The reigning orthodoxy of race in enlightened circles has triumphed in just about the last place would expect.  Japan, which takes pride in its racial homogeneity, has selected a young woman with a Japanese mother and an African-American father as Miss Japan-Universe, to be entered in the Donald Trump-owned Miss Universe contest.   The young lady goes by the name of Ariana Miyamoto, which I presume to be her mother’s, not her father’s name.  And she is certainly lovely. I think this is a very good thing, for Japanese attitudes toward mixed-race offspring were not always so benign.  When I first visited Japan in 1967, I had dinner with a group of mixed-race offspring of Japanese mothers and American servicemen, and they were a faced with serious economic and social discrimination.  Racial purity is a rather dangerous doctrine, as the history of the German Third Reich and Japanese Imperium prove. It will be very interesting to see how...(Read Full Post)