Japanese Diaspora in Brazil

 How Japanese immigrants in São Paulo define and express their identity, and how Brazilians view the Japanese diaspora within their nation.  Avatar photo: japanesefocus.org/-nobuko-adachi/3410/article.html

[fuckyeahnipobrazilians]

Wedding picture of a japanese immigrant and a brazilian woman. Circa 20′s or 30′s.

Photo found at Museu da Imigração do Estado de São Paulo. 

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Exclusion & Inclusion: Brazil & Japan

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Identity is much more than just where you and/or your parents were born! Patricia describes her family as Brazilian, even though her parents have Japanese, French, and Portuguese ancestry. It can be difficult to define one’s identity, and even though Patricia faced bullying for being “different” in Japan because of her ‘Brazilianess’ she incorporated being both Brazilian and Japanese into her “mixed” identity.  

[theasiaofbrazil]

But, where are you reeeeaalllly from?

In a settler colonial nation, like Brazil, no one is really ‘ethnically’* Brazilian. This is not to say that there is no ‘Brazilian’ identity or culture, as there obviously is, but rather that ethnicity/heritage are not the same as identity/culture/nationalism, although these concepts are often connected. The Indigenous people who owned the land that is now Brazil are not even technically Brazilian, because that name was given to the land by the European colonizers.

I say this as a Canadian, which is a fellow settler colonial nation, where no one from Canada can be ‘ethnically’ considered Canadian for the same reasons as mentioned above in the case of Brazil.

Nationalism seems to get mixed up with ethnicity and allows certain groups to claim that they are truly from a nation, and others are not. Of course, this claim comes from the construct of races, and then racilaizing certain groups, and then claiming that because of their visible physical differences they are “different” from the dominant group. 

The use of power and privilege of the original colonizers situates them as the archetype for what a citizen of a nation must look like. This marginalizes the groups that may not look like the dominant group. 

I want to argue that in settler colonial nations, no group really has any more claim to the nation than any other group (except the Indigenous people who actually deserve ALL the claim to the land..). In a settler colonial nation like Brazil and Canada, nationalism and the feeling of belonging and a home within a nation should not be exclusive. 

People of Japanese heritage in Brazil arguably are just as “Brazilian” as anyone else in the nation. Nationalism in settler colonial nations is constructed by/defined by the cultural of the people in the nation, it does not define who is allowed to make up the nation.

This video really reminds me of this tension within nations settled by colonizers: 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DWynJkN5HbQ

* Even though the term “ethnicity” can be controversial, it was the best term that I could think of for this context.

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@theasiaofbrazil obg por existir ♡

[theasiaofbrazil]

obrigado :’) 

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Japanese Immigrants Celebrate in Brazil

This week marks a century after the first Japanese immigrants landed in Brazil. And on the streets of Sao Paulo they are already celebrating. Let's take a lo...

2008 marked One Hundred years since the first ship, Kasato Maru, bringing Japanese immigrants arrived in Brazil. In the above video starting at 1:15/1:55 Yamazto, a child of Japanese immigrants, describes how he believes that people of Japanese descent living in Brazil are “more connected to [Japanese] cultural traditions” than people living in Japan. This is a great example of how people can become even more connected to their identity in the face of adversity. It is difficult to navigate ones identity when being completely immersed in a new and unknown culture/society. In the case of Brazil, immigrants from Japan arguably had to navigate new ways to not lose their identity while also adjusting to life in Brazil. 

I wonder how this act of holding on to ones Japanese identity has been, or not been, a barrier to immigrants’ abilities to be “accepted” into Brazilian society.

I also wonder if things are changing with younger generations, and if this means that younger generations have had to adapt their Japanese traditions even more than their ancestors did in order to hold onto their Japanese culture, while also becoming a part of Brazilian society.

I wonder what pieces of their culture have been lost and gained and changed in forging this new identity.

