Japanese, Haitian, And Now A Grand Slam Winner: Naomi Osaka’s Historic Journey To The U.S. Open washingtonpost.com

Nine days before she beat Serena Williams in the finals of the U.S. Open, Naomi Osaka already seemed bored talking about her own life story.

“Um, I think everybody knows this by now,” she said last month, with a small laugh. “Like I grew up in New York until I was 8 or 9 and then I moved to Florida, so…” She shrugged.

It was a somewhat oversimplified version of the rising tennis star’s unusual story: Her father, Leonard Francois, is Haitian; her mother, Tamaki Osaka, is Japanese. The two met in Hokkaido when Francois, then a college student in New York, was visiting the island. According to a recent profile in the New York Times Magazine, Tamaki Osaka’s father accused her of bringing disgrace on the family when he learned that she was dating a black foreigner, and the two moved to Osaka, Japan’s second largest city. It was while they were living there that the future tennis star was born.