next post on Instagram might be, before someone asked her to reflect on how she was changing conceptions of Japanese identity. After some confusion over the question when it was mistranslated by the interpreter, Naomi largely demurred. “I don’t really think too much about my identity or whatever,” she said. “I know that the way that I was brought up, I don’t know, people tell me I act kind of Japanese? So I guess there’s that.”

Naomi answered similarly in a separate interview quoted by the Associated Press. “When someone asks me a question like that, it really throws me off because then I really have to think about it,” Naomi said of her multicultural background. “I don’t know. I don’t really think that I’m three separate, like, mixes of whatever. I just think that I’m me.”

This article is adapted from Naomi Osaka: Her Journey to Finding Her Power and Her Voice by Ben Rothenberg with permission from Dutton, an imprint of the Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC. Copyright © 2024 by Ben Rothenberg.