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

Despite the historical and contemporary movement of hundreds of thousands of Asian immigrants to Latin America since the 1600s, the Latin American immigration historiography suffers from a paucity of publications on this significant phenomenon. This essay collection on Japanese transnational immigration and settlement in Brazil, and Japanese-Brazilian repatriation makes an important and weighty contribution to the nascent literature pertaining to Asian immigration to Latin America. In addition, this edited volume makes a uniquely Latin Americanist contribution to the burgeoning literature on immigrant transnationalism. Although numerous transnational studies have been published by anthropologists related to ethnic groups such as the Haitian, eastern Caribbean, and Filipino communities of the United States, Latin Americanist historians have been slow to appropriate the transnational analytical framework. Through this compilation, Jeffrey Lesser breaks fresh theoretical ground for Latin American social and cultural historians.

The essays included within this collection examine an interesting array of topics pertaining to the experience of both Japanese immigrants and their descendants living in Brazil, and Japanese Brazilians who have recently chosen to repatriate to their ancestral homeland. Recruited by Brazilian elites to fill agricultural labor shortages engendered by the abolition of African slavery, hundreds of thousands of Japanese immigrated to Brazil during the first half of the twentieth century; today, the "Nikkei," or Japanese Brazilian population numbers more than 1.2 million. Lured by the promise of higher wages, since the late 1980s, moreover, more than 200,000 Japanese Brazilians have chosen to return to Japan as "dekasegui" factory workers. In examination of the historical and contemporary experiences of these immigrants and repatriates, the nine essays of this collection discuss a wide range of topics, including: the historical identity transformations of Okinawan immigrants in Sao Paulo; overseas voting rights and ethnic identity within the elderly Japanese Brazilian community; dekasegui ethnic identity; the feminization of Japanese Brazilian labor migration to Japan; and the mythical connections between the Japanese and Tupi languages.

Theoretically, the essay collection is drawn together by the framework of transnationalism and related notions of "home" and "diaspora." Drawing from these theoretical concepts both explicitly and implicitly, most of the essays focus upon a discussion of Japanese Brazilian and dekasegui ethnic identity. As for analytical approach, most of the articles are written and researched from the perspective of cultural anthropology. Although Lesser is himself a historian, five of the eight substantive articles presented in the collection were contributed by anthropologists. The anthropological flavor of the essay collection is not necessarily a weakness, but may surprise those who are familiar with Lesser's historical scholarship and who pick up this book expecting to find a compilation of historical essays. Overall, the essays are of outstanding quality, well written, and of the highest scholarship. Most of the essays are meticulously researched and draw from a wide range of sources, including interviews, periodicals, private papers, oral histories, government records, musical lyrics, and films. In addition, the volume for the most part holds together well both theoretically and thematically.

Although the collection as a whole is consistent in quality and substantively cohesive, two minor flaws are apparent. The final essay, titled "Do Japanese Brazilians Exist?," stands out as less rigorously researched than the other contributions. Although theoretically interesting, it draws large theoretical conclusions about the nature of Japanese Brazilian identity based upon interviews conducted with only two Japanese Brazilians living in Japan. The eighth essay of this collection, titled "Feminization of Japanese Brazilian Labor Migration to Japan," is of outstanding quality and well researched, but does not fit well within the larger collection. Whereas the substantive focus of the larger volume relates to issues of ethnic identity, this essay presents highly quantitative sociological wage analysis and comparative immigration data which stand out as theoretically disconnected from the other essays of the collection.

Notwithstanding these minor shortcomings, this essay collection makes an important and unique contribution to Latin American, migration, and transnational studies. Moreover, in addition...