An Ethnography of the Lives of Japanese and Japanese Brazilian Migrants. Ethel V. Kosminsky
from Brazilian influence, they were more likely to keep their original culture, such as the Japanese language, the respect for the elderly, and the adoration of the emperor. These three aspects helped maintain strong links among family members. As Japanese immigrants settled in a patriarchal society, this cultural trait was reinforced in Brazil (Kosminsky 2004). Although the immigrants did not plan to stay long in Brazil, World War II caused them to change their plans and remain definitively in the country.
The Brazilian government, whether it was the empire in the nineteenth century or the republic in the twentieth century, opposed a Japanese immigration it considered to be “the yellow danger.” However, the Japanese immigrants arrived in 1908 in order to replace African slave labor and replenish the dwindling supply of white European workers for the coffee plantations in São Paulo State. Plantation owners, intellectuals, and the Brazilian Federal and São Paulo State government would have preferred white Europeans to Asians, to further their efforts to alter the Brazilian population by making it white through miscegenation. According to them, Brazil as a modern nation needed to build its race (white) and civilization (following the European model). They considered Chinese, Hindu, and Japanese people as representatives of decaying civilizations, who would only serve to hinder these “advancements” they saw as necessary (Seyferth 1996: 56–57). Brazilians saw Japanese, upon their arrival, as an odd people, who had a different phenotype, spoke another language, were not Catholics, and had different mores.
These feelings began to change at a time when many Japanese immigrants and their descendants started to move to cities and blend into Brazilian culture. They learned Portuguese, attended Brazilian schools, converted to Catholicism, and began marrying outside their ethnic group. Brazilians conceded that those whom they would always still call Japanese were an intelligent, hardworking people.
If the Japanese immigration to Brazil was mostly composed of families, the transmigration of Japanese Brazilians to Japan was not, as stated before. At first, it was men leaving their families behind. It soon included women immigrating alone, followed by couples that left their children with grandmothers. In the last decades, nuclear families immigrated. According to Japanese Brazilian associations, there were several cases of family ruptures between those who immigrated and those who stayed behind including problems regarding the interruption of sending the remittances. Even among whole families in Japan there were ruptures, which were directly connected to the daily stress that migrants faced.
Parents have to work many hours a day, between eight and twelve hours, if they want to save money to return to Brazil quickly. Children are often neglected; some go to Japanese schools and others to Brazilian ones, and then they stay by themselves at home or stay on the streets. Families often move to find jobs, which means that they move their children from school to school (Ishikawa 2009, 2012, 2014). In this environment, some adolescent children form criminal gangs (Sasaki 2009: chapter 7).
Continuing with my hypothesis, I maintain that Japanese Brazilian transmigrant families living in the highly industrialized Japanese society face an excessive level of stress, exacerbated by discrimination due to their lack of Japanese language proficiency and their different mores. All of this can have a profound and negative effect on families. Literature points to a comparable situation with that experienced by Eastern European Jews immigrating to a similarly newly industrialized New York City in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Seasonal jobs, a lack of money, and awful living conditions led husbands and fathers to abandon their wives and children. Women faced with this situation had no other choice than to institutionalize their children in orphanages while they searched for work that would enable them to bring their children home (A Bintel Brief 1990). All those entering America at this time faced the same fate, with orphanages arranged in order to keep races and ethnicities separate.
I also compare the experiences of Japanese Brazilian children who lived in Japan and returned to Bastos to that of children who were left behind by their parents in Bastos. I study their socialization within the family, between students and teachers, and within peer groups (Plaisance 2004). Currently, it is fashionable to consider children as social agents, but children can be both social agents and vulnerable, which is one of our hypotheses. Children who attend Japanese schools serve as translators for their parents and neighbors. However, children have no decision-making power regarding staying in Japan or moving to Brazil. The second hypothesis is that due to the transnational process, the socialization of children is interrupted several times, due to the back and forth of their families. A possible result is that children can have a crisis of identity, feel insecure about their mother’s love, have difficulties adapting to one country or the other, and face severe learning challenges at school.
I examined a child’s life experiences as an extended case study (Burawoy 1991). I refer to its peculiarities, such as the seven years spent attending school in Japan; six years of elementary school, plus one year of junior high school. This almost exceptional social fact highlights the difficulties that most Japanese Brazilian children face in attending school in Japan (Kawamura 2003). Japanese Brazilian children finish junior high school because there is no repetition of elementary and junior high school grades. Although they are able to speak Japanese fluently, “very few possess an adequately high skill in reading and writing the language” (Ishikawa 2014: 8–9).
As one considers “problematic the exceptional or deviant cases,” one is “driven outside the field situation to the broader economic and political forces” impacting the Japanese Brazilian migrants, especially their children. Through the perspective of transnationalism, “the social situation becomes a completely different object, one threaded by patterns of power” and domination on one side, and resistance on the other (Burawoy 1991: 278). This case is an exception due to this student having continued to improve her Japanese skills in Bastos, where she taught the Japanese language. She wanted to attend college in Japan. It is rare for Japanese Brazilian children to want to continue their education in Japan after junior high school (Ishikawa 2014: 8–9).
NOTE
1. I use hypothesis as a guide to conduct the research and not as a relationship between two or more variables.
This book was made possible because at the time fieldwork was done, 2005–2006, São Paulo State University (UNESP), Marília, was a strong university, in the sense that one could receive the financial and emotional support of the São Paulo State University (UNESP) central administration and the local branch administration. Besides this, I was very proud and, at the same time, very grateful to observe how well my students and I were treated in Marilia and in Bastos, the site of research. As research requires specific financial support I and my students received the complete and necessary support from the federal agencies, CNPq (Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico—National Council for Scientific and Technological Development), CAPES (Coordenadoria de Aperfeiçamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior), and, on the state level, FAPESP (Fundação de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado de São Paulo). Students and I were able to research thanks to grants. Some students could not even attend their undergraduate, master’s, and PhD courses and research without those grants, although the public universities were free of charge.
Those were other times, when the public university, students, professors, and members of the administration alike were respected because they were working in order to extend knowledge in the social sciences that was used on behalf of Brazilian society and in other countries of the world as well. Back then, São Paulo State University had two principal aims related to research. At first, undergraduate students learned how to take part in research conducted by a professor. The supervisor wrote a research project, for example, whose objective was divided between two students for a period of time or according to the research site. Students were awarded grants, PIBIC (Programa Institucional de Bolsas de Iniciação Científica) by CNPQ that were administered by the Dean of UNESP in charge of research. If the undergraduate students were sufficiently advanced, I helped them write their own research project and then send it to FAPESP. I observed that the students who got this knowledge and experience were able to get their master’s thesis more easily. It was very pleasant to work with undergraduate students, and to encourage their learning. Other departmental professors and