Dominicano Donde Sea: 60 Years of Globalization, Migration, and Integration in the Nikkei Dominican Community

DOMINICANO DONDE SEA: 60 YEARS OF GLOBALIZATION, MIGRATION, AND INTEGRATION IN THE NIKKEI DOMINICAN COMMUNITY Omar Pineda Jr. Submitted to the Department of Asian Languages & Civilizations of Amherst College in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Bachelor of Arts with honors Advisor Trent E. Maxey May 5th, 2016 INDEX Acknowledgements 2 Introduction 3 Chapter 1 Birth of a Japanese Diaspora 15 and Immigration to the Dominican Republic Chapter 2 Los Que Quedaron: Nikkei Dominican Diversification, 62 Reverse Acculturation, and Internationalization Chapter 3 Migration of Work: Return to the Native Homeland 106 and Arrival in the Dominican Diaspora Chapter 4 Voy Pa’lla: Long-Term Overseas Resettlement 144 and the Next Generation of Nikkei Dominicans Afterword 182 References 185 1 Acknowledgements First and foremost, I would like to thank Professor Wako Tawa and the Japanese Language program for helping with translations for this project, and for also guiding me through a new language, and essentially a new world, that has been so central to my time at Amherst College. Hontou-ni osewaninarimashita. Thank you Valentina Peguero for your encouraging words during this project’s earliest planning stages. I especially want to thank Professor Trent Maxey, whose constant support, guidance, and enthusiasm for this research motivated me tremendously over these past few months. The fieldwork for this study was made possible by generous grants from Amherst’s Alpha Delta Phi and Linden Family Funds. A Five College Digital Humanities Microgrant also funded the creation of an online blog mapping past and present Nikkei Dominican migrations.1 Thank you Sharon Domier at Frost Library for connecting me with Japanese language resources and for requesting items that were shipped in from as far as Hawaii and Japan. I was very fortunate to have met several Nikkei Dominicans who were willing to share their stories and also introduce me to friends and relatives abroad. Thank you for your time and kindness, and thank you for letting me into the new homes that you have worked so diligently to create for yourselves. Thank you to Pamela Rodriguez and Elaine Vilorio for showing interest in my project and connecting me with their own distant Nikkei relatives. The world is not all that big after all. Lastly, I would like to thank my mother for all of her sacrifices since immigrating to the U.S. from the Dominican Republic in 1990. Thank you for raising us with the Dominican Republic’s beautiful culture, unique Cibaeño dialect, and delicious food, which I never appreciated enough until I had to eat three meals a day at a dining hall. Te quiero mucho mami. 1 https://dominicanodondesea.wordpress.com/ 2 Introduction Migration has several implications for both members of the entering group (immigrants, refugees, etc.) and those of the host society. Contact between the distinct cultures of the incoming minority and that of the dominant majority often results in a conflict that is settled by a process of acculturation, or cultural change.1 The nature of these conflicts depends on several factors, as does the extent to which they are resolved, ranging from the assimilation of the new group, a symbiosis in which each group adopts aspects of the other’s culture, or a complete separation between members of opposites groups. Our ability to measure this sense of integration, or lack of it, between groups has changed over time. As more people venture in search of new beginnings in far off corners of the world, several researchers have looked into the effects of globalization on not only state to state interactions, but on transnational and diasporic communities as well. Globalization, a transnational increase in interactions and dependence making “the world in reality and in experience more connected,” has influenced how individuals have responded to migration, introducing heightened, eroded, and/or hybrid identities.2 Conditions met in the receiving country such as perceptions towards immigration and societal pressures account for differences in identity formation. In Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (1996), anthropologist Arjun Appadurai explores how media’s evolution and increased accessibility can explain contemporary migrations in a more globalized world. Appadurai notes that “electronic mediation and mass migration mark the world of the present not as technically new forces but as ones that seem to impel, and sometimes compel, the work of the imagination.” Media in its various forms (radio and television, cassettes and videos, newsprint and telephone) has provided the stimulus for individuals to move, influenced their adaptation to their new environments, and also allowed 3 them to maintain ties to their native homelands.3 In this way, Appadurai argues that globalization does not necessarily result in the homogenization of people. In his 1983 Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, Benedict Anderson introduces the concept of an