Yuki Iozumi was fretting about how her shoulders might look in a wedding dress.
"I feel like I look too muscular,” said the tiny-framed Iozumi, 20, relating how her friends had told her that practicing karate had changed her body. "I think it’s not so feminine.”
Traditional femininity was her goal. Although Iozumi, a second-year community studies major, wasn’t getting married, she was competing in a beauty pageant at Aoyama Gakuin University in Tokyo — part of a wildly popular, and unabashedly skin-deep, phenomenon at Japanese universities known as Miss Con.