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Hispanic American Historical Review 83.2 (2003) 432-433



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The Japanese Community in Brazil, 1908-1940: Between Samurai and Carnival. By STEWART LONE. New York: St. Martin's Press, 2001. Maps. Tables. Notes. Bibliography. Index. x, 209 pp. Cloth, $60.00.

This book analyzes the Japanese immigrant community in Brazil from the perspective of a historian of Japan. Examining the first period of mass Japanese immigration to Brazil (a second one began after World War II), the research is based primarily on Japanese-language newspapers published in Brazil and on personal accounts published in Japan.

This book does not claim to be about Brazil per se, and Lone's focus on expatriate Japanese has a number of virtues. It provides evidence of how some aspects
of Brazilian popular culture (such as music or carnival) were consumed by Japanese immigrants. It analyzes Japanese-language materials that, while discussed in both Brazilian and Japanese scholarship, are rarely presented to the English-speaking public. It does a good job of bringing the internal community debates to the fore, especially between immigrants and Japanese government representatives, and between Okinawans and those from the Japanese mainland. The occasional mentions of the ways in which the contemporary Japanese immigrant community remembers its past exclusively as one of hardship overcome (especially in museums) is particularly interesting.

The Japanese Community in Brazil wants to "situate the lives of expatriate Japanese more firmly in relation to Brazilian society" (p. 5) and strongly critiques the Japanese-language scholarship that presents the immigrant experience divorced from that of the Brazilian world. Lone, however, makes few advances: he presents immigrant/Brazilian relations as static (Brazilian society comes to the Japanese immigrants apparently without human contact), and the book does not shed new light on how ethnicity or majority/minority relations function in Brazil. Even the title, The Japanese Community in Brazil, gives the impression of separate worlds that make only occasional contact.

Lone's interest in the first generation of arrivals gives important clues to the internal world of immigrant Japanese speakers. Yet the "Japanese community" was not only made up of working-age immigrants, and Lone makes little distinction between those who arrived as adults, those who came as children and were brought up in a Brazilian (albeit ethnicized) milieu, and the generation born in Brazil. By examining only discourses among expatriate adults, Lone suggests erroneously that the community was self-contained and internally focused. His understanding of the Japanese-Brazilian magazine Gakusei (Student), published by the Liga Estudantina Nippo-Brasiliera (Japanese-Brazilian Student League), is a perfect example of the problem. Lone asserts that the hyphenated term "Nippo-Brasileira" is only a translation of the Japanese word nippaku (Japanese-Brazilian) (p. 141). It was not that simple. The Brazilian-born editors of Gakusei were strident acculturationists (or [End Page 432] perhaps multiculturalists) who made clear in their Portuguese-language articles that they were using hyphenation to speak to a Brazilian audience, not just a Japanese expatriate one. Indeed, the editors of this magazine and others like it went out of their way to invite non-Japanese intellectuals to contribute articles specifically because of their vision of a multicultural, and not "Japanese," Brazil.

Those who study Brazil (or Latin America generally) will be, at times, uncomfortable with some of this book's assertions. The 1934 constitutional immigration quotas are confused with secret immigration decrees that came into existence three years later. The important Correio Paulistano newspaper is called Correio Paulista throughout. The high point of the anti-Japanese movement is set at 1939 (p. 70), but that moment in fact comes three years later when Brazil entered the war on the Allied side and forced both immigrants and Brazilian citizens of Japanese descent to "evacuate" so-called strategic locations. Palgrave/St. Martins, which has published excellent books on Brazil by Marshall Eakin (Tropical Capitalism: The Industrialization of Belo Horizonte, Brazil, 2001) and Gail D. Triner (Banking and Economic Development: Brazil, 1889-1930, 2000) should have done a better job on the editing, since none of the Portuguese...

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