Niseis, Sanseis, and Their Class-Gender Identity

Born in the city during the 1950s and 1960s, Niseis and Sanseis [third-generation Japanese Brazilians] were expected to succeed as urban professionals, following the path of the older elite Nisei generation, who had advanced themselves as “special Japanese” in Brazilian society. By 1980, interracial marriage had become a norm among Japanese Brazilians, especially among men. They attempted to define themselves on their own terms, through the choice of careers, choice of marriage partners, and for certain political ideologies. While some educated Niseis, especially men, rigorously resisted what was expected of them as “Japanese” under the patriarchal rule for the family and “community,” many educated Nisei and Sansei women chose to remain single to become their parents’ caretakers and/or chose to work in Japan for dekassegui for the financial needs of their families. Meanwhile, the gendered pattern of Japanese Brazilians’ intermarriage has been reversed, with more women marrying out.

Prewar Child Immigrants and Their Japanese Identity

Pre-war child immigrants who arrived in Brazil in the 1920s and 1930s grew up as Japanese in the Brazilian countryside, where the Japanese formed various ethnic associations and built Japanese language schools. Counted on for agricultural labor and as caretakers of their younger siblings, prewar child immigrants had little or no Brazilian formal education, but many learned the Japanese language in accordance with their parents’ plan of going home after making a sizable fortune. Young daughters’ sexual honor was defined in relation to family honor, and gender subordination was strengthened for ethnic endogamy. By 1970, prewar child immigrants with fluency in Japanese had come to occupy the important positions in their Japanese Brazilian community in the city and by identifying themselves as quasi-Niseis, they eventually redefined themselves as more Japanese than the Issei and even than the Japanese in Japan.

Japanese Brazilians and Their Brazilian Identity in Japan

Within a year and half after the global recession began in September 2008, one quarter of Brazilian residents in Japan had returned to Brazil, which critically damaged the once thriving ethic Brazilian businesses in Japan’s Brazil Towns. Brazilian dekassegui workers largely married among themselves, and gender subordination often came to be reproduced and even strengthened in the Brazilian diaspora. Over the years, due to Japan’s prolonged recession, the Brazilian population in Japan came to be dispersed. Japanese Brazilians remaining in Japan became increasingly nationalistic as Brazilians, imagining their homeland for its bright future, with the World Cup (2014) and Summer Olympics in Rio de Janeiro (2016). While being positioned collectively as Brazilians, Japanese Brazilians have not come to form a homogenized Brazilian identity in Japan and continued to position themselves individually over “the face” and the definition of Nikkeiness.

Sanseis, Yonseis, and Their Racial Identity

The upper-middle-class Sasei and Yonseis [fourth-generation Japanese Brazilians] were born during the 1970s and 1980s and grew up in the city among “Brazilians.” In their childhood they all shared the experience of being bullied for their “(Japanese) face” and “slanted eyes” as a racial minority. They have struggled to find their positions under Brazil’s fluid racial formation, despite their educated parents’ individual “whitening.” Many have continued to resort to intermarriage with white Brazilians fueled by the desire to further “whiten” themselves. Becoming proud of Japan’s economic prosperity, some others, including racially mixed ones, have chosen to affirm their cultural identity collectively as the self-identified Nikkei [Japanese descendants]. Some began to learn the Japanese language in college and studied in Japan on fellowships. They socialize and date among themselves and eventually practice ethnic-class endogamy, even though their definition of Nikkeiness varies individually, except for their “face.”

