Words express "relationships." The man and woman who gave birth to me and raised me are "father and mother" to me and my younger sister and brother. I don't have any children, but when my younger sister and her husband and my younger brother and his wife have children, the relatives start calling them "grandfather and grandmother."
The reason I have decided to write such an obvious thing is because I believe that when considering immigration issues, we need to reconsider the term "Japanese ___ people," which we use so casually.
Since I live in the United States, I will use "Japanese American" as an example. In fact, "Japanese American" is a translation of the English term "Japanese American." And the term "Japanese American" did not exist in the United States until the 1960s. Japanese people could not become Americans (citizens) until the 1950s, when the US immigration law was revised and naturalization of Japanese immigrants was permitted. Although the second generation of Japanese people born in the United States were American citizens by birth, many of them were still in their teens in 1941, when the war between Japan and the United States began, and they were not treated as full adults. In the 1950s in the United States immediately after the end of the war, Japan was synonymous with "evil," and there was no tolerance in America that would allow Japanese people to assert their identity.
In the 1970s, during the student movement that began at the University of California, Berkeley, the assertion of Asian identity arose and the term "Asian American" was coined. The term "Japanese American" is a derivative of this.
Why did "Asian American" and "Japanese American", which began as political jargon among some radical students, become established in American society? It was because American capitalism in the 1970s needed a multi-ethnic market. Capitalism must constantly expand its market. The American white capitalist market had become saturated in the 1960s. So they turned their attention to the multi-ethnic market of African Americans (*note) and Asian immigrants. The third generation of African Americans who had been freed from slavery, the third generation of Issei who had been agricultural laborers, had received a college education by the 1960s, had built up assets, and were meeting the requirements to become American citizens.
As a result, American society began to actively accept Asian immigrants and the descendants of Japanese immigrants. As a result, the terms "Asian American" and "Japanese American" became established.
The common point between the social situation in America in the 1970s and the current and future social situation in Japan is the need to build positive relationships with multiple ethnic groups, a group that was previously not even considered.
Following the example of the United States in the 1970s, it would be appropriate to call people who came from Brazil and are working in Japan "Japanese of Brazilian descent." They are Japanese of Brazilian descent in two senses. The first generation who came to Brazil from Japan are Japanese of Brazilian descent in the sense that they retained Japanese culture throughout their lives, but also ended their lives by acquiring Brazilian citizenship.
I have been living in Los Angeles for almost 30 years, and the longer I live away from Japan, the stronger my identity as a Japanese person becomes. This is a common phenomenon around the world. In multi-ethnic societies, the people who stand out are not those who have assimilated into American society, but those who have a strong sense of their own country's culture. Looking at Japanese immigrants, there are more big businessmen among the first generation, who are completely Japanese, than among the second generation, who have assimilated into American society.
Society is created by words. As long as we continue to use the term "Japanese of ___ kind," the boundary between foreigners and Japanese will not disappear. If Japan aims to become a multi-ethnic society in the future, I think it is first necessary to establish the term "Japanese of ___ kind." Some Japanese in Los Angeles are now calling "Korean residents in Japan" "Korean Japanese." We may already be moving in this direction.
The term "Japanese of XX descent" also gives us an opportunity to reconsider the culture and history of Japan. I often cover cultural events held by the Okinawa Prefectural Association in Los Angeles, and every time I do I am reminded that Okinawa and Japan have completely different cultures. The Okinawan terms "Uchinanchu" and "Yamatonchu" are exactly the same as "Japanese of Okinawa descent" and "Japanese of Yamato descent." (End)
(*Author's note)
In the article published in the African-American magazine "Immigrants," I wrote "black people" in this section, but when publishing it in "Discover Japanese," I changed it to "African American" in accordance with the guidelines of the Japanese American National Museum.
I believe there is a big difference in meaning between "black people" and "African American." The word "colored," which was used until the 1950s to refer to black people, literally means a race that is "colored and not white."
After 1960, the term "colored" changed to "black" in America, but even today, the term "black" as it is commonly used in American society still has a stronger connotation of "this person is not white" (colored) than of an ethnic identity based on place of birth or family, like Japanese or Asian Americans.
*This article is reprinted from the multicultural information magazine Immigrants, Vol. 2. When reprinted on Discover Nikkei, we added a note from the author.
© 2010 Shigeharu Higashi