[fuckyeahnipobrazilians]

A 1988 stamp celebrating the 80 years of japanese immigration in Brazil

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Japanase streets in Brazil.. (at Liberdade)

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椰子樹 Yashi Ju.  O Coqueiro. The Coconut Tree.

Photos taken at the Centro de Estudos Nipo-Brasileiros (CENB). 

A community literary magazine founded in 1938 by and for the Japanese in Brazil, Yashi Ju’s wide range of essays and haiku and tanka poetry speaks of life in Brazil for the Japanese community. The magazine published its eleventh issue in 1941, and after a six year hiatus that, according to the Sociedade Brasileira de Cultura Japonese (Bunkyo) 1 was due more to disinterest within the Japanese community rather than pressure from Brazilian authorities, resumed publication of its twelfth issue in 1947 (550). 

The magazine still circulates today, but its readership has gotten older, as the number of Japanese-Brazilians who can read Japanese (and who are interested in the literary world of their grandparents) continues to decrease. Nowadays, explains Kenji Matsuzaka, who works at the Center, pieces about family, getting sick, and getting older are becoming more commonplace in the fabric of the magazine.

I’m curious about those six years in which nothing was written. Bunkyo actually writes that there was a “falta de vontade de seus participantes,” which I may have interpreted too liberally as “disinterest” (550). Was it because of economic reasons, or organizational reasons – or something else altogether – that there is no record of those six years? I’m curious because from what I’ve gathered so far, the Chinese in Brazil basically have written very little, and I’m intrigued by everything this absence in literature stands for – a political voice (or lack thereof) different from that of Chinese Americans in the United States, a self-history that is more difficult to piece together, and what, if not In the Year of the Boar and Jacky Robinson, do Chinese-Brazilian children read? 

“Bunkyo” is the abbreviated name in Japanese of the Sociedade Brasileira de Cultura Japonesa. ↩

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The Nikkei

The generations of Brazilians who are born in Brazil to Japanese immigrant parents/grandparents/great grandparents are known as “Nikkei”. Navigating one’s identity in life is hard enough, but even harder it seems when one’s identity has never-before-been-seen. The Nikkei occupy some of the first generations of people with Japanese heritage actually born in Brazil (their parents, grandparents, or even great grandparents were the ones who immigrated throughout the 1900′s).

In an article by Fox News (yes, Fox News... lol :( ) many young Nikkei view themselves as “first-and-foremost Brazilian.” (Fox News, http://www.foxnews.com/world/2014/06/17/japanese-brazilians-struggle-with-identity-despite-long-history-in-world-cup/) However, despite their belief in their ‘Brazilian-ness’ they describe how they are still not fully accepted within Brazilian society. This marginalization is hard to understand within the context of Brazilian society, because Brazilian society is essentially made up of immigrants from some time or another. Really, no one is ‘truly’ Brazilian because like many colonized nations the national identity itself is made up of immigrants. 

Perhaps ‘Japanese-Brazilians’* are marginalized from Brazilian society and seen as more immigrant than other Brazilians for a couple reasons. One being that in the history of Brazil, Japanese people have immigrated relatively recently. Secondly, and perhaps more crucially, the marginalization of those with Japanese heritage in Brazil comes from a pattern seen in cultures around the world of Asian stereotyping and fetishization. 

In Fox News’ article, a Brazilian artist of Japanese heritage, Yudi Rafael Koike, describes their art piece that reflects how those of Japanese heritage in Brazil are marginalized by stereotyping done by Brazilian society. Brazilian society sees those with Japanese heritage as “different” from the rest of Brazilians, even though all Brazilians have some sort of immigrant past. This art piece is a mirror with the words “This is the shape of Brazilian Eyes”. This symbolizes how those with Japanese heritage in Brazil are stereotyped, in this case by visual ‘Asianess’/difference, as being non-Brazilian. Koike tries to prove that in a nation full of immigrants, those of Japanese heritage are no less Brazilian than anyone else. 

artist: Yudi Rafael Koike, coutesy of: Fox News (http://www.foxnews.com/world/2014/06/17/japanese-brazilians-struggle-with-identity-despite-long-history-in-world-cup/)

*I put this in quotations because, as can be seen by this article, in hyphenating the Brazilian identity of children of Japanese immigrants I would only serve to perpetuate the idea that these Brazilians are any less Brazilian than any of the other immigrants that make up Brazilian identity. I want to respect their identifying as Brazilian, with no hyphen.

