Description
Book SynopsisDuring the first half of the twentieth century, Japanese immigrants entered Brazil by the tens of thousands. Examining these significant but rarely studied transnational movements and the experiences of Japanese-Brazilians, this book includes essays that rethink complex issues of ethnicity and national identity.
Trade Review“Jeffrey Lesser’s achievement is that he and his colleagues have assembled the most comprehensive, multi-dimensional portrayal to date of the Japanese in Brazil as well as Brazilians of Japanese descent who have gone to work temporarily in Japan. Their research deftly illustrates how the multiple identities of immigrants and their descendants, as well as transnational labor migrants, can generate a plethora of responses as to where and what their real home actually is. As such, this book makes a seminal contribution to Asian, Latin American, and migration studies.”—Lane Ryo Hirabayashi, University of California, Riverside
"
Searching for Home Abroad makes a major contribution to Brazilian studies and to our empirical and theoretical understanding of transnational migration, liminality, and the construction of transnational identities. Its contributors—from history, sociology, anthropology, and ethnomusicology—provide us with a rich, nuanced, and very much needed understanding of early-twentieth-century Japanese immigration in Brazil, as well as the more recent Japanese-Brazilian emigration to Japan."—Leo Spitzer, author of
Hotel Bolivia: The Culture of Memory in a Refuge from NazismTable of ContentsAcknowledgments ix
Glossary xi
Introduction: Looking for Home in All the Wrong Places / Jeffrey Lesser 1
Japanese, Brazilians, Nikkei: A Short History of Identity Building and Homemaking / Jeffrey Lesser 5
Speaking in the Tongue of Antipode: Japanese Brazilian Fantasy on the Origin of Language / Shuhei Hosokawa 21
Identity Transformations among Okinawans and Their Descendants in Brazil / Koichi Mori 47
Interlude: Circle K Rules / Karen Tei Yamashita 67
Searching for Home, Wealth, Pride, and "Class": Japanese Brazilians in the "Land of Yen" / Angelo Ishi 75
Urashima Taro's Ambiguating Practices: The Significance of Overseas Voting Rights for Elderly Japanese Migrants to Brazil / Joshua Hotaka Roth 103
Homeland-less Abroad: Transnational Liminality, Social Alienation, and Personal Malaise / Takeyuki (Gaku) Tsuda 121
Feminization of Japanese Brazilian Labor Migration to Japan / Keiko Yamanaka 163
Do Japanese Brazilians Exist? / Daniel T. Linger 201
Contributors 215
Index 217
