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/
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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
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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.
Accounts of smaller Nikkei groups available in English are generally limited to works such as Daniel M. Masterson’s The Japanese in Latin America (2004). Masterson’s work appeared during a period in which most Nikkei research focused on conditions faced by young return migrants in Japan. This has drawn attention, both within the diaspora and among scholars, away from Japanese communities in Latin America, which have also been progressively losing future leadership to outward migration.9 Masterson acknowledges that his work is not intended to be exhaustive, and that there still remain areas of the Japanese emigrant experience that warrant
6 more complete analysis. His questions still apply: to what extent does cultural adaptation occur among the Nikkei in Latin America? Others similarly ask: what significant differences are there between people of Japanese descent in the Americas and what explains these differences? Surely migration and globalization must offer some answers to these questions as well as those posed more generally by Anderson and Appadurai.
Although comprehensive studies such as Masterson’s and those produced through INRP offer more encompassing representations of the Japanese diaspora, especially by including its often overlooked smaller communities, they can inadvertently reduce some Nikkei experiences to a mere couple of pages. One such Nikkei community is the one found in the Dominican
Republic. According to a Japanese population census, there were 847 registered Japanese nationals living in the Dominican Republic in 2013.10 After accounting for diplomats, ambassadors, and a handful of expatriates, one finds that most of this cohort is made up of descendants from a short-lived Japanese immigration project. The Nikkei Dominican community is projected to be even larger if we account for those who have chosen not to or have yet to claim
Japanese nationality. This coming summer marks the 60th anniversary of these immigrants’ first arrival in the Dominican Republic, having determinedly sailed across the world and into the port of Trujillo City, present-day Santo Domingo.
This study focuses on the Dominican Republic as one of Japan’s few post-war emigration destinations and host to a Japanese diasporic community rarely studied by western scholars.
Approximately 1,300 Japanese immigrants arrived in the Dominican Republic between 1956 and
1961 before a mass exodus saw nearly 84% of their population either return to Japan or relocate to other Latin American countries. Those who remained were “Dominicanized,” acculturating to their host country while, to varying extents, maintaining ties to their native homeland.
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References to small Nikkei communities such as this one in English are usually limited to just a few pages within compilations on the Japanese diaspora, or as unelaborated statistics in charts or tables. The information available on this community is not only scarce, but also generally redundant.
The literature that has examined this community in isolation, produced in either Japanese or Spanish, have taken historical and/or political approaches in their analyses. Approximately six pieces concerning Japanese immigration to the Dominican Republic are accessible to an English audience, along with a few newspaper articles in newspapers such as the Asahi Shimbun and the
Washington Post. Gardiner (1971) provides one of the earliest accounts of the migration events just a few years after the settlement’s failure. Dominican scholar Alberto Despradel (1994) examines the politics surrounding the agreement that initiated Japanese immigration to the
Dominican Republic from the perspective of Trujillo’s regime, the Dominican dictator at the time. Horst and Asagiri (2000) provide a historical overview of the immigration project and allude to the beginnings of Nikkei-Dominican return migration to Japan, joining their Nikkei counterparts from elsewhere in Latin American in their ancestral homeland. Cordis (2008) similarly provides a historical overview of the political and economic circumstances surrounding
Japanese immigration, and also mentions a need for more specific studies on this community such as “investigations into the cultural and linguistic ramifications of Japanese colonization in the Dominican Republic.” The most comprehensive analysis of this community thus far can be credited to Dominican scholar Valentina Peguero. In Immigration and Politics in the Caribbean:
Japanese and other Immigrants in the Dominican Republic (2008), Peguero contributes more contemporary ethnographic research on Nikkei within the Dominican Republic and their relationships with local Dominicans. More recently, Lopez (2013) has completed undergraduate
8 thesis work in Spanish concerning Japanese cultural expressions within the Dominican host society.
This study surveys contemporary Nikkei Dominicans, the diverse descendants of those
Japanese who immigrated to the Caribbean island 60 years ago, examining the sort of communities they have formed and currently participate in worldwide. Through the lens of migration, acculturation, and media mediated globalization, I examine what led Japanese individuals to immigrate to the Dominican Republic in the 1950s and their lives there at the time, today’s Nikkei Dominican community within the host country, and Nikkei Dominican presence in Japan’s return migrant communities which, to the best of our knowledge, has never been studied. Country specific studies such as this one have already been done for other Nikkei communities, particularly in Brazil and Peru. New to all Nikkei research, I will also look at
Nikkei globalization outside of the Japan-Host Country binary through those who have followed the migratory patterns of their adopted countries—in this case, forward migration to the
Dominican diaspora, including destinations such as Spain and the United States. This serves as a model for what we can expect of the Japanese diaspora in an even more globalized future.
