Between 1886 and the early 1930's, about 2,750,000 immigrants came to Brazil from all over the world (20). This included some 230,000 Japanese; the majority arrived between 1908 and the early 1930s. Japanese arrived a bit later than did wage workers from Europe because Brazilian elites were not sure if this kind of “colored” people would fit into their society. Short of farmhands since the abolition of slavery in 1888, desperate coffee plantation owners finally prevailed. Today, about 1.6 million people of Japanese descent are citizens of Brazil. This number of Japanese Brazilians is the largest Nikkei (people of Japanese descent living abroad) community in the world, and far surpasses the number of US Japanese Americans, which stands at about 1.2 to1.3 million. The population of Japanese Brazilians is only 0.868 percent of the total Brazilian population (18). Nonetheless, Japanese immigrants and their descendants have stood out in Brazil ever since their arrival, and they have often been ostracized and discriminated against.
The troubled Brazilian economy of the early 1900s meant that Japanese Brazilians faced economic difficulties, and many chose to become dekassegui (“working abroad”) migratory workers in Japan. It is estimated that about 250,000 Nikkei Brazilians had gone to Japan by 1997 (34). Although the majority of Nikkei in Brazil had never seen their ancestors’ homeland, they were called “returnee migrants” in Japan. Both the Japanese government and the workers themselves assumed they would fit in culturally, but often they did not. By 2008, the number of these dekassegui migratory workers had risen to 312,582 (42). However, in the early 2000s Japan faced a major recession, as did much of the world. As a result, Japanese companies fired many of these migratory workers while keeping local Japanese workers; the number of dekassegui workers declined to 175,410 by 2014 (42).
Through various interviews, this book provides important human faces to these statistics, telling a compelling story of a diasporic community's quest for identity, at “home” and “abroad.” Nishida explains how the identities of Japanese Brazilians have been constructed historically. She analyzes how notions of identity have changed, depending on gender, age, and immigrant-generation (there are six now, since the first issei generation arrived around the turn of the twentieth century). She studies not only people of Japanese descent in Brazil, but also Japanese Brazilians who have resided in Japan. Thus, the study represents one of the very few books that deals with the social issues and identities of Japanese Brazilians in both places. This book makes us realize that if we are to understand Nikkei Brazilian identity today, we must study Nikkei in both Brazil and Japan. Nishida tells us that while “diaspora” means a group of people who share a departure or distance from a common ancestral space or origin, their identity cannot be reduced to any essential set of characteristics shared by all who fall into certain categories such as gender, generation, class, or nation. I totally agree. Diaspora-identity is constructed out of a variety of social, cultural, and political factors. It is dynamic, fluid, and in a constant state of flux.
One example of such complex fluidity is seen in the very interesting case of Okinawan Japanese Brazilians. One might criticize Nishida for almost lumping the Okinawan Japanese Brazilian community and mainland Japanese Brazilian community together. The history of Okinawa is very complicated, and Okinawan migrants in Brazil established communities that were separate from mainland Japanese migrants, as Nishida readily admits (14, 112). Yet, she does not really explore this ethnic separation (perhaps because of the many mixed marriages now between Okinawan Japanese Brazilians and mainland Japanese Brazilians). But mainland and Okinawan ethnic differences exist. A Japanese American of Okinawan descent, the historian Gary Okihiro, wrote that the different cultural and immigrant experiences of Okinawans have left a legacy that can still be seen in the Japanese American Nikkei community even today (“Acting Japanese” in
Japanese Diasporas: Unsung Pasts, Conflicting Presents and Uncertain Futures, Nobuko Adachi, ed., 2006). Nishida probably needs to pay more attention to such distinctions and take these factors into account in her analysis.
Nishida also could have expanded on the historical background of several Japanese Brazilian communities, such as Bastos and the Hirano community (both in São Paulo state), instead of just mentioning their names in passing. For example, she mentions that the parents of some of her informants were farmhands on a coffee plantation who had moved from Colônia Hirano and later re-migrated to Bastos (49, 50). In a study of diaspora-identity, it is very important to know something of the diasporees’ background; this might provide clues to identity formation. Both the Hirano and Bastos communities were established in rugged forests in the hinterlands of São Paulo state. The new migrants had to clear these forests to make agricultural fields and build their homes. But there were significant differences between them. The Hirano community (7.6 square miles) was established under a charismatic leader, Umpei Hirano, near a river and was intended for wet rice cultivation. But as a result, the people of the Hirano community lost one-third of their residents to malaria within a year, causing many to leave. Only Hirano's most devout followers stayed on. The parents of one of Nishida's interviewees is probably one of those who left the community at that time.
On the other hand, Bastos was one of four Japanese government-sponsored villages, with an area of 46.6 square miles. The people of Bastos moved there after the Japanese government had researched the incidence of tropical diseases in the location. They also received help to establish a Japanese school, a hospital with a Japanese doctor, a pharmacy, and an oil refinery. Residents of Bastos called themselves Bastense, a proud marker of identity. So the social and natural environments have been deeply influential in establishing a community's character and identity.
There are a few other, lesser things that might have improved the book greatly. For example, in place of the largely unneeded and unused national maps of Brazil and Japan, this book needs a map of the predominantly Japanese Brazilian areas in São Paulo state, showing the major railways and Japanese Brazilian communities. Such a simple geographic device would have shown the reader how important railways like the “Noroeste line” (49) and the “Mogiana line” (72) were to the developments of Nikkei communities.
Although this book might prove to be a bit difficult for people who do not have a good background on Japanese Brazilians and their history, it is well written and provides many firsthand accounts and other interesting stories of people trying to establish a sense of local identity in an ever internationalizing global world. For that, Nishida is to be commended.
