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Preface

The Transnational Migration of Japanese Brazilians

The centennial celebration marking the arrival of the first ship at the port of Santos, São Paulo, bringing the first Japanese immigrants to Brazil took place in 2008. Preparations for this commemoration began in earnest in 2004. Books and articles were published, and conferences were held at public universities with funding from the Japanese and Brazilian governments, private banks, and publishing houses. No centennnial commemoration of Italian, German, Portuguese, Spanish, Syrian-Lebanese, or of any other group had ever been celebrated in this way.

There have been no celebrations and very few books, master papers, and PhD dissertations examining the transnational migration of Japanese Brazilians, which began in the 1980s. Why did the centenary of Japanese immigration reach such a large public and gain so much financial support? Why has the transnational process between Brazil and Japan, or even the settlement of Japanese Brazilians in Japan, received little attention from the Brazilian academia and the public in general, with the exception of the Japanese Brazilian associations concerned about the disruption of families? What has been the quality of the family relationships of transnational migrant Japanese Brazilians in Bastos and in Japan? How did the early adjustment process of Japanese immigrants affect their family links in São Paulo State, especially in Bastos?

The transnational migration process is more than a labor migration, in which the migrants move to work in another country, to which they have ethnic connection or not, through labor brokers or not, and face difficulties obtaining citizenship from the host country. It is a temporary migration that can sometimes last for years. Immigrants occupy the lowest position in the host society. They perform the unskilled and cheap work that members of the host country refuse to do. This back-and-forth migration is not apparently a new phenomenon. Italians in the United States of America in the 1800s came as seasonal migrants and worked for wages, which they saved and invested back into their small farms (Nugent 1995: 157). However, the transnational migration is a contemporary phenomenon.

Transnational migration in the era of globalization presents new aspects. Changes in the technologies of transportation and communication stimulated migration because both help immigrants get in touch with their families who have stayed behind. This separation often causes strains within the family, for those alone in the host country, those who stay in the sending country, and even for the family who immigrated together (Foner 2000: chapter 6).

This kind of relationship based on technologies of communication is not restricted to the familial one. Immigrants created a network that improves forms of solidarity, such as an Internet newsletter, which does not depend on space appropriation and face-to-face contact (Vertovec 1999: 449). As an example, Brazilian Japanese immigrants created “Ipcdigital: O portal dos brasileiros no Japão” (Ipcdigital: The Portal for Brazilians in Japan). The May 7, 2015, newsletter, for instance, includes information about remittances to Brazil, different kinds of labor agreement, a division of labor at the Brazilian General-Consul in Hamamatsu, a readers’ help section, a section about retirement in Japan and in Brazil, several ads from people seeking work, and more.

The population of Japanese Brazilian immigrants to Japan initially consisted of men, then by women on their own, and finally by couples and their families. They came from the lower and middle classes, some with college degrees, and chose to move to Japan due to the Brazilian economic crisis in the 1980s. This crisis reached many Third World countries (Hobsbawm 1996: 571). They aimed to earn enough money to return to Brazil and buy a house or start a business. Japanese factories needed cheap labor, and the Japanese government preferred those of Latin American-Japanese descent in order to maintain Japan’s ethnic homogeneity and avoid potential social and ethnic conflicts (Tsuda 2003: 92). Japan’s ethnic homogeneity is a societal founder myth, interwoven with its social structure. This myth is similar to that of Brazilian racial democracy and American meritocracy, established to prevent conflict and improve social cohesion among society’s members. At the same time, a myth highlights a society’s contradictions (Schwarcz 1996: 179).

Their level of education mattered little. Factories in Japan were looking for workers to fill positions no Japanese was willing to fill. Transnational migrants expect to work many years in Japan, save money, and return to Brazil. If they fail, they return to work in Japan for an additional period of time. Disadvantaged people use this strategy to overcome the challenges of the current world economy (Portes, Guarnizo, and Landolt 1999).

The concept of socioeconomic formation includes social production processes and relationships and the social conditions of people’s lives (Marx 1976: 38). Globalized socioeconomic formation, the current capitalist step, certainly continues based on labor and capital. However, it depends on transnational migrants. Developed countries with well-protected boundaries need immigrants, but they do not give them citizenship rights. They concede temporary visas to immigrants who see these developed countries as a transient place to make money, while maintaining roots in their own homeland. This kind of transnational migration is only possible due to the improvement of transportation and communication. Technology will continue to expel human labor out of the production of goods and services as long as the number of consumers is large enough (Hobsbawm 1996). Rich countries increase the income gap between the wealthy and poor within their own societies, and further expand the division of the world into rich and poor countries. Countries regardless of their wealth demonstrate income gaps based on race/ethnicity and/or religion.

Some authors refer to this capitalist phase as transnationalism, which also comprises the state’s role as transnational entrepreneur and its creation of supranational organizations, and its opposite grassroots nongovernmental transnational organizations and movements. Transnationalism includes sociocultural activities, such as diasporic literature and satellite and cable networks (Portes, Guarnizo, and Landolt 1999; Vertovec 1999).

Transnationalism increased the number of labor brokers and human trafficking. Most of the Japanese Brazilian immigrants working in Japan were recruited by labor brokers, as were more than two-third of the migrant population of Maringá city, located in Northern Paraná State in 2001 (Sasaki 2009: 330–31). 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 immigrants settled in agricultural colonies, relatively apart 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.