What has been the state of the Nikkei Dominican community within not only the
Dominican Republic but internationally, and how has this been influenced by globalization? The evolution of media and migratory phenomena allows us to explain this narrative in a historical context. The entry of new cultures and ideas often meets resistance from the native people.
Similarly, pressures to assimilate are met with reluctance from newcomer migrants. I propose that this confrontation produces new communities, be they physical or increasingly imagined as those that Anderson proposes, and that they differ in terms of their constituents. Taking
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Anderson’s contributions a step further past the nation state, are these communities localized or instead part of a transnational collective consciousness?
The complex processes of acculturation for Nikkei Dominicans have resulted in varying levels of integration and separation from the dominant majority. These have been generally influenced by two factors: the reactions of the receiving society to which they arrive and a temporal globalization effect, reflected in media’s modernization. In other words, the communities that Nikkei Dominicans transform and participate in worldwide have depended both on local attitudes at their migratory destinations and on the period in which they migrated, the latter of which is related to accessibility to media items that have made living transnationally much easier. Together, these factors have changed how much these individuals have needed to interact with locals, and in this way, media facilitates communities, tells us who they are composed of, and indicates how its members might interact with those outside of it. We found that these elements, especially on their influence on this group’s early acculturation processes, have made it so that they will be Dominicano Donde Sea, Dominican no matter where they are.
This sort of identity does not necessarily hold for other Nikkei groups that have historically had much larger communities.
Much of the foundation for this study is based on findings in research previously published in English, Spanish, and Japanese, as well as primary documents such as diaries and newsprint. I also rely on frameworks established by studies of other Nikkei populations to draw distinctions unique to the Nikkei Dominican experience. My own findings depended heavily on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in the Dominican Republic, Japan and the U.S. In light of limited text sources, I gathered information through site visits and a total of 17 extensive interviews with first, second, and third generation Japanese in Santo Domingo, Constanza,
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Santiago de los Caballeros, Tokyo, Kanagawa, Nagoya, Gifu and Fukuoka. I also established
Nikkei Dominican contacts in New York City and Miami, U.S. cities heavily populated by
Dominican immigrants. Interviews were conducted in Spanish, Japanese, or English, and took place between October 2015 and February 2016.
The first of this thesis’ chapters provides historical background for understanding
Japanese immigration to the Dominican Republic and these migrants’ rapid Dominicanization. I focus on Japan’s deceptive use of media to promote settler relocation throughout Asia and towards the west in the interests of state expansionist goals. Using WWII as its focal point, this chapter provides an overview of the diaspora’s expansion before the war, the diaspora’s contraction during postwar occupation, and the emigration program revitalization attempt that led to immigration to the Dominican Republic. I also provide an overview of early life in the
Dominican settlements, discussing the difficulties these pioneers faced and the effects of globalization already evident early on in this community. Extending up until the mid-1990s, this section highlights interactions with native Dominicans and the formation of a Nikkei Dominican identity that is continuously redefined as access to media, and therefore contact with each other and Japan, increases.
A second chapter uses ethnographic findings to give an update on those who chose to remain—the state of the Nikkei Dominican community within the host country. It resumes where the previous chapter leaves off: the beginning of a divisive lawsuit against the Japanese government in 1996. Aside from Japanese and Dominican news outlets, this lawsuit also drew a considerable amount of international attention that increased international awareness of this community’s existence. Modern media instantly globalizes the local. The lawsuit sheds light on differences between those who sued and those who abstained, and also on a growing divide
11 between the younger and older generations. New organizations and communities arise from internal conflict. I also look at reverse acculturation as this community begins to define itself against the dominant majority after having assimilated. Festivals, celebrations, and anniversary monuments/publications create memory and serve as reminders of their Japanese roots. Finally, this chapter considers Nikkei Dominican legitimization within the global Nikkei community through their hosting of the 18th Pan American Nikkei Conference this past summer.
The third chapter looks at communities Nikkei Dominicans have participated in as they pursue better economic conditions as foreign migrant workers abroad. I explore Dominican international cultural influence and the younger generation’s global dispersions in the 1990s.
