Sarah Dzafce is no longer Miss Finland. And for good damn reason.
The beauty pageant contest winner sparked controversy last week when she posted a picture of herself slanting her eyes to make what in Japanese would be called 吊り目, the almond-shaped eyes that are common to many East Asian peoples.
Dzafce isn’t Asian. She posted the pic along with a caption about “eating with a Chinese person.” (You can see the pic here.)
Dzafce has been stripped of her title and even excoriated by Finland’s Prime Minister, who called the post “thoughtless and stupid.” For her part, the beauty pageant star said her friend added the caption, and that she did it to visualize how she’d been battling a splitting headache. She’s since posted an apology on her Instagram.
The incident has, understandably, made headlines across Asia. Ironically, one of the major papers pushing the story in Japanese has been Sankei Shimbun.
Why do I say “ironically”? Sankei is an explicitly right-wing publication that devotes a lot of effort to stoking fears about foreigners in Japan – particularly, as of late, the Kurds living in Saitama Prefecture. It also runs Japan Forward, a staunchly revanchist site replete with historical denialism. Forward, for example, has run multiple articles by and in defense of Mark Ramseyer, a Harvard Law School professor who wrote a piece of pseudo-academic slop dismissing the existence of “comfort women” in Korea during World War II. It also regularly publishes pieces that deny the Nanjing Massacre in China.
A history of racism
But let’s put that aside for now. Stopped clocks and all that. Because Sankei has been covering the absolute foolishness coming from Finland’s Finns Party, part of the ruling coalition. The party organized a backlash in which members such as MP Juho Erola posted pictures of themselves making the same racist gesture and saying, “I am Sarah!” It doesn’t take much imagination to see why that would make headlines in Japan.
This is nothing new for the Finns Party, it seems. Then-Finance Minister Riikka Purra had to apologize in 2023 when social media users unearthed posts she made in which she talked about “Turkish monkeys,” used racial slurs against Black people, and mused about shooting immigrants on public transit. What’s more, Purra only had her job because the previous Finance Minister, Jussi Halla-aho, had stepped down after his history of prejudicial comments against Islam and Somalis came to light.
(As a side note, “aho” in Japan’s Kansai dialect means “moron.” Nice little coincidence, that.)
To its credit, the Finns Party realized that, maybe, it had gone too far. After objections from Japan’s Chief Cabinet Secretary Kihara Minoru, party leadership reprimanded a Finnish parliament member and a European Parliament member for posting their own slant-eye pics.
History is clear about what the Finns Party is: a sack of racist shitheads who seem eager to out-shithead one another. But no one should be surprised by their actions. This is exactly the sort of behavior that the war on “cancel culture” has sought to enable and embolden worldwide.
And Japan’s right is as much to blame for fomenting this as anyone else.
Cancel culture got canceled, and we’re all the worse for it
The so-called “war on woke” was started by America’s right as a way to stop the steady advancement of minority rights in the US. “Woke” originated in Black Vernacular English to mean being aware of the injustices built into the system.
