An Ethnography of the Lives of Japanese and Japanese Brazilian Migrants. Ethel V. Kosminsky
This information can be applied to other Japanese–Brazilian migrant populations from Brazilian cities including São Paulo, Belém, and Rio de Janeiro, and the states of São Paulo, Mato Grosso do Sul, Rio de Janeiro, Bahia, Santa Catarina, and Rio Grande do Sul. Labor brokers controlled the process of enveloping migrant workers, obtaining necessary documents and visas, securing jobs, and arranging housing (Sasaki 2009: 331). Migrants’ siblings could barely influence their choice.
Labor brokers direct Japanese Brazilian immigrants to non-skilled factory jobs in Japan. The power of these brokers in the receptive society applies to almost all Japanese Brazilian immigrants, even to those who opened small business, such as food stores and restaurants for their own countrymen. Herbert Klein (1989, 1983) writing about Italians in Brazil, Argentina, and the United States demonstrates the importance of the receptive society and its labor market between the second half of the nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth century. However, transnational labor conditions are different. They create an underclass and an elite one, and at the same time, squeeze the middle class.
The Japanese government financially backed the centenary celebrations as a way to keep its economic, political, and financial link with their former immigrants and their descendants and with the Brazilian government. Japan backed Japanese Brazilian cultural activities, including museums devoted to Japanese immigration. The centenary celebrations became a point of pride for the former immigrants and their descendants. The Japanese Brazilian immigrants mythologized the adversity they faced and how their descendants overcame this and became successful medical doctors, politicians, and engineers. This glorification of the past and the invention of traditions became common among other groups of immigrants, such as Eastern European Jewish and Italian immigrants in turn-of-the-century New York City (Foner 2000: 2–3).
Those who went to work in Japan as Dekasegi were devalued. Originally Dekasegi meant to work away from home. In Brazilian Portuguese, they are called Dekassegui. Currently, Japanese apply this word to foreigners, including Japanese Brazilians or Nikkei, who work in low status and low skill occupations. Japanese call this kind of occupation 3K jobs: Kitani (dirty), Kiken (dangerous), and Kisui (difficult). Japanese see these jobs as derogatory ones (Sasaki 2014: 8).
The discrimination against Brazilian Nikkei has to do with their insertion in subaltern employment in Japan. However, in both countries, Dekasegi is associated with “the idea of failure, wounding the pride of the Japanese—and the successful Nikkei who live in Brazil—who had immigrated earlier in the twentieth century and who had achieved some degree of success relative to their host country” (Sasaki 2014: 8).
Besides Brazil, the Japanese state sent emigrants to other Latin American countries, such as Peru, Paraguay, Argentina, Bolivia, Dominican Republic, and Mexico, from the end of the nineteenth century to the middle of the twentieth century. Japanese emigration started in the 1880s, when migrant workers moved to Hawaii and North America. The official reason for Latin America’s migration policy was overpopulation and poverty from the 1920s to 1960s. During this length of time 40 to 50 percent of the emigrants to Latin America came from Southwest Japan. In fact, people who were disadvantaged and marginalized due to the Japan’s modernization and capitalistic development assumed radical positions of resistance. Japan decided to get rid of those who questioned its policy and sent them to Latin America. Besides increasing its internal social control, Japan’s nation-state flexed its imperialist tentacles beyond its borders through a system of migration and colonization (Endoh 2009).
Japanese people considered Japanese Brazilians as betrayers, even though those who left Japan in order to survive a severe crisis, and did so with the help of the Japanese government. Japanese immigrants intended to stay for a few years in Brazil, work hard, save money, and then return to Japan. However, World War II interrupted their plans, and they had to settle definitively in Brazil. The novel Haru e Natsu e as Cartas que Não Chegaram (Haru and Natsu and the Letters that Did Not Arrive) contrasts the fraught relationships of family members who had left Japan and those who had to stay (Hashida 2005). Novels, oral accounts, and biographies based on migration experience are a rich source of information for migration studies. These need to be combined with additional material, such as life histories, interviews, and historical data, as they are all a part of the rich historical experience of such groups (Kosminsky 2003: 179; Sakurai 1993).
