No place to call home: Japanese Brazilians discover they are foreigners in the country of their ancestors

Natural History, April, 2004 by Takeyuki Tsuda

From my window on the train rolling into the station in Tokyo, the people waiting on the station platform were a blur. As we slowed down to our precise stopping point, Japanese faces came into focus. The doors opened, and people shuffled in or out of the car. Just before the doors closed, three men strolled in. Compared with the other passengers, these Japanese appeared quite different, their demeanor casual and leisurely. Two were dressed in shirts of bright mixed colors and jeans with a stripe down the side. The third wore a T-shirt with the word "Brasil." They were in the middle of a loud, boisterous conversation, in Portuguese.

"It's really funny," one of them remarked, leaning against a handrail with his hands in his pockets. "He goes on talking and talking, but the Japanese don't understand him."

"The poor guy," another said. "It's because his Japanese is old-fashioned. Not only that, it's a dialect from Okinawa." They laughed.

Instantly the three men--Brazilians of Japanese descent--drew the attention of the surrounding native-born Japanese. Some looked up from their newspapers to stare. Other gave furtive glances, pretending not to notice the strangers. Two women sitting beside me turned their eyes away from the men and looked at each other. They exchanged one word: gaijin ("foreigners").

I felt like an eavesdropper two times over. Born in the United States of Japanese immigrants, I, too, was a gaijin at least technically. But my parents had seen to it that I absorbed their native language and culture, and I had visited "the homeland" many times. In Japan, by observing all the social graces, I could often pass for a native. My anthropological fieldwork, however, focused on Japanese-Brazilian immigrants, like the three men on the train. To learn about their prior lives in Brazil, I had spent more than eight months in Porto Alegre and Ribeirao Preto, conducting interviews and participating in community activities. Now, to understand the experiences of the Japanese Brazilians who had come to live in Japan, I was spending much of my time working alongside them in a Japanese factory. I was probably the only other passenger who could follow the conversation in Portuguese. Yet for the moment I kept mum and observed passively. Juggling my various private and public identities in the field was a strain, and I was off duty.

Brazilians of Japanese descent began arriving in Japan during the late 1980s, in search of high-paying factory jobs. Their anomalous ethnic status attracted considerable attention from the start. "The first time the Japanese Brazilians came to town, I was really surprised," one young Japanese man told me. "I thought, wow, look at these weirdos! What in the world are they anyway? They looked Japanese, but they weren't real Japanese. They acted completely differently, spoke a foreign tongue, and dressed in strange ways. They were like fake Japanese, like a fake superhero you see on TV."

With a population of about 280,000, Japanese-Brazilian immigrants have become the third-largest group of foreigners living in Japan, after the Koreans and Chinese. To social scientists they are "return migrants," because they are going back to their ethnic homeland. Yet most of them were born and raised in Brazil, do not speak Japanese very well, and have become culturally Brazilian to various degrees.

Such ethnic return migration is a worldwide phenomenon. In recent decades more than half a million people of Korean and Japanese descent, who were scattered across China, Eastern Europe, and Latin America, have return-migrated to Korea and Japan. In Europe, there has been a massive return of several million ethnic German, Hungarian, Italian, and Spanish descendants from Eastern Europe and Latin America to their homelands. Motivated by long-held traditions, millions of Jews, notably from Eastern Europe, have settled in Israel.

Because they and their forebears have become assimilated into the culture of a foreign land while living abroad for generations, the return migrants often find themselves treated as ethnic minorities in their "home" countries. Many of them work as unskilled manual laborers, which confines them to low social and economic status. Hence, whatever nostalgic longing and attachment they might have felt toward their ancestral homelands, return migrants often find the reality of their new circumstances alienating. In response, many adopt a strong sense of national allegiance and identification with the country they left behind, stronger than any they ever felt before. Others assume the identity of a diasporic people, whose sense of belonging cannot be defined in nationalist terms.

Ironically, the parents or grandparents of the Japanese Brazilians had left Japan in search of a better life in Brazil. Many of those emigrants were farmers, recruited as contract workers for Brazil's booming coffee plantations. The labor flow began in 1908 and continued into the early 1960s. Although most of the emigrants intended to return to Japan after several years, the vast majority settled permanently in Brazil with their families. There, they went on to become independent farmers and landowners. Many have since urbanized and their descendants have entered Brazil's middle class as professionals and business owners with educational levels and incomes substantially higher than the Brazilian average. Numbering more than 1.2 million, they constitute Brazil's oldest and by Elf its largest Asian minority.