Beauty Over Brains: Japan’s Skin-Deep University Pageants

Yuki Iozumi was fretting about how her shoulders might look in a wedding dress.

“I feel like I look too muscular,” said the tiny-framed Ms. Iozumi, 20, relating how her friends had told her that practicing karate had changed her body. “I think it’s not so feminine.”

Traditional femininity was her goal. Although Ms. Iozumi, a second-year community studies major, wasn’t getting married, she was competing in a beauty pageant at Aoyama Gakuin University in Tokyo — part of a wildly popular, and unabashedly skin-deep, phenomenon at Japanese universities known as “Miss Con.”

The pageants, called Miss Contest in full, are staged at numerous campuses across Japan, including at pedigreed universities like the University of Tokyo and Keio University that are considered training grounds for elite political and business leaders.

While beauty pageants persist in the West, what is different in Japan is that they are sponsored by student groups at institutions that proclaim august principles of intellectual achievement and preparation for professional life. The contests also perpetuate a culture that often places women in rigid gender roles.