Ethnic migration and memory: disputes over the ethnic origins of Japanese Brazilians in Japan

Abstract

Research on Japanese Brazilian migration to Japan has followed most ethnic migration studies in assuming a conceptual opposition between an ‘official’ view held by the Japanese government's immigration policy, which conceives Japanese Brazilians as culturally close to the Japanese, and an ‘informal’ view held by Japanese Brazilians themselves, which maintains they are closer to Brazilian culture. I argue that, although the tension between the official and informal views is certainly important, it should not be reduced to a contrast between national cultures. This becomes clear when we examine the way Japanese Brazilians living in Japan organize commemorations related to the memory of their Japanese ancestors' past migration to Brazil. In this case, official and informal discourses do conflict, but this tension focuses not so much on the opposition between Japanese and Brazilian culture, but on how different representations of the past affect the current status of Japanese Brazilians in Japan.

Keywords:

• Japanese Brazilians
• ethnic identity
• ethnic migration
• ethnic organizations
• memory
• commemoration

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank my collaborators in Kobe and São Paulo for their generosity and understanding. I am also grateful to Orion Klautau for his insights and encouragement. Finally, I would like to thank Motoji Matsuda, Yasuko Takezawa, Shinzo Araragi, Koichi Mori, Renato Rivera and two anonymous referees at ERS for their valuable comments and suggestions.

Notes

1. For general accounts of ethnic migration, see Brubaker (1998), Joppke (2005) and Skrentny et al. (2007). For studies on specific cases in Germany and Israel, see Joppke and Rosenhek (2002) and Remennick (2002), for ethnic migration in Hungary, see Fox (2003, 2007) and for Greece, see Christou (2006a, 2006b).

2. The interviews were conducted in Portuguese and Japanese, sometimes both at the same time. I translated all the excerpts that are quoted in the text. All names are pseudonyms.

3. There were only 622 Brazilian nationals living in Kobe by the end of 2007. Hyogo prefecture, where Kobe is located, had more expressive numbers: 3,324 Brazilian nationals were registered. But these numbers are still comparatively very small (Japan Immigration Association 2008).

4. Most Japanese migrants at the time worked in coffee plantations at first. The migratory flows were interrupted after 1941, because Brazil declared Japan a war enemy, but the migration process recommenced in 1953. Approximately 240,000 migrants went to Brazil during that period. On Japanese migration to Brazil, see Lesser (1999) and Makabe (1999).

5. It is significant that many recent publications in Japan about Japanese Brazilians have substituted the expression ‘Japanese Brazilian’ (nikkei burajirujin) for simply ‘Brazilian’ (burajirujin) (e.g. Ikegami 2001; Onai 2003).

6. Retrieved on 20 August 2008 from http://www.city.kobe.jp/cityoffice/17/020/emigration.htm.

7. Historians, however, emphasize that the Japanese in Brazil were given considerable support by the Japanese government, especially when compared to other immigrant groups (Sakurai 1999).