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Why Brazil?

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About the blogger: (and a quick disclaimer)

This summer I had the amazing opportunity to visit South America for the first time. I went to Brazil for a Study Abroad course, and at the risk of sounding cliché and completely unoriginal, as one often does when it comes to speaking on travelling to knew and wonderful places, it blew my mind!

One of the most memorable things that I learnt in Brazil was that there is a large population of Japanese people living within Brazil’s largest city, São Paulo. 

For those of you who have never really heard much about the geography of Brazil, São Paulo is located in the South of Brazil, a little west of Rio de Janeiro, as indicated by the above map (http://www.lonelyplanet.com/maps/south-america/brazil/).

Why this blog/topic? 

For some reason, I was very surprised to learn that there was a large Japanese population in Brazil. The Japanese in Brazil even have their own neighbourhood known as “Liberdade”, meaning ‘freedom’ in Brazilian Portuguese.  According to Wikipedia, this neighbourhood happens to be the largest Japanese community (outside Japan) in the entire world!!! (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberdade_(district_of_S%C3%A3o_Paulo) 

I wasn’t sure why this fact in particular surprised me, until I recently began thinking about it in more depth when I created this blog. This blog has been created for an assignment to study any aspect of “Asianness” for a course I’m currently taking. This topic of “Asianness” is very broad and open to interpretation, so I wasn’t sure what to write on. Being a white/caucasian woman, I was concerned about speaking on any aspect of “Asianness”, but especially a topic that I was not familiar with. I didn’t want to run the risk of not staying in my lane*... Since I actually visited Liberdade, I felt like that was perhaps my best connection/knowledge of “Asianness”. I hope to do the community justice with this blog. 

Where do I want (hope) this to go? 

I’ve started to realize that perhaps my surprise with the Japanese diaspora stems from a question of why people from a “developed” nation (Japan) would move to a “developing” nation (Brazil)? (I understand that the concept of “developing” and “develop” are problematic at times, but in this context it is the best description I have for my thought process) Clearly this question contains my own biases of growing up in North America/ a “developed” country. I am looking forward to unpacking this question further. Regardless of my own bias, I still think the question of “why?” is very valid and one worth exploring.

I would like my blog to delve deeper into how the Japanese diaspora in São Paulo see their identity, and how the Brazilians see the Japanese diaspora in their country. The concept of identity is important when situated in São Paulo because it is an extremely diverse city with immigrants from all over the world. Still, there’s clearly something to be said about the Japanese in São Paulo, as they have their very own neighbourhood (Liberdade) that, according to Wikipedia, happens to be the largest Japanese community (outside Japan) in the entire world!!!  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberdade_(district_of_S%C3%A3o_Paulo) 

*Disclaimer: I would like to recognize my position of power and privilege in writing this blog. I am not Asian; I am a caucasian cis female. In my identity, I am very much an outsider to the concept of “Asianness”. Furthermore, even though I have visited Liberdade, I am in no way an expert on it, or Brazil altogether for that matter. I would like to take this blogging opportunity to learn, as I’m still learning about these concepts and many others. That means that I am very open to constructive criticism. 

I look forward to learning more about Brazil, a country that I’ve fallen in love with, by looking at how “Asianness” is expressed within it.  I will do my very best to incorporate the voices of the people and communities I’m researching in this blog, and I hope to at least do them justice. :)