Diaspora and Identity: Japanese Brazilians in Brazil and Japan by Mieko Nishida (review)

Drawing primarily on life history interviews conducted with ninety-six Japanese immigrants and their descendants in São Paulo City and ten Japanese Brazilians in Japan in the nearly sixteen-year span from December 1997 to June 2013, the book under review offers a complex and nuanced picture of Japanese Brazilian identity. Rather than characterize the Japanese diaspora as a homogenous or monolithic group, author Mieko Nishida takes pains to highlight the rich diversity of individual experiences and self-perceptions while at the same time demonstrating the many ways in which structural forces such as class, gender, nation, and generation shape these singular lifeways. This examination of the various dimensions of identity is a welcome addition to the many studies on Japanese Brazilians that have, until this point, tended to emphasize ethnicity above all else.

The chapters of Diaspora and Identity are organized according to generational cohorts, beginning with prewar first-generation immigrants to Brazil (Issei), followed by their second, third, and fourth-generation descendants (Nisei, Sansei, and Yonsei) and finally the Japanese Brazilian dekasegi—"return" labor migrant—generation in Japan. The result is a sweeping yet comprehensive historical picture of the Japanese Brazilian diaspora, ranging from the experiences of first-generation immigrants to Brazil in the early and mid-twentieth century to those of their second-, third-, and fourth-generation descendants throughout the century in Brazil and following their migration to Japan starting in the late 1980s and early 1990s. The discussion of the differences between prewar and postwar immigrants in Brazil is particularly revelatory. For example, most prewar immigrants were recruited in family units—i.e., including children—by emigration companies, in contrast to postwar immigrants, more than half of whom came via sponsorship or self-financing and who included many more single men. Unlike their prewar counterparts, many postwar immigrants eventually returned to Japan (p. 103). These and other differences have led to significant clashes between the generations.

A Japan-born native speaker of Japanese trained as a historian of Brazil, Nishida toggles comfortably between interviews in Japanese and Portuguese—a situation that raises interesting questions about positionality. As she notes, "the choice of language often reflected the informant's politics of position, based on his/her perception of the person who was to interview him/her" (p. 7). Still, readers are left wondering how informants' perceptions of the author might have affected their language choice during interviews. While the author never told people which language she preferred to use, practically speaking she would have had to choose either Portuguese or Japanese in asking initial questions of her informants. Additionally, though she does not discuss Okinawan Brazilians separately throughout her work, they may have perceived her "mainland" Japanese background differently than other informants did. How, then, did the author navigate her own politics of position, and how did this positionality shape her interactions and interviews?

Diaspora and Identity is particularly cogent in its analysis of gender and the patriarchal contexts that have shaped the experiences of Japanese Brazilians both in Brazil and in Japan. This is especially important given that, as the author notes, there are few published autobiographies and memoirs or other documents written by or about Japanese Brazilian women (p. 6), although "women constituted around 40 percent of the prewar Japanese immigrant population" (p. 223). The book pays close attention to the particular pressures placed on women to care for aging parents, for example, or to practice ethnic endogamy. It also demonstrates how the experience of labor migration to Japan often differs for women and men. On the one hand, women dekasegi are routinely paid less than their male counterparts (p. 225), but on the other hand they may also enjoy "new economic opportunities and freedoms that they would not have had in Brazil" (p. 120). This is an important contribution to the existing body of English-language works on dekasegi—many of them written by men—that...