Japanese-Brazilian Return Migrants and the Search for Homeland Abroad

Migration and Alienation: Japanese-Brazilian Return Migrants and the Search for Homeland Abroad Takeyuki Tsuda Harper-Schmidt Instructor Social Sciences Collegiate Division The University of Chicago 5845 S. Ellis Avenue, Room 233 Chicago, Illinois 60637 Introduction I was in the eighth grade when I took my "first" trip to Japan. In fact, I still vividly remember seeing the Japanese mainland from the airplane for the first time. I was peering anxiously out of the small plane window as we descended through the thick clouds. It had been a full thirteen hours since we had left Chicago, and I was eagerly awaiting my first glimpse of Japan. My mother sat beside me. Then I saw it. At first, it was a brief blur as the plane passed over a break in the clouds. As we continued our descent, the contours of the land below suddenly became clearer as the plane emerged out of the clouds and the white haze lifted. The Japanese countryside looked quite different from the flat, monotonous cornfields of the American midwest. The rice patties below were a luscious green and the landscape quite hilly. Some of the hillsides had been meticulously carved into terraced rice fields, an interesting sight completely absent in the midwest, where land was flat and abundant. I was overcome with emotion upon seeing my ethnic homeland. I looked at my mother, who was also peering out the window with me. "This is our country, mother. We have finally come home." Such a statement may seen a bit strange, coming from a second generation Japanese-American born and raised in the United States. Except for a brief trip when I was three years old (which I had obviously forgotten), this was my first time in Japan. Yet, my mother found nothing strange in my emotional reaction upon seeing Japan. "You are pure Japanese," she had told me many times, meaning that I was a pure Japanese descendant. However, that statement also implied a sense of cultural purity as well. My mother always felt that it would be shameful if her son, as a Japanese descendant, was not familiar with Japanese culture and could not speak Japanese fluently. As a result, she had sent me to a grueling Japanese Saturday school, where I had to take classes with students from Japan. At home, we spoke exclusively in Japanese. In fact, my mother always scorned Japanese-Americans with names like Harry Hashimoto, who had supposedly forgotten their Japanese ethnic heritage. 1 A few weeks earlier, my teacher in Japanese Saturday school had found it strange that I referred to my upcoming trip to Japan as "kikoku" (repatriation). "Why is it repatriation?" he asked me. "You were born and raised in the United States." "It's because I consider Japan to be my homeland," I replied. "Then, what will you call it when you leave Japan and return to the U.S.?" he pursued. "Oh, that's repatriation too," I answered in a matter-of-fact manner. My teacher did not point out that it does not make sense to be able to repatriate to two different countries during one overseas trip. Or does it? After the plane landed at Narita International Airport outside Tokyo, we proceeded through the gate area and arrived at the passport control checkpoint. There were two lines, one for "nihonjin" (Japanese) and the other for "gaikokujin" (foreigners). I naturally followed my mother into the "Japanese" line, but she instructed me otherwise. "You have to wait over there," she said, pointing me toward the other line, where a bunch of Caucasian Americans stood. Although I found it quite strange to be waiting in a line designated for "foreigners" upon entering my "homeland," it did not bother me much at that point. I knew that the only reason I did not have dual nationality was because my parents had simply failed to register me with the Japanese government before the official deadline during the hectic period right after my birth (I was a caesarian).1 Nationality was simply a legal formality without much significance, I had told myself. When I approached the counter to present my American passport, I spoke to the immigration official in Japanese, just to show him that I was no "foreigner" like the other Americans that stood in line with me. Upon gathering our luggage and passing through customs, we boarded the bus that would take us to TCAT (Tokyo City Air Terminal), where our relatives were eagerly waiting for us. When we got off the bus a couple hours later and entered the lobby area, a large group of relatives converged upon us (my mother has four siblings, all with families). I looked bewildered at the surrounding Japanese faces. Of course, I recognized almost none of them, since this was my first encounter with most of my Japanese relatives since I had been an infant. A middle aged woman approached and greeted me in broken, Japanized English. 