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Nine days before beating Serena Williams in the US Open final, Naomi Osaka seemed already bored by talking about her own story.
"Um, I think everyone knows it now," she said last month with a chuckle. "As I grew up in New York until the age of 8 or 9, and then moved to Florida, then …" She shrugged.
It was a somewhat simplified version of the unusual story of the rising star of tennis: his father, Leonard Francois, is Haitian; his mother, Tamaki Osaka, is Japanese. The two met in Hokkaido when François, then a student in New York, was visiting the island. According to a recent New York Times Magazine profile, Tamaki Osaka's father accused her of scandalizing the family when she learned that she was dating a foreigner and that the two moved to Osaka, the second largest city. from Japan. It was then that they lived there that the future tennis star was born.
Yes, her last name is the same as her hometown, which is another thing she is tired of talking about.
"Are you ready?", She said when a journalist questioned him on Saturday. "We're recycling a 2014 joke! All those born in Osaka, their last name is Osaka.
"I never know what to do when asked where I'm from," Osaka tweeted in May 2017. "I just say FL, because say that Japan is starting a useless conversation."
She may be tired of questions about her complicated identity, but given her growing celebrity, it's unlikely they'll disappear anytime soon. The 20-year-old is currently ranked seventh in the world and her win on Saturday was Japan's first Grand Slam champion. She is also considered the first Grand Slam winner of Haitian descent. "At the US Open, Naomi Osaka seems to be the second best player in the world," said a New Yorker headline.
On Saturday, Osaka was inadvertently found at the center of controversy after referee Carlos Ramos decided to penalize Williams for his tone. Because of his widely criticized call, Washington Post sports columnist Sally Jenkins wrote, "We will never know if young Osaka really won the US Open in 2018 or if a man would make Serena feel his power. Williams. "
Yet, despite all this flood of anger that followed, virtually nothing was directed against Osaka, who was praised for his humility. At the award ceremony, she cried and said to the crowd, "I'm sorry to have to finish like this."
Then she turned to Williams and greeted her saying, "I'm really grateful that I could play with you.
Osaka has frequently described Williams, the winner of 23 Grand Slams, as her idol and inspiration. And like Williams, she was trained primarily by her father, as well as her older sister Mari, who is also a professional tennis player.
"I was 3 years old when I started playing tennis," she told Bleacher Report last month. "It's the only thing I really knew and the best thing to do.
At that time, his parents had left Japan and moved to Long Island to get closer to François' family. Several years later, they will move to South Florida, where many of the country's best young tennis players are trained. Broward County, where they settled, also has a large Haitian population: Creole is the third most widely spoken language after English and Spanish in the county. Osaka's education, she said in interviews, has been influenced by both Japanese and Haitian culture. When she speaks, she sounds like any other 20-year-old girl in Florida. Asked about her career goals in 2016, she replied, "To be the best, like no one has ever been. It's a quote from Pokemon, I'm sorry. This is the Pokemon theme song. "
"She has some of the purest raw power in the game, a service that she can use to dictate points and a forehand that generates phenomenal racket head speed," wrote Louisa Thomas in Racquet Magazine. "Even at 16, she had a forehand at over a hundred miles an hour."
When Osaka became professional in 2013, her dual citizenship meant that she had a choice between playing for Japan or the United States. His father chose Japan, thinking that it would open up more opportunities for him.
The country is fairly homogeneous and Osaka, as a black woman, stands out. "I could see the shock on people's faces," she told Racquet magazine in March, remembering her first tournaments.
[Japan’s half-black Miss Universe says discrimination gives her ‘extra motivation’]
After the 2016 Australian Open, Osaka said it was "touching" that there are Japanese flags on the booth and that Japanese fans are encouraging it. "I still think that they are surprised that I am Japanese," she explained.
But Osaka is not quite comfortable speaking in Japanese, which is understandable, since she left the country as a toddler. At press conferences last week, she answered questions in Japanese but answered most of them in English. Yet his messages on Twitter and Instagram alternate between the two languages.
"I do not know if you know, but I can understand most of the Japanese and I speak when I want it", she tweeted in January, adding "this concerns my family and my friends".
"Thank you always for your continued support," she told fans on her website, available in both languages. "I'll do my best every game! And I will continue to try to speak Japanese better.
With his Grand Slam victory, Osaka has become an overnight sensation in Japan. A teacher from Kobe City told the Associated Press that Osaka 's post – match comments were "so cool and yet so Japanese". But the wave of headlines referring to her as the first Japanese woman to win the championship as her black identity is erased.
Osaka, for its part, has repeatedly reminded reporters that she is Japanese and Haitian. But she does not seem to be questioned on her Haitian side as often.
"Talk about your relationship with Japanese culture and American culture," a reporter told him Wednesday after Osaka's quarterback victory. "How did the two cultures make you what you are?"
"My father was Haitian, so I grew up in a Haitian house in New York," Osaka reminded him. "I lived with my grandmother. And the Japanese of my mother and I have also grown up with Japanese culture, and if you say American, I guess because I lived in America, I have it too. . . I hope to have answered your question. I do not know."
This may not be her favorite subject, or what she is perfectly comfortable with, but Osaka is aware that her multicultural experience allows her to become an international celebrity. At the Australian Open 2016, she was asked why she had so many fans.
"Probably because they think I'm interesting," she told reporters. "Maybe it's because they can not really pin down who I am, so it's like everyone can comfort me."
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