I apply the following terminology to describe the Japanese Brazilians in this research from the point of view of the interviewees: Japanese, someone who has the Japanese phenotype although he/she holds Brazilian citizenship; Brazilian, someone who does not have the Japanese phenotype and has a mix of European, African Brazilian, and Native Brazilian ancestry; Nikkei, originated from the Japanese term Nikkeijin, is applied to all the Japanese descendants; and finally Dekasegi, classified as such by Japanese Brazilians, Japanese and Brazilian companies, and both societies. The interviewees also used the generational terminology: Issei, first generation born in Japan; Nisei, second generation; and Sansei, third generation. However, Brazilians, regardless of origin, do not use the expression Japanese Brazilian, which is American. I decided to keep this expression in order to make it easy for readers (Tsuda 2003: 50; Sasaki 2009: 355).
For the Brazilian government, the celebration of the centenary highlighted the continuation of Japanese Brazilians’ remittances. These remittances, sent in dollars, were instrumental in helping to shrink the Brazilian deficit, worsened by the high interest charged on this debt. Banks, real state agencies, and business companies were also interested in the migrants’ remittances. In the early 1990s, Dekasegi sent remittances totaling approximately four billion dollars. In 2009, remittances were estimated to be only 1.7 billion dollars. Migrants tended to be more careful about managing their savings in Brazil, as they were fully aware of the failures of their compatriots, whose small businesses had not thrived despite their best efforts. They also were conscious of the difficulty of re-integrating into society after so many years abroad. Another reason for the decrease of remittances is related to the increasingly longer stays of migrants, the consumption of durable goods, and the increase in the number of families that remained intact over that in the earlier immigration (Sasaki 2009: 340–41).
Besides the transnational corporations and its executives, politicians, and the transnational capitalist class (the elite), the transnational migrant communities are making a huge impact on the global economy through the remittances that they send to their families. To many nation-states, remittances represent the most important source of foreign exchange. This leads many countries to create specific policies in order to keep their link with the immigrants, such as allowing them to vote for national elections (Vertovec 1999).
The number of Japanese Brazilians has been decreasing due to the Japanese economic crisis, and the remittances have therefore diminished. Other Asian immigrants have replaced Japanese Brazilians. The population of Japanese Brazilians exceeded 300,000 in 2007, the third largest group of foreigners in the country. The first were Koreans, numbering around 600,000 people, and the Chinese were second with around 500,000 people (Ishikawa 2012: 223). Currently, according to the General Consulate of Brazil in Tokyo, based on a Brazilian Federal Division of Justice’s report, the number of Brazilians in Japan decreased 4.2 percent from a total of 185,694 to 177,953 people between June 2013 and June 2014. It now ranks fourth, following the Chinese (648,734 people), Koreans (508,561), and Philippines (213,923). The Vietnamese population holds fifth place, increasing 38.1 percent in one year from 61,931 to 86,400 people (“Comunidade: Número de Brasileiros no Japão Cai 4.2%, para 177.953,” October, 2014).
Comparing the Japanese immigrants’ family relationships in the beginning of the twentieth century to the transnational migration of the Japanese Brazilian family relationships in the twenty-first century is a fruitful way to examine the adjustment process of migrating in both countries. Adjustment process consists of treating all their conflicts “as directly affected by macroeconomic and macrosociological factors that have an impact on immigration” (Gans 2000: 76).
The hypothesis that guides our research is: the Japanese immigrant family kept strong ties among its members under the patriarchal authority of the head of the family in Brazil in the first decades of the twentieth century.1 This is due in part because Japanese immigrants settled in rural areas and family members worked together on plantations to insure their prosperity. As