Japanese Brazilian Saudades

Diasporic Identities and Cultural Production

Ignacio López-Calvo

• Publisher: University Press of Colorado
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781607328506
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Japanese Brazilian Saudades explores the self-definition of Nikkei discourse in Portuguese-language cultural production by Brazilian authors of Japanese ancestry. Ignacio López-Calvo uses books and films by twentieth-century Nikkei authors as case studies to redefine the ideas of Brazilianness and Japaneseness from both a national and a transnational perspective. The result suggests an alternative model of postcoloniality, particularly as it pertains to the post–World War II experience of Nikkei people in Brazil.López-Calvo addresses the complex creation of Japanese Brazilian identities and the history of immigration, showing how the community has used writing as a form of reconciliation and affirmation of their competing identities as Japanese, Brazilian, and Japanese Brazilian. Japanese in Brazil have employed a twofold strategic, rhetorical engineering: the affirmation of ethno-cultural difference on the one hand, and the collective assertion of citizenship and belonging to the Brazilian nation on the other. López-Calvo also grapples with the community's inclusion and exclusion in Brazilian history and literature, using the concept of "epistemicide" to refer to the government's attempt to impose a Western value system, Brazilian culture, and Portuguese language on the Nikkeijin, while at the same time trying to destroy Japanese language and culture in Brazil by prohibiting Japanese language instruction in schools, Japanese-language publications, and even speaking Japanese in public. Japanese Brazilian Saudades contributes to the literature criticizing the "cognitive injustice" that fails to acknowledge the value of the global South and non-Western ways of knowing and being in the world. With important implications for both Latin American studies and Nikkei studies, it expands discourses of race, ethnicity, nationality, and communal belonging through art and narrative.

1

Historical Memory and Claiming Place

DOI: 10.5876/9781607328506.c001

Collective historical memory is often mobilized in Nikkei cultural production in order to create an imagined community or to claim belonging within the Brazilian nation. This social group’s shared knowledge can be passed on from generation to generation or, on occasion, represent an empowering social construction. The historical episodes that literary and filmic works choose to memorialize and, equally important, those they try to erase are reliable indicators of a Nikkei public memory, even if it is still fragmented and partial. Secondhand “recollections,” that is, the reminiscences passed on from generation to generation, are an important source for Nikkei collective memory as well. Among other representational forms, an idealized image of Japan, for example, may be transmitted through oral history from nostalgic Issei to their children and grandchildren. However, once some of these Nisei or Sansei have the opportunity to live in Japan as dekasegi, they may contrast their lived experience to their parents’ sanitized memories, noticing shocking differences. This oppositional contestation and reframing of the received image of Japan recur in texts and films by and about dekasegi.

One text in which historical memory is a major component of the narrative is the Nisei Júlio Miyazawa’s (1948–) first novel, Yawara! A Travessia Nihondin-Brasil (Yawara! Crossing Nihondin-Brazil, 2006; henceforth, Yawara!), which memorializes several key episodes in Japanese Brazilian history.1 According to the author, with this publication he wished to pay homage to the centennial celebration of Japanese immigration to Brazil that was to take place two years later. However, most of the novel, which shared the 2009 Prêmio Literário Nikkei (Nikkei Literary Award) with two other works, was written between 1978 and 1980.2 The Nikkei history explored in Yawara and in his second novel, Uma Rosa para Yumi (A Rose for Yumi, 2013; henceforth, Uma Rosa), is the metaphorical “Travessia” featured in the subtitle of his first novel. Along with the sea voyage, this “crossing” refers to a change of mentality and self-identification among Japanese Brazilians. It also reflects different phases (not always chronological) that many members of this minority have undergone: the initial pre–World War II period, when the novel’s characters still saw themselves as loyal subjects of the Japanese Empire and identified either as Japanese immigrants or as Japanese born in Brazil; a period of identitarian uncertainty for some characters that transverses both the pre- and postwar periods; and the postwar period, when some characters progressively shift their national affiliation to become patriotic and proud Brazilians.

I choose to dedicate this first chapter to Miyazawa’s Yawara! because I consider it one of the most sophisticated Portuguese-language fictional explorations of identitarian conflicts among Japanese Brazilians—these conflicts are also a core issue in Nikkei discourse. As the anthropologist Takeyuki Tsuda explains: “Identity refers to a conscious awareness of who one is in the world based on association with certain sociocultural characteristics or membership in social groups. The individual’s identity consists of two components: the self and the social identity. The self (or self-identity) is the aspect of identity that is experienced and developed internally through the individual’s own subjective perceptions and experience of the social environment. However, an identity is also externally defined by others in accordance with standardized cultural norms and social roles, which can be called the individual’s social identity” (Strangers 9–10). Yawara! re-creates this traumatic identitarian tension between the Nikkei characters’ internal self-perceptions and external social influences, stemming from the majority Brazilian population as well as the Nikkei community. I argue that the author’s choice of topic—primarily in the passages describing Mário Japa’s (Mário “The Jap”) multiple identities—is related to an intention to validate and vindicate symbolically the hard-fought Brazilianness of the Nikkei. Ultimately, Miyazawa presents this psychological journey as a celebration of his ethnic heritage and, more important, of his ethnic group’s contributions to the betterment of Brazil.