2 "Halo, ai amu yua anto (Hello, I am your Aunt)." Another man (who turned out to be my eldest uncle) was asking my mother how much Japanese I understood. My relatives had naturally assumed that I had become more American than Japanese. For the first time, I felt profoundly “Other” in Japan. During my sojourn in Japan, I was apparently identified as a foreigner a number of times despite my self-assumed fluency in Japanese, an experience that was rather perturbing to me at first. For instance, I remember approaching a guide at Hakone National Park in Shizuoka prefecture to inquire whether he had more detailed maps of the area. "We don't have more detailed maps," he responded. "But we do have a map in English." Was it my lingering American accent that gave away my identity as a foreigner? Or was it my demeanor, body comportment, or manner of dress that indicated that I was not a native of Japan? Eleven years later, when I returned to Japan to conduct dissertation fieldwork, the situation was rather different.2 Ironically, my increased residence in the United States (mainly several more years of Japanese Saturday school) apparently made me appear more "native" in Japan than before. After living in Japan for several months, I remember attending a party arranged by one of my friends in Tokyo. After speaking with a group of Japanese for awhile, a Japanese woman (whom I had not been introduced to) looked at me and said, "You seem to know a lot about America. Have you lived in the United States before?" I was quite surprised and told her that I was born and raised in the United States. “You couldn’t tell I was American?” I asked amused. “I had no idea,” the woman admitted. I always felt a strange sense of triumph whenever someone mistook me for another Japanese. However, this was not because I had finally proven to the Japanese that Japan was my true homeland. It was simply a sense of accomplishment anyone receives when his linguistic and cultural mastery in a foreign country reaches the point where he can pass as a “native.” For I no longer considered Japan to be my true homeland. America was. My first sojourn in Japan had taught me that. When returning to Japan for dissertation fieldwork, I had not referred to it as kikoku. 3 Migration, Alienation, and Homeland Most Japanese-Americans have not heard much about their fellow nikkeijin (Japanese descendants living outside Japan) in Brazil. When I first heard about the Japanese-Brazilians and how they are currently return migrating to Japan as unskilled foreign workers, the topic instantly intrigued me, partly because of the apparent connections to my own personal ethnic background and experiences. I had always assumed that the Japanese-Americans were the largest group of nikkeijin and was quite surprised to hear that the Japanese-Brazilians, with a population over 1.2 million, outnumber us by over 400,000. Because of a severe Brazilian economic crisis and a crippling shortage of unskilled labor in Japan, the Brazilian nikkeijin began return migrating to Japan in the late 1980s as temporary migrant laborers and primarily work in factories of small and medium-sized Japanese companies in the manufacturing sector. Although they are relatively well-educated and mostly of middle class background in Brazil, they still earn five to ten times their Brazilian salaries in Japan as factory workers. An open Japanese immigration policy toward the "ethnic Japanese" and well-established transnational labor recruitment networks between Japan and Brazil have also contributed to the migrant flow (see Tsuda 1999a). Currently estimated at over 230,000, the Japanese-Brazilians have become the second largest population of foreigners in Japan after the Chinese and their numbers continue to increase at a steady pace despite the prolonged Japanese recession.3 A vast majority of them are of the second and third generations (nisei and sansei) who were born and raised in Brazil, do not speak Japanese very well, and have become culturally Brazilianized to various degrees. As a result, despite their Japanese descent, they are ethnically rejected and treated as foreigners in Japan because of narrow definitions of what constitutes being Japanese and have become the country’s newest ethnic minority. What struck me initially is that this massive population movement was referred to as a “return migration” in the literature and in the popular press. Of course, this term made perfect sense to me. Although most of the nikkeijin migrants were born in Brazil, they were now “returning” to their ethnic homeland. It was a type of kikoku.

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