Postwar Immigrants and Their New Japanese Identity

The new values and ideas that post-war Japanese immigrants brought with them to Brazil not only created conflicts with prewar immigrants but also challenged and/or confirmed patriarchy in the Japanese diaspora. Many postwar immigrant men arrived as single agricultural and industrial workers in the 1950s and 1960s. Some married Nisei and white Brazilian women but others preferred to look for women to marry back in Japan. Thus in the 1960s and 1970s adult Japanese women arrived in Brazil as “bride immigrants,” whose main role was to support their husbands in Brazil. In the 1980s, unemployed postwar immigrant men became the first to choose dekassegui work in Japan in order to support their families in Brazil. Like their prewar counterparts had done, postwar immigrant parents devoted themselves to the higher Brazilian education of both daughters and sons and expected them to succeed as urban upper-middle-class Brazilians.

Immigration and Diaspora

Starting in 1908, Japanese immigrants arrived as coffee colonos in São Paulo state. Required to immigrate in family units, the Japanese settled down among themselves in rural São Paulo. In the 1930s and early 1940s they were challenged greatly by Brazilian nationalism under President Getúlio Vargas and the WWII, which ended prewar immigration in 1942. After the war, Japanese immigrants decided to stay on in Brazil and began to migrate to the city, whereas Japanese immigration was resumed in 1953. By 1980, Japanese Brazilians had moved up to urban middle classes, by means of higher education. Yet, due to Brazil’s hyperinflation, dekassegui started on a large scale in the mid-1980s, which resulted in the creation of Brazil Towns in central Japan. In June 2008, the centenary of Japanese immigration to Brazil was widely celebrated in Brazil but soon afterwards the global recession began to move Brazilians and their families in Japan back to their homeland.

Introduction

In her Gaijin (1980), Tizuka Yamasaki (b. 1949) narrates a story of a young woman who marries her older brother’s best friend for the sake of their immigration to Brazil in 1908, and eventually becomes an independent working single mother in the city. Even though the story is loosely based on her maternal grandmother’s life, Yamasaki uses the movie to express her own identity as an educated Brazilian woman, who was involved in women’s movement during Brazil’s military regime. The movie received international acclaim but has not been widely appreciated among the Japanese in Brazil, mainly because it challenges the essentialization of Japanese Brazilian identity, which obscures gender and class. Inspired by Gaijin, which gives a voice to the historical “voiceless,” this book employs life history/story as its main methodology, in combination with substantial archival research. Each informant narrates his/her story and reveals his/her complex identity in relation to the Japanese-born but US-based author, based on their “shared” Japanese ancestry.

Conclusion

In June 1998 the Japanese immigrants monument was inaugurated in Santos, São Paulo after a decade-long campaign by Japanese Brazilians. Its statue of a young immigrant family (parents and a young boy), divorced from the historical reality, quickly became a political vehicle for state diplomacy, as well as a popular tourist site. Eventually, in 2007, the Japanese government made a public announcement that the design of the statue was adopted for a commemorative 500-yen coin for the centenary in 2008, which was eventually abandoned due to a dispute brought by a Brazilian sculptor who holds its copyright. This episode illustrates that Japanese Brazilians are not completely in control of how their identity is constructed and represented under hegemonic power. The histories of the “Japanese” in Brazil needs ultimately to be re-thought and re-written with closer attention to the multiple, and historically changing, determinations of Japanese Brazilian identity.

Niseis and Their Brazilian Identity

The Nisei [second-generation Japanese Brazilians], who were born in the 1930s and 1940s, received Brazilian primary education in the countryside. During the 1950s and 1960s, the Nisei established and participated in their own Nisei clubs in São Paulo City, which were exclusive to Japanese descendants and divided by class, and they practiced ethnic-class endogamy among themselves. With the power of higher education, elite Nisei men quickly moved up on the social ladder. Many college-educated Niseis in this generation tend to position themselves as Brazilians/Westerners over the Japanese and other Asians. Yet, when the time came for their children to choose their marriage partners, some still wanted to keep their families “Japanese,” without having any “Brazilian” in-laws. This is a clear example of one’s multiple identity in conflict. Having distanced themselves from the general Japanese Brazilian population for many years, some of the elite Nisei “returned” to major ethnic Japanese organizations and associations after the turn of the twentieth-first century.