In my view, Yawara! and Uma Rosa are emblematic works in the Portuguese-language Nikkei literary and cultural corpus, as they explore, mostly from the perspective of Japanese Brazilian self-definition and self-representation, why so many Japanese immigrants decided to emigrate and eventually settle in such a distant country that was then deeply committed to a process of whitening its population. Both works draw the sociocultural progress of Japanese immigrants and their descendants through the years, transforming their public image from a perceived inexpensive and docile labor force to a so-called model minority and a key part of Brazilian national identity. As mentioned in the introduction, readers can often find the tension created between Nikkei writers and filmmakers’ celebration of cultural difference and the concomitant claim to Brazilianness and national belonging, which is evident in Yawara! However, I argue that they are intimately related: the open celebration of Nikkei achievements in different fields—and particularly of the involvement of its leftist youth in national politics during the 1970s—in Yawara! and Uma Rosa responds to a will to power and, more specifically, to the author’s vindication of the true Brazilianness of his ethnic group. It is reflective of Nikkei public strategies to negotiate their own authentic Brazilianness throughout decades, and awareness of notions about the Brazilian national essence, regardless of its mythical or constructed origins. In the process, Nikkei discourse resorts to ethnic assumptions that are equally mythical in nature: in certain cases, in the authors and filmmakers’ goal to narrate conflict and trauma, historical amnesia (in this case trying to erase the infamous chapters of anti-Japanese hysteria in Brazil or considering the Shindō Renmei episode a taboo) has been as useful as historical memory. Ernest Renan, in his 1882 Qu’est-ce qu’une nation? (What Is a Nation?), and Benedict Anderson, in his 2006 Imagined Communities, remind us of the power of forgetting for nation building.3 Likewise, Homi Bhabha posits that “Being obliged to forget becomes the basis for remembering the nation, peopling it anew, imagining the possibility of other contending and liberating forms of cultural identification” (The Location 161). As negative ethnic stereotypes dealing with “Yellow Peril” prejudice became a considerable obstacle to Nikkei integration, positive stereotypes dealing with the perceived fixed nature of racial typology have, at times, been embraced in a sort of strategic essentialism that may empower the community. This stance is most noticeable in Miyazawa’s works.

Both novels explore the transmission of cultural affect between generations of Nikkei. The reader learns how structures of feeling changed throughout time from an initial collective “unhomeliness”4—that is, the sense of being geographically and culturally displaced in a strange and hostile land, or being caught in an undefined cultural identity between the ancestral culture of one’s parents and the local culture—to slowly identifying with their native Brazilian culture or having multiple identities. This identitarian diversity, however, should not be read as an assimilationist discourse. In fact, the vindication of cultural difference is a leitmotif in Nikkei fiction, where characters often identify themselves as Japanese, Japanese Brazilian, and/or Brazilian, among other options. At the same time, Miyazawa echoes how Japanese immigration (along with the immigration of other disenfranchised ethnic groups that could not easily be labeled black or white, such as Chinese, Koreans, and Middle Easterners) ultimately changed Brazil and challenged elite articulations of Brazilian national identity. Through this strategic cultural discourse, Nikkei present themselves as an economically beneficial component of the Brazilian national body, a path to modernity, and a model to be imitated by all of Brazil. As Lesser argues, the proof of their strategies and negotiations’ success is that “By the mid-twentieth century, elite paradigms about who was and was not an acceptable Brazilian changed so markedly that many Europeans were no longer in the ‘white’ category while some Asians and Middle Easterners were” (“Ethnic Myths” 68).5 Indeed, the fictional Japanese immigrants’ strategies for survival and community formation, their progressive integration into mainstream society, and their claim to place are all recurrent topics in the collective narrative of Japanese Brazilian cultural production.