imagined community. It is “imagined because members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion.”4 Anderson similarly highlights the role that media has played in facilitating these communities in its capacity to quickly disperse and generalize information to large audiences. He notes that studies on the transnational diffusion of literature were still rare in the early 1980s. Anderson’s imagined community can be extended to a more global scale with migrants who live abroad yet maintain transnational ties with their homeland and ancestral roots. Contextualized specifically for this study, the transnational imagined community is a product of globalization involving the sharing of a common heritage, ideology, and consciousness that transcends national borders. From the streets of Little Tokyo in Los Angeles to those of São Paulo’s Liberdade district, Japan’s culture, media, and people have disseminated all over the world. A diaspora refers to the dispersion or spreading of something that was originally localized, be it a people, language, or culture.5 Japan’s diaspora encompasses several emigrant communities whose members are referred to as Nikkei: non-Japanese people of Japanese descent.6 According to participants of the 11th Pan American Nikkei Conference held in New York City in 2001, the Nikkei, aside from having one or more Japanese ancestors, are characterized by a sharing of “Japanese language and values, emotional orientations and a corporate view stressing cooperation, mutual aid, and the needs of the large group as a whole.”7 4 Several scholars have engaged the relationship between migration and forms of acculturation among members of this community, focusing on the Nikkei communities that have formed in Latin America and the communities of descendant return migrant workers in Japan. However, few have made it the primary focus of their research. Some have also specifically considered the role that modern media plays in this dialogue. For example, in her ethnography of Nikkei Brazilian return migrant workers in Japan, Circle K Cycles, Karen Tei Yamashita looks at ways in which this community maintains ties with Brazil. One such practice involves circulating illegal VCR recordings of Brazilian television shows amongst themselves. A series of smaller studies have documented similar experiences for different groups of Japanese descendants, but only one has synthesized the state of this community at its most general level: the International Nikkei Research Project (1998-2001). INRP was a collaborative research project that synthesized and addressed issues concerning all members of the diaspora for the first time. It resulted in an encyclopedia as well as a compilation that focuses on those of Japanese descent in the Americas and on those from Latin America in Japan.8 These collections not only document the Nikkei experience but also provide a comparative basis for Nikkei studies that demonstrates the diversity that exists within the Japanese diaspora. Its authors mostly summarize Nikkei history in the context of their respective host countries, and then discuss those issues which most affect their specific community today. To a certain extent, these authors also examine how globalization has influenced the formation of a collective Nikkei identity, stressing the value of examining “interdependency and interconnections among people in a high-tech universe.” Works such as these, which consider several Nikkei communities in unison, are the most likely to discuss topics relating to globalization, at least in passing. Globalization has an inherent role in shaping relationships 5 between the host country and the Japanese homeland, as well as within the host countries themselves. The main objectives of these projects have been to document and compile an overview of the different groups that make up the global Nikkei community. This has essentially provided the foundation for scholars to begin addressing topics within Nikkei globalization. However, few have done so thus far. Another shortcoming of western research concerning the Nikkei experience is in the scarcity of work that has concerned its smallest groups—minorities within the Japanese diaspora. There are more persons of Japanese ethnic origin in just one South American nation, Brazil, than in all fifty U.S. states (1.5 million vs 900,000). Yet, it is only recently that case studies of the Japanese diaspora within Latin America have gained more attention within the sphere of English language scholarship. Research on these emigrant communities has traditionally been published in either Japanese, Spanish, or Portuguese. We are only beginning to find historical accounts, articles, and ethnographies that focus not only on Nikkei communities in Latin America but also on the communities of descendant return migrant workers that have formed in Japan since the 1990s. Studies that do focus on Nikkei in Latin America have mostly only looked at communities in countries with substantially large Japanese populations, such as Brazil and Peru.

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