Searching for Home Abroad: Japanese Brazilians and Transnationalism (review)

Historian Jeffery Lesser has produced this well edited volume on the meanings of "home" for Japanese immigrants in Brazil and Japanese Brazilians in Japan. As Lesser emphasizes in his introduction, the contributors to this book are rather diverse in terms of academic disciplines and specialties, as well as nationality and ethnicity.

In the first chapter, Lesser summarizes Japanese Brazilian history. Japanese immigration to Brazil began in 1908, as a result of Brazilian state policies aiming at the importation of the "whites of Asia." The Nikkei, namely Japanese descendants, came to be regarded as "whites" in Brazilian society by the 1930s. During the 1950s when they established themselves in middle and upper classes, some Nikkei came to conclude they could only become Brazilian by means of intermarriage or plastic surgery. According to Lesser, Japanese Brazilians have maintained their hyphenated identity until today, even through the boom of their transnational labor migrations to Japan, called dekassegui, from the mid-1980s until the end of the 1990s. Ethnomusicologist Shuhei Hosokawa examines Rokurô Kôyama's "linguistic" study of Tupi as a mother tongue of the Japanese language for his discussion on pre-war Japanese immigrants' efforts to assimilate into the Brazilian nation.

Anthropologist Koichi Mori examines the transformation of collective ethnic Uchinanchu identity of Okinawan descendents over the years in relation to Japanese and Japanese Brazilians in Brazil. Japanese American novelist, Karen Tei Yamashita provides us with a chapter from her most recent book Circle K Rules (2001): an account of Japanese Brazilian workers and their families' struggles with the Japanese and Japanese culture during her and her family's six-month stay in Japan in 1997. Japanese Brazilian sociologist Angelo Ishi portrays the middle-class dekassegui life in the "land of yen" and describes vividly how positively and creatively the young Nikkeis have lived their lives as successful Brazilians in Japan.

Anthropologist Joshua Hotaka Roth discusses elderly Japanese immigrants' enthusiastic response to the institution of an absentee ballot system in Japan (1999). He notes the ambiguity of their Japanese identity after having resided many years in Brazil, far away from Japan, where they continue to hold citizenship. According to Roth, if they ever go back to Japan, they would be forced to "wake up" from their illusions of being Japanese, suddenly realizing they have spent too many years outside Japan to remain Japanese, much as described in the old Japanese folktale "Urashima Taro." Takeyuki (Gaku) Tsuda, another Japanese American anthropologist, discusses dekassegui as social alienation. According to Tsuda, the Brazilian Nikkei in Japan, separated from both Brazilian and Japanese societies, have created a collective ethnic identity among themselves. They have therefore formed a rather egalitarian and homogenous community by sharing common work experiences as unskilled foreign guest workers in Japan, despite their originally different class positions back in Brazil. Sociologist Keiko Yamanaka, based on her extensive quantitative research, examines the process of feminization of Brazilian dekasseguis as it relates to the whole population of female guest workers in Japan. The book concludes with anthropologist Daniel T. Linger's chapter, "Do Japanese Brazilians Exist?" Linger maintains Japanese Brazilians in Brazil do not necessarily view themselves as part of a Diaspora, as the Japanese government defines them, and that they do not always form an ethnic group.

All of the chapters in this anthology are based on abundant research and meticulous scholarly arguments, although some of the contributors differ substantially from one another in their interpretation of Japanese Brazilian identity. This may cause confusion to readers who are not sufficiently familiar with the subject. Unfortunately, Yamanaka's otherwise interesting chapter does not fit very well in the theme of the book itself. This reader also wonders how informative and helpful Hosokawa's chapter can be to those who are interested in pre-war Japanese immigrants' collective "homemaking" in Brazil, since his study is based solely on a Japanese male immigrant. Furthermore, it should be pointed out that Roth's assertion of "the unassimilable Japanese," who have "resisted...