Similar to what has been studied with other Latin American Nikkei groups, I look at Nikkei
Dominican return migration to Japan, specifically to the city of Atsugi where most of them are concentrated. Did they have as difficult of a time as other Latin American Nikkei in adapting to
Japanese society, and what unique challenges and restrictions did Nikkei Dominicans face? What sort of space have they made for themselves in Japan, and why have some left while others still remain? Atsugi has been at the heart of Nikkei Dominican migrations towards other parts of
Japan, as well as between the Dominican Republic, Spain, and the United States.
In the fourth and final chapter, I consider Nikkei Dominican long-term resettlement abroad. What factors contribute to the transition from migration of work to permanent resettlement? These communities vary, as do the aspects of their multifaceted Nikkei identities they must access in order to thrive in a given host country. How does modern media facilitate the social spheres they join? What sort of roles do they assume within Japan’s transnational Latin
American Nikkei communities? Modern migration compels the emergence of new identities. We expect their Dominican identities to be compromised more when they migrate to a “homogenous
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Japan” as opposed to the U.S., a country “founded by immigrants.” To what extent have these families integrated, and how does this vary by country? There now exists a generation of Nikkei
Domnicans that have lived exclusively overseas, acculturated to new cultures, and added further nuance to this complex identity.
After preliminary research on several Nikkei groups and the history of Japanese immigration to Latin America, I was convinced of a need for a study that focused specifically on
Nikkei Dominicans in a globalized world. This study provides a new perspective on Nikkei transnational communities and is a case study in globalization that demonstrates the fluidity with which migration can now occur in the age of modernity. It satisfies several deficits in the fields of Anthropology, Asian, and Latino studies by providing much needed ethnographic work, consolidating different worlds of literature, and beginning to answer questions posed by globalization theorists. Finally, this study also highlights the evolution of a relationship between media and migration, with modern technologies allowing for control of media to transfer from stately powers down to common individuals who can use it to create new communities.
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1 David L. Sam; Berry, John W. (1 July 2010). "Acculturation When Individuals and Groups of Different Cultural Backgrounds Meet".Perspectives on Psychological Science 5 (4): 472. 2 Lane Ryo Hirabayashi, Akemi Kikumura-Yano, and James A. Hirabayashi. New Worlds, New Lives : Globalization and People of Japanese Descent in the Americas and from Latin America in Japan / Edited by Lane Ryo Hirabayashi, Akemi Kikumura-Yano, James A. Hirabayashi. Asian America. Stanford, Calif. : Stanford University Press, 2002. 3 Arjun Appadurai. Modernity at Large : Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. Public Worlds: V. 1. Minneapolis, Minn. : University of Minnesota Press, 1996, 6 4 Benedict R. Anderson. Imagined Communities : Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism / Benedict Anderson. London ; New York ; Verso, 2006, 6 5 Definition of “Diaspora”
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Chapter 1 Birth of a Japanese Diaspora and Immigration to the Dominican Republic
“No me puedo olvidar de expresar mi profundo agradecimiento a la tierra Dominicana que nos recibió con mucho respecto, dignidad, y sin ninguna forma de discriminación. Por extendernos una mano en nuestro momento de necesidad y enseñaros de su calidez humana. Que dios siempre la proteja, ¡Banzai!” (Original)
「私達の一人一人を差別せずに尊重してくださり、大きく手を広げて暖かく受け入 れてくださり、助けてくださったドミニカ共和国の皆様への深い感謝の念は、決し て忘れられるものではありません。神様がドミニカ共和国の全ての方々を永遠に見 守ってくださり、また、彼らに恵みを与えてくださることを心よりお祈りしていま す。」
“I cannot forget to mention my deep appreciation to the Dominican Republic for taking us under its wing, treating us with respect, dignity and without discrimination. For holding its arm out to us and embracing us with its warm humanity. That god protect and always bless the Dominican Republic! Long live Dominicana!” -Yoshihiro Iguchi in Seiun no shou: Dominika kyouwakoku Nihonjin nougyou ijuusha 50 nen no michi.
