Ballerino giapponese fischiato per aver vinto una gara di flamenco spagnolo

***The Telegraph reports:***

A Japanese dancer has been booed after becoming the first foreigner to win at Spain’s most prestigious flamenco festival.

When the Cante de las Minas festival jury chose Junko Hagiwara as best female dancer, applause was mixed with jeers in the town of La Unión in Murcia.

The 38-year-old from Kawasaki, whose stage name is La Yunko, said she did not hear the hecklers because her mind “went blank” after the announcement.

No foreign competitor had previously won the “Desplante” award at the annual festival held every August.

“When I dance, I don’t think I am a foreigner, that I am Japanese. It doesn’t occur to me. I am simply on stage, I listen to the guitar, the singing, and what I feel I express in my dancing,” Ms Hagiwara told local newspaper La Opinión de Murcia.

“I consider myself to be a purist of the genre. True flamenco purists don’t think about where I come from.”

**Read more:** [**https://www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2024/09/03/japanese-dancer-booed-winning-spanish-flamenco-competition/**](https://www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2024/09/03/japanese-dancer-booed-winning-spanish-flamenco-competition/)

And the rival also said this was rigged. What a bunch of sore losers. I’m from Spain btw.

Racist and xenophobic people are such pathetic scum…

I’ve been several times in Seville and always visited some “tablao flamenco” and it’s becoming common to see Japanese performers together with Spaniards or solo. There’re from guitarists to dancers and they are as good as their Spanish counter parts.

Actually, something that I like a lot is to see how well they work together. In case people doesn’t know, Flamenco is heavily based on musical improvisation, so most of the time one will start (dancing, playing guitar, singing or clapping) then the rest follows but they never know whats next. So when you see these performances knowing this and the level of understanding among them, that they don’t even need to flag changes, it’s very impressive.

As far as I know, flamenco organisations have absolutely zero chill with this type of behaviour, anything racist, xenophobic or any type of abuse is severely punished. Think that this music has been carried by gypsies for most of history and they were heavily discriminated, so the organisations grew to protect the art and the artists. The artist that accused the competition of politics better have proof or the backslash will be severe.

C’mon, let’s not turn Europe into the United States. Culture is to be shared.

What a bunch of idiots those who did it. There is a surprisingly high number of Japanese, particularly women, who dance flamenco.

Real classy

The recent Miss Japan is originally from Ukraine and got a similar reaction by many Japanese people. So I guess this is universal.

This whole article is complete nonsense to be fair there was a couple of boos in a sea of applause according to the video in the article, probably from friends and family of the of contestants. But yea lets make that the story because outrage sells.