Between Dichotomies: Cultural Isolation/Adaptation and Oppression/Resistance

Miyazawa’s exploration of the “crossing” in the subtitle of the novel begins with the inception of the immigration process, focusing, from a sentimental (at times bordering on the melodramatic) perspective, on the reasons for emigration, the immigrants’ nostalgia for Japan, and the identitarian uncertainties they tried to overcome. Yawara! addresses the different steps of the immigration process, including the “pull” and “push” factors. It explains, for instance, that the Japanese government and the emperor encouraged emigration as a way to alleviate the social tensions caused by an acute economic crisis. It also reveals that, out of patriotism, many Japanese peasants obeyed the emperor’s wishes; others naively believed the official declaration assuring prospective emigrants that it would not take long to become wealthy in Brazil and that they, therefore, could return to Japan after having reached their financial goals. Yet, as the novel reflects, the first group of immigrants soon realized that living and working conditions in the adoptive country were much harsher than advertised by recruiting companies. Toake Endoh exposes the questionable advertising techniques: “The migration promoters may not have intended to deceive the public, but certainly felt the pressure of the self-assigned numerical targets, especially when earlier emigration plans fell short. Their sense of urgency may have driven them to create grandiose or, at times, false recruiting advertisements so as to attract sufficient numbers of emigrants. Fully aware of the risks of such inflated claims, Emigration Administration Guidelines of the Kaikyōren instruct: ‘[The] method of advertisement needs to be as stimulating as possible, even at the cost of accuracy to some extent.’” (92; emphasis in original). Likewise, Ondina Antonio Rodrigues reproduces this false advertising: “In Brazil there is a tree that gives gold, which is the coffee plant. It is only a matter of picking it up with one’s hands.”6 Feeling deceived, Japanese immigrants were further disappointed on account of the racism directed at them, particularly during World War II—Brazil joined the Allied cause in August of 1942.

The structure of Yawara! meshes three stories of kinship and friendship. The novel re-creates the lives of three Japanese immigrant families who arrived in Brazil in 1936 thanks to the aid of the Associação Nipônica no Brasil (Japanese Association of Brazil). In December 1945, after the war’s end, they founded a village in the region of Atibaia, in the state of São Paulo. Although these characters are fictional, the author claims to have found inspiration in the people he met in the region of Jabaquara; the plot’s action, however, takes place in real Brazilian locations and includes historical facts. The characters from the original community of Atibaia and their descendants—a synecdoche of all Brazilian Nikkeijin—choose different paths that range from cultural isolation within their ethnic group to full cultural integration into mainstream Brazilian society. For instance, Kenhiti and his wife, Akemi, one of the three original Japanese families who arrived in 1936, never adapt to the host country. In fact, Kenhiti, a humble peasant from Hiroshima’s countryside and a judo expert, worries more about the preservation of Japanese culture than about learning Brazilian customs. His situation worsens when he is unjustly imprisoned for a two-year term after defending his nephew Goro from the physical attack of the Brazilian landowner’s son. Once released, he and his wife commit suicide because of the resulting psychological trauma and shame:

The brightness of the sun bothered the eyes of Kenhiti, who, in his feverish imagination, believed he was contemplating Japanese land. For this reason, he looked at it scared and full of happiness, and screamed:

“Fuji-San! Mount Fuji . . . Fuji-San! Beloved fatherland!”

. . . Screaming and running through a seemingly shorter path yet leading directly to the cliff, Kenhiti extended his hand to Akemi, who grabbed it. That way, united by the same idea, both jumped to eternity!7

The delusional vision of the iconic Mount Fuji in the Brazilian countryside suggests their inability to grasp the new reality in a strange and foreign land. The novel implies that Kenhiti’s failure to adapt to the new culture, customs, and language—added to the death of his relatives after the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima—contributed to his eventual demise and dragged his wife Akemi to an untimely death.

Saudade is omnipresent in the novel as well as in much of Japanese Brazilian literature and film. While it plausibly reflects a historical reality, the recurrent references to this deep melancholic emotional state of longing for a loved person or thing that is absent and will never return may also be a strategic way to emphasize the true Brazilianness of Nikkeijin, since this feeling is often considered quintessential to the “Brazilian essence or spirit.” At the onset of the narrative of Yawara!, the nostalgic Issei Koiti Furukawa, head of another of the...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Foreword by Jeffrey Lesser
• Acknowledgments
• A Note on Translation
• Introduction: Diasporas, Unstable Identities, and Nikkei Discourse
• 1. Historical Memory and Claiming Place
• 2. Between Assimilationism and Cultural Celebration
• 3. Female Agency, Nostalgia, and Generational Gaps
• 4. The Impact of World War II on the Nikkeijin
• 5. Contested Modernities: Dekasegi (Self-)Representations and the Nipponization of Brazil
• 6. Brazilian Dekasegi Children in Japanese Film
• Epilogue
• Chronological List of Analyzed Works
• Works Cited
• Index