An Ethnography of the Lives of Japanese and Japanese Brazilian Migrants. Ethel V. Kosminsky
in Bastos at the time of the fieldwork, 2005–2006. The Bastos colony, founded in 1928 in São Paulo State, was known as the most “racially homogenous” Japanese colony in the 1930s. Race relations consist of a social category, in which individuals are conscious of each other’s different “permanent physical trait” (Park 2000: 105). Compared to other Japanese colonies, Bastos stood out due to its predominant phenotype. The only non-Japanese there were Brazilian workers who had come from Minas Gerais State and the northeastern region in order to cut down the trees.
My approach is interdisciplinary: I integrate sociological, historical, political, economic, and ethnographic knowledge. This approach allows me to view the subjects of my research from many points of view. It is socio-historical, because “Every social fact is a historical fact and vice-versa.” A concrete science of human reality can only be achieved as a historical sociology or a sociological history. Otherwise, I would be working with two partial images of society (Goldman 1969: 23). Historical sociology regards the origin and the ongoing process of the migration phenomenon, referring to Marx’s writing about the primitive accumulation of capital, as the genesis of the capitalist mode of production (Marx 1975: 891–954).
Until the mid-1960s, Brazilian sociology did not set sociology apart from anthropology. When they diverged, both were impoverished. Political science joined those sciences but with an inferior status. Social scientists conducted research on Native Brazilians, folklore, peasant culture, slavery, immigration, and other topics. Joint efforts in the fields of sociology, anthropology, and political science made the research more productive and also led to a marked difference in their approach. Marxism strongly influenced sociology in Brazil, and sociologists’ criticism of social inequalities grew. American and French anthropology influenced Brazilian anthropology through cultural anthropology and structuralism, respectively. Political science found its own way researching societal economic gaps and state politics. Some researchers, such as Antonio Candido (1964), could be classified as an anthropologist or a sociologist. Candido also employed a historical approach. Researchers specialized in specific segments of Brazilian society, which in turn resulted in an impoverished or diminished framework for understanding it as a whole. Such fragmented methods are only able to provide a very narrow view, and their conclusions refer only to the point studied (Pereira de Queiroz 1992).
Currently, it is difficult to differentiate Brazilian sociology from anthropology, apart from the fact that some sociologists may use quantitative research methods and anthropologists only employ qualitative methods. Both disciplines may choose the same research object and use the same approach to collect and analyze their empirical material. This differs from the stricter boundaries between American sociology and anthropology. However, American ethnography, which started as an anthropological branch, has been used within sociology as a methodological approach (Burawoy 1991).
American anthropologists were the first to apply a transnational approach to the study of contemporary migrants, those who “develop and maintain multiple relations—familial, economic, social, organizational, religious, and political that span borders” (Glick Schiller et al. 1992: 1). Sociologists have incorporated and re-created transnationalism according to their own theoretical perspective (Portes 1999; Vertovec 1999).
This short, and at the same time important, analysis of the convergences between sociology and other fields in the Americas demonstrates that sociology is receptive to other disciplines. This “is reflected in the popularity and acceptance of the notion of interdisciplinary by sociologists everywhere, indicating their willingness to establish cooperative relations across fields” (Portes 2002: 6). Although sociology incorporates knowledge from other disciplines, at its core it is based on its “intellectual heritage received from the founders of the discipline [which gives] a distinct outlook on social phenomena . . . Sociology’s perspective centers on the dialectics of social life” (Portes 2002: 6). Interdisciplinary social sciences research requires a specific discipline to lead, and this discipline is sociology. In my research, I use sociology in order to understand socioeconomic formations, their social production processes and relationships, and the social conditions of people’s lives (Marx 1976: 38).
A Comparative Method
The history of the Bastos colony began with the foundation of Yugen Sekinin Brasil Takushoku Kumiai (Bratac), also known as Sociedade Colonizadora do Brasil Ltda, funded by Japanese capital in São Paulo City in 1928. Bratac intended to establish a colony of Japanese immigrants who had come straight from Japan. However, Brazil’s immigration policy in the 1930s and the Pacific War in 1941 brought Japanese emigration to a halt.
In the 1930s, Bratac decided to sell plots of land to the “earlier immigrants,” those who had arrived previously to work as laborers on coffee plantations. According to the company’s statistics, 20 percent of Bastos’ population in 1937 consisted of those who had come straight from Japan and 80 percent who had come from São Paulo coffee plantations (Mita 1999: 65). There were two types of Japanese immigrant rural communities in Brazil before World War II: those composed of families related to one another who had already formed rural communities in Japan and those who were not related. Before World War II, these rural communities of related families in Japan had shared ancestry, religious customs, and mythological beliefs, allowing them to maintain a strong allegiance to the group, even though it was now made up of new members. Families in Bastos, however, were not related, and had come from different regions, and so were at the opposite end of this spectrum, with very little in common (Mita 1999: 96). Traits that they did share included physical attributes, language, customs, values, endogamy, and their self-identity (Weber [1968] 1978: 385–98). This enabled them to identify as members of the same ethnic group. They developed their self-identity as Japanese colonists who differed from the Italian, German, and Spanish colonists, and Afro-Brazilian former slaves, with whom they worked on the São Paulo coffee plantations (Mitta 1999: 99). But the non-related Japanese immigrants’ cohesion was vulnerable, especially in regard to their link to Japan.
Thus, the Japanese government emphasized patriotism to overcome the immigrants’ distant location and their internal cultural differences. It stressed emperor worship and civic virtues as the most important elements of Japanese national identity in order to strengthen the link between the Japanese state and the immigrants (Endoh 2009: 9). Japanese immigrants in the Bastos colony adopted the Emperor Jimmu, whose accession has been recorded as occurring in 660 BC in their mythology, as the spiritual leader of their community. Other colonies did so as well. This attitude provided much-needed cohesion for a disparate people trying to come together as a community. They celebrated the anniversary of the colony’s foundation, the New Year, sporting events, and official school ceremonies to strengthen their social links. Every Japanese family’s living room boasted a picture of the Japanese imperial couple next to a picture of Brazilian President Vargas. This was true even after World War II, and this proved to be true, at least until 1952 (Mitta 1999: 96–101). For immigrants, it symbolized the affirmation of their ethnic identity, their strong connection to Japan, and their integration into one civil religion.
Sociologists note that a civil religion has the function of preserving a society’s values and providing social cohesion (Marshall 1998: 73). Robert Bellah was one of the first sociologists to make use of this concept. Based on Durkheim, he stated that any social group has a way of expressing its identity that is “religious.” Civil religion is a way of connecting a nation and a people through ethical principles, helping guide the population “to some form of self-understanding” (Bellah 2006: 221).
Reverence for the emperor played a very important role before World War II. When war came, immigrants and their descendants divided into two groups, those who refused to believe that Japan was losing the war and those who did not question it. The first group, Kachigumi, created an association called Shindo Renmei (“Liga do Caminho dos Súditos,” Association of the Emperor’s Subjects), which attacked and killed some members of the second group, the Makegumi (Morais 2000; Mott n.d.; Nakasato 2011). They believed that the relationship between the emperor and the Japanese people was akin to the relationship between father and son (Bastos Shuho 1952: 8). “To betray the Nation is the same as to betray one’s own father” (Nakasato 2011: 142).
Bastos represented, in microcosm, the trajectory of the transnational experience and its lifespan,