Naomi Osaka 大阪なおみ
Naomi Osaka is a tennis player, and currently the highest paid female athlete in the world (Blasi). She was born in Japan to a Haitian father and Japanese mother, she moved to the US when she was 3 years old and grew up there. Osaka was homeschooled and started representing Japan when she was 10. Her parents made this decision for her stating "She was born in Osaka and was brought up in a household of Japanese and Haitian culture. Quite simply, Naomi and her sister Mari have always felt Japanese so that was our only rationale"(Perrotta).
Osaka beat Serena Williams to win her first Grand Slam title at the 2018 US Open, then won her second Grand Slam at the 2019 Australian Open to become the world No.1 in singles. The first Japanese or Haitian person to be world No. 1 (Berkok). Naomi gave up her US nationality to represent Japan when she turned 22. Naomi Osaka has been known for her shy candid personality and has expressed regret about holding back her thoughts.(Macfarlane)
Recently she has been speaking out about racial injustice and supporting the Black Lives Matter movement. Last year two Japanese comedians apologized after saying she "needed some bleach" (Denyer). She has faced both backlash and support for her opinions on BLM. Naomi Osaka has fans around the world and many hope that her existence would encourage Japanese society to be more accepting of biracial people.
Place of Birth: Osaka, Japan
Nationality: Japanese (Gave up US Nationality to play for Japan)
Background of Parents: Father is Haitian and Mother is Japanese
Languages Spoken: English (native), Japanese (beginner speaking, intermediate understanding)
Profession: Tennis player
Sentiment Data from Youtube
Comments from a video titled " Naomi Osaka vs Coco Gauff - A Night to Remember "
Video Summary
Fans are on their way to the US Open 2019, some are interviewed and many express they are excited to see Coco Gauff (US representative) play today. Naomi Osaka plays and wins against Coco Gauff. After the match Naomi shares her winning moment and encourages Coco to speak to the interviewer with her rather than crying alone in the showers. Coco speaks while crying, they hug and Naomi gets to speak. Naomi starts to tear up as she recalls how she used to see Coco practicing at the same courts as her and about how they have both made it to where they are today.
Data Collection Parameters
Collected a random sample of 63 comments all with 3 likes or more, comments were counted more than once if they fit into more than one category. Due to the subjective nature of interpreting the comments there may be some discrepancies in the data. To see examples of comments that fit into a category, view the google sheet with extracted comments The example comments are listed under the graph and highlighted accordingly with the category on the left.
Data Analysis
The vast majority of comments were praise. The comments about her racial background were largely to express pride at her tennis skills and classy/kind/humble character example snippets of comments for each category include "ほんとに日本の誇り(truly the pride of Japan)", "That's blk unity n love there", "Haiti and Japanese parent brought up better PERSON". Absolutely no mention of her language ability. Thus this supports the idea that groups are more likely to claim a mixed individual who has achieved great success in a certain area or who is held in high regard by others.
Comments from a video titled " What did Naomi Osaka speak by a Japanese message? "
Video Summary
Naomi Osaka is on a Japanese talk show and speaks a little bit of Japanese to thank her fans for supporting her and mentions her family.
Data Collection Parameters
Collected a random sample of 44 comments with at least one like, comments were counted more than once if they fit into more than one category. Due to the subjective nature of interpreting the comments there may be some discrepancies in the data. To see examples of comments that fit into a certain category, view the google sheet with extracted comments. The example comments are colored to match the pie chart.
Category Breakdown
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Data Analysis
The above graphs break down the data from the "Racial background" and "Language Ability" categories from the first graph above. In the language ability graph many commented about her lack of Japanese fluency, this shows that these people had expectations for her ability to be higher than what was shown in this video. The large amounts of comments related to language ability might also be linked to the title of the video, which states that Naomi will be speaking in Japanese. The title of the video is in english, thus it is more likely that english speaking viewers are watching this video.
Many people are mentioning her racial background. In the video the fact that her father is Haitian is not mentioned. Thus we can assume that many of the people commenting on this video are already familiar with Naomi enough to know her racial background. Another interesting thing to note about this sample was that the people who disapprove of her representing Japan are evenly split for two entirely opposite reasons.
Sentiment Data from Twitter
Tweets @ naomiosaka on June 18th, 2020
Data Collection Parameters
Collected a random sample of 100 tweets on June 18th, 2020 which contained @ naomiosaka. Tweets were counted only once and put into the category they most closely fit. Tweets in Japanese or english and only one tweet per account were organized by sentiment (30 tweets uncounted/unable to be categorized). Due to the subjective nature of interpreting the comments there may be some discrepancies in the data. To see examples of comments that fit into a category, view the google sheet with extracted comments The example comments are listed under the graph and highlighted accordingly with the category on the left. The uncounted comments are highlighted pink.
Data Analysis
There are a large amount of news tweets on this day since Naomi Osaka was nominated for Sportswoman of the year by BET and also set to do a talk for TIME. Naomi Osaka has been making headlines this month by taking a stance against racial injustice and showing her support for the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement. There has been some backlash with a decent part of the backlash stemming from her support for a protest in Japan despite the fact that Covid 19 was still around. The data shows that there are a large number of english comments that support her, and in net total the majority of people tweeting @ her are supportive. Comments in Japanese seem to be more supportive in other categories like her tennis career, and compliment her for her past achievements. It should be noted that within the supportive comments for Naomi's stance on BLM, and the news tweets, many mentioned her racial background but since tweets were not double counted the racial identity category became smaller.