The Multiple Identities of the Nikkei Community

Introduction

My presentation is based on field research conducted by the author, with the support of the Japan Foundation (2002), along with UNICAMP-FE, among groups of Brazilian migrant workers in several Japanese cities (Hamamatsu, Toyota, Oizumi, Ota, Toyohashi, and Nagano) and in the Brazilian cities of Londrina, Maringá, and São Paulo. My goal is to show, through changes that have taken place during the course of more than twenty years of migrations, the formation of networks and the role they play in regard to the migrants.

Initially, life for Brazilians in Japan was characterized by their presence in some areas …

Statistical data for 2007 reveal that more than 300,000 Brazilians are currently working in Japan, exceeding the nearly 250,000 Japanese that have arrived here since the beginning of Japanese immigration to Brazil one hundred years ago.

According to that same data, approximately 30% of those will probably never return to Brazil – individuals who had originally left with the goal to “make money and return” to their native land.

Of interest: that same situation had already been experienced by their ancestors who, pressured by adverse conditions in a country desperate to become modernized like the capitalist countries of the West, …

The Brazilians went to Japan since the middle of the 1980s, at the end of 20th century, looking for a dream, moved by hope, for a better life. In this same period, many other Brazilians also went to other destinations around the world: United States, Paraguay, and Europe. Many Latin-Americans from border countries close to Brazil and other foreigners, such as Koreans, Chinese, and Angolans came to Brazil in the last decades, making the scenario of population dislocation around the world more complex in the face of the compression of the time and the space that David Harvey characterized as …

Within the context of international migrations and specifically within the dekasegi migratory movements (Brazilians workers in Japan), we can highlight their effects on the emotional and cognitive development of children, while remembering that those children are passive participants of this movement—it’s not up to them to decide to go to Japan, to remain there, or to return to Brazil, even though they suffer every consequence of this migration.

The children who remain in Brazil while their parents go to work in Japan and those who live with their parents in Japan, all of them, to a lesser or greater extent, …

The Brazilian media in Japan, as well as most of the world’s communication processes, has undergone accelerated growth followed by significant diversification and segmentation. In the more than two-decade-old dekasegi migration movement—during which groups of Brazilian immigrants were slowly transformed into a socially articulated community—the media has been accompanying this expansion while going through constant modifications, whether in the printed press, audio and video means of communication, and the Web. To fully understand the current landscape of the Brazilian media in Japan, it is necessary to take a look back in order to grasp the beginnings of the dekasegi press. …