むかし むかし Hace mucho tiempo Long, long ago 母ちゃんは Hicieron que mama Mother ぶらじる丸に Montara el Brasil-Maru Was put onto the 乗せられて Rumbo hacia la República Brazil-Maru ドミニカ移住をしてきたら Dominicana Came to DR where 難儀、苦労を Donde la esperaba Troubles, affliction 待っていた Aflicción, dificultades Awaited おやじ殿が移住など Todo fue idea All father’s idea 考えついたばっかりに Antojó de papá Decided on a whim 若き時代は Pasados por una juventud Now youthful days, unspent 夢の間に Que todavía sigue en sueños Live only within dreams 現在は Y ahora mama And mother’s hair 白髪のお婆さん Cabello en blanco Has gone white (Original) Sueños de mi abuelita Song from a 1991 video recording of a meeting in Constanza’s Japanese Club. Original Japanese sung to the tune of Urashima Tarō, a Japanese folktale about a young fisherman who, against several warnings, opens a box which ages him instantly. These lyrics reflect the unexpected hardship the immigrants encountered in the D.R.
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The purpose of this chapter is two-fold. First, it summarizes the formation and expansion of a Japanese diaspora as a function of two state policies: colonization and emigration.
Colonization throughout the Asian continent, together with government sponsored emigration programs to the western world, rapidly advanced Japan’s global presence in just a matter of decades. We use WWII as a focal point to provide a historical overview of changes in Japan’s diasporic communities through the state’s rise, fall, and recovery. This contextualizes the factors that led an intrepid cohort of families to leave Japan and start anew in the Dominican Republic.
We then step aside from an expository mode to examine the lives of those who chose to remain in the “Caribbean Paradise,” encounters and conflicts between the Japanese and local
Dominicans, and reasons for their rapid Dominicanization, including limited access to media and thus ties to their Japanese homeland. A Nikkei Dominican specific identity and community in relation to Dominican society was later made possible by increased access to media, and therefore to worlds outside of the Dominican Republic, including Japan. A historical approach allows us to focus on developments in media, globalization, and modes of acculturation over time.
Japanese Colonization of the Asian Sphere (1874-1945)
On July 8th, 1853, commodore Mathew Perry docked his ships into the ports of Edo,
Japan representing the United States. This forced end to Japan’s isolationist sakoku policy ushered in a period of reformation, ambitious imperial endeavors and emigration programs that would disperse the Japanese people to lands further away than ever before. From a realist’s perspective, Japan, an island nation with few natural resources, engaged in its extensive colonization of East Asia in order to secure capital necessary for self-advancement against rapidly encroaching western powers. By the time the Japanese empire found itself an active
16 player in WWII, it had acquired lands in Okinawa (1874), Taiwan (1895), Korea (1910),
Micronesia (1919), Manchuria (1931), North China (1937) and Southeast Asia (1942).1
Conditions for natives as well as for Japanese individuals varied between the colonies. The extent of colonization, in terms of numbers of Japanese nationals living in the colonies and the assimilatory measures imposed on its locals, depended both on the colony’s age and on its proximity to the empire’s mainland. As Japan’s closest neighbor and one of the earliest annexed territories, Korea hosted the largest colonial population of Japanese nationals by 1941 (712,583 vs 397,090 in Taiwan as second largest) (See Figure 1). Conditions for Koreans during this period are also known to have been severer in comparison to those of locals in other colonies.
Long term Japanese state expansion required increased presence of Japanese nationals throughout the colonies. While relocating from Japan to a colony was more often than not a personal decision, the government also actively incentivized emigration. In 1937, the Ministry of
Agriculture and Forestry began to finance the mass emigration of farmers to Manchukuo, presumably to alleviate domestic overpopulation issues and shortages in agricultural land and food.2 Influenced by pro-emigration propaganda promising a “New Paradise”, many Japanese departed for Manchuria expecting “extensive landholding, suitable housing, generous financial aid, white rice every day, and an honored position atop the rural social order.”3 These conditions, luxuries for anyone during this time, were rarely ever met. Brought to a screeching halt by
Japan’s defeat, the country’s largest emigration project had expected to eventually move 5 million nationals to Manchuria, of which it only accomplished settling approximately 270,000.3
Formation of the Japanese diaspora by way of colonization not only saw an outward flow of government officials and settlers, but also facilitated movements towards the mainland and even between the colonies themselves.
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In terms of status within the colonies, a very clear dichotomy existed between Japanese colonizers and the colonized locals. More often overlooked have been the discrepancies that existed between the Japanese themselves. The socioeconomic hierarchal structures that were an integral aspect of life in Japan were transferred over to the colonies as well. For example,
Japanese who immigrated to Manchuria for agricultural work were at times persecuted and forced by their own army to partake in dirty work such as espionage.4 Japanese citizens on the lower end of this hierarchy were also the most vulnerable to everyday hostilities from native populations. Differences between the Japanese in the colonies are best illustrated in the way that repatriation from the colonies was handled at the war’s end. Government officials and soldiers were prioritized for evacuation while those in the more rural inland, areas already limited in terms of transportation and communication, were left to fend for themselves. Many Japanese civilians were killed and many children, now referred to as war orphans, were lost in the chaos that ensued.5
Western Expansion through Pre-War Emigration Programs (1868-1941)
Parallel with its colonial undertakings, the Japanese state promoted and sponsored emigration programs throughout the western world. Emigration to the Americas began with a group to Hawaii in 1868, and then branched out throughout the hemisphere, specifically towards
Latin America. By 1941, approximately 420,000 Japanese had immigrated to the United States, with the highest concentrations consistently arriving in Hawaii. Brazil, now host to Japan’s largest diasporic community with over 1.5 million people of Japanese descent, saw its first
Japanese settlers in 1908, and nearly 190,000 more followed suit over the course of 30 years.
Other pre-war destinations included Canada, Argentina, Columbia, Cuba, Mexico, Paraguay, and
Peru, among many others. Japanese emigration quickly evolved into cooperations between the
18 state and companies that together orchestrated the politics and finances behind relocating individuals. As in emigration to Japan’s Asian colonies, print media propaganda was again used to recruit Japanese nationals (See Figures 1 and 2). Headlines such as “Tree bear gold nuggets in
Brazil” and “Land for free” were distributed to households often on the verge of economic collapse.6
Most pre-war emigrants left Japan as dekasegi: temporary male migrant workers who devoted themselves to full-time agricultural work before returning with their earnings. This system provided emigrants access to a continuous flow of Japanese individuals, money, and gifts between Japan and their host country.7 The decision to migrate depended on several personal factors, and the conditions that awaited these immigrants varied by host country and time period.
Similar to the discrepancies between conditions advertised and those actually met by Japanese in the colonies, terms promised in western emigration propaganda were not always fulfilled. Many communities within Japan, particularly those in its southwest region, developed cultures of migration, and quickly became emigration feeders. State propaganda served its institutional purpose by getting the expansionist ball rolling, establishing both migratory routes and transnational Japanese communities. Individuals would now impulsively set off abroad simply based on word of mouth communications from neighbors and friends.
Just as migration between the colonies and mainland Japan was fluid, movement between countries in the Americas, whether or not they already had Japanese communities, was common.
Individuals could resettle to just about anywhere after arriving at their formal destinations.
Japanese in Peru and Brazil, the largest receiver nations in South America, transmigrated throughout the continent to countries such as Chile, Bolivia, Uruguay and Venezuela. Up until the early 1920s, by which point it had begun restricting immigration, the United States had
19 overwhelmingly been the preferred destination.8 Immigrants who would have gone there now instead set their eyes on Latin America or Asia. Many emigrated to Latin American merely as a stepping stone for illegal migration north into the U.S. Tensions in the late 1930s as WWII approached led Latin American countries to also limit Japanese immigration, and so emigration efforts by the Japanese state were then redirected to areas of colonial Manchuria.9
Diaspora in Hiatus: WWII and Allied Occupation (1941-1952)
After a series of embargos and failed negotiations, the United States officially declared war on Japan following the 1941 assaults on Ally fleets, including the infamous attack on Pearl
Harbor. The Allies, consisting of Great Britain, the Soviet Union and the United States, countered rising Axis powers headed by Germany, Italy and Japan. On February 19th, 1942,
President Roosevelt enacted Executive Order 9066 to justify the internment of over 120,000 people of Japanese ancestry, many of which were actually Japanese American citizens, throughout camps in California, Arizona Washington, and Oregon. Several Latin American countries, notably Peru and Bolivia, cooperated with the U.S. by detaining Japanese civilians in their countries and forwarding them to these camps. Between early 1942 and mid-1944, Peruvian authorities deported 1,800 Japanese immigrants to the U.S., of which only 50 returned at the war’s end.10 Cuba is also noted for its systematic internment of its Japanese population on the
Isle of Pines prison island.
Allied forces advanced on Axis powers throughout 1944 and would call for their unconditional surrender in the summer of 1945. On the August that followed, the United States expedited the end of the war through its catastrophic atomic bombing of Hiroshima and
Nagasaki. On August 15th 1945, Emperor Hirohito broadcasted an ambiguous message to the nation of Japan, lamenting “a surrender that was unavoidable in the face of such advanced
20 military technologies.” Allied occupation of a defeated Japanese empire, involving a restructuring of the country’s political system and drafting of its new constitution, began immediately after the war