Reworking Narrative the Brasilidade

This chapter investigates música sertaneja in the Japanese Brazilian expatriate community, following its unique trajectory of transnational migration from Brazil to Japan, and back again to Brazil in the past few decades. Música sertaneja is a style of “country music” that originated in the Brazilian countryside in the 1920s. It has become an important agency of identity negotiation for Brazilians of Japanese descent in the past few decades, when the massive economic migration known as dekassegui propelled many middle-class Japanese Brazilians to “return migrate” to their ancestral home as unskilled laborers. The author discusses how this recent dekassegui experience provoked Japanese Brazilian expatriates into reconfiguration of their identity, and how, in the process, they not only used música sertaneja to negotiate their space in the diaspora, but also reworked the traditional brasilidade narrative in their favor.

McNamara analysis cephalometric parameters in White-Brazilians, Japanese and Japanese-Brazilians with normal occlusion

ABSTRACT Introduction: McNamara’s Jr. cephalometric analysis is a tool to diagnose dental and skeletal discrepancies and is widely used, guiding diagnosis for surgical procedures to be performed or for the use of functional devices. Few studies have shown that different ethnic groups have different cephalometric patterns. Thus, single characteristics should be respected to support the diagnosis and to help the treatment plan for different ethnic groups and their different patterns of miscegenation. Objective: Obtain normal values for McNamara’s cephalometric analysis for adolescent Japanese-Brazilian descents with normal occlusion, as well as to compare this sample with similar samples of White-Brazilian and Japanese. Methods: Lateral headfilms from 40 White-Brazilian, 33 Japanese and 32 Japanese-Brazilian descents were selected. The three groups were composed by individuals with normal occlusion, well-balanced profiles and were separated by sex. The data were statistically analyzed with ANOVA, t-test, ANCOVA and MANCOVA tests. Results: White-Brazilian males had significantly greater nasolabial angle than Japanese males. Japanese-Brazilian displayed an intermediate value between White-Brazilian and Japanese. Conclusion: White-Brazilian, Japanese and Japanese-Brazilian present different cephalometric characteristics of McNamara analysis. Japanese males have a significantly more acute nasolabial angle than White-Brazilian subjects.

Migrant and Minority Nostalgia in Karen Tei Yamashita’s Circle K Cycles

This essay explores the concept of nostalgia through an analysis of Circle K Cycles (2001), a creative (auto)ethnographic text in which the Japanese American writer Karen Tei Yamashita portrays Japanese Brazilians’ ethnic return migration to Japan in the 1980s and 1990s. In the face of social marginalisation and the hegemonic pressures of Japanese culture to conform to a standard of ‘pure Japaneseness’, Japanese Brazilians reinforce their attachment to Brazil, which they express in the form of nostalgia, or saudade. Yet Yamashita criticises any idea of cultural separateness and ‘purity’, both by experimenting with form and by describing phenomena of cultural hybridisation.

Saudades de ser nihonjin: Japanese-Brazilian identity and mental health in literature and media

Brazil is currently home to the largest Japanese population outside of Japan. In Brazil today, Japanese-Brazilians are considered to be successful members of Brazilian society. This was not always the case, however, and Japanese immigrants to Brazil endured much hardship to attain their current level of prestige. This essay explores this community’s trajectory towards the formation of the Japanese-Brazilian identity and the issues of mental health that arise in this immigrant community. Through the analysis of Japanese-Brazilian novels, TV shows, film and public health studies, I seek to disentangle the themes of gender and modernisation, and how these themes concurrently grapple with Japanese-Brazilian mental health issues. These fictional narratives provide a lens into the experience of the Japanese-Brazilian community that is unavailable in traditional medical studies about their mental health.