Four-time Grand Slam winner Osaka, whose mother is Japanese and father Haitian, climbed a replica Mount Fuji on Friday to light the cauldron in the ceremony’s crowning moment.

And she wasn't the only athlete of dual heritage representing the host.

Japanese-Beninese NBA basketball star Rui Hachimura was one of the flagbearers leading Japan’s team into the Olympic Stadium.

Osaka and Hachimura are adored in Japan and boast lucrative sponsorship and advertising deals. But many young people of black and Japanese heritage still struggle in an often conservative and largely homogenous society.

“There were many times when it was hard,” 14-year-old Omuro, born to a Japanese mother and a black American father, told AFP of her childhood in a town north of Tokyo.

“People would whisper behind my back and make fun of me at extracurricular clubs, or when I was walking down the street.”

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