Searching for Home Abroad. Japanese Brazilians and Transnationalism ed. by Jeffrey Lesser (review)

128 The k t i n Americanist Spring 2005 Searchingfor HomeAbroad. Japanese Brazilians and Transnationalism . By Jeffrey Lesser (ed.).Durhamand London: Duke University Press, 2003, p. 219, $21.95. This book provides a fascinating collection of essays on diverse aspects of the Japanese migration to Brazil in the early 20Ih century and the recent flows of Japanese Brazilians who relocated to Japan. The underlying theme is the process of transnational homemaking, breaking, and transforming. Coming from different disciplines and perspectives, the contributors explore whether home is a place or a state of mind, and how the notion of home is constructed and modified. Some of them examine the original wave of Japanese immigration to Brazil, while others focus on the displacement of Brazilians of Japanese descent that moved to Japan (initially, as temporary workers) in the last two decades of the last century. The contributions are framed in the ongoing debates on ethnicity and other interrelated concepts, such as globalization , transnationalism, diasporas, citizenship, and identity. They mostly fit into a growing literature that understands reality as a socially constructed process. A brief introduction by the editor presents the historical background of the two-ways migration flows. It is followed by eight chapters and an interlude that cover different dimensions of the phenomenon: identity building and making; language and the construction of identity; a case study on identity transformation (Okinawans and their descendants in Brazil); economic motivations to migrate and how working and living conditions affect the migrants’ interpretations of their experiences; the significance of overseas voting rights for elderly Japanese migrants to Brazil; liminality, social alienation, and personal malaise associated to transnational displacement; the feminization of Japanese Brazilian labor migration to Japan, and collective identity. Based on various methodological approaches (e.g., content analysis, interviews , statistics, participant observation, etc.), the essays provide important insights on how the two minorities of immigrants conceptualize their own past and current identities, their relations with other groups within the host countries and with relatives and the whole society at home, their strategies to cope with discrimination and other adverse conditions, and their understanding of the notion of “home.” One of the main contributions of the book is the detailed and rich description of that process of conceptualization. Indeed, the authors’ diverse perspectives provide good illustrations of what Book Reviews 129 searching for home abroad means. For instance, Takeyuki (Gaku) Tsuda examines the role of liminality as a transitional rite and highlights the importance of migrant communities as a critical source of emotional support and affiliation, cultural meaning, and a “home away from home;” Angelo Ishi points out the many contradictions and conflicts of class, status, expectations, and values Japanese Brazilians working in Japan face today (mainly originated in the fact that they are from urban middle-class origins and many have university degrees, but in Japan they occupy the lowest position in the social pyramid and work as blue-collar employees in factories) and how they have managed to redefine their lifestyles, labor choices, and leisure and hobbies preferences in order to overcome adverse conditions they had not foreseen before relocating; Joshua Hotaka Roth argues that, for elderly Japanese residing in Brazil, overseas voting was a confirmation that their Japanese identity had remained intact through several decades while they showed, at the same time, a strong identification with Brazil. Nevertheless, the strength of the book is not only on the descriptive part. The main contribution of the volume lies in the attempt to show the complexity and nuances of the process of transnational homemaking, which questions traditional assumptions about ethnicity, citizenship, and identity and opens the door for further investigation and development of new theoretical approaches. The idea of multiple identifications suggested by Roth is a case in point. Likewise, Ishi goes beyond economic explanations of international migration that tend to look at it as part of the broader process of increasing globalization and labor market dynamics to look at the complex cultural, social, and economic adaptation of Japanese Brazilians that went to Japan since the late 1980s,thus suggesting to understand their identity not as economic refugees but, rather, as the result of a complex process of political, cultural, and ideological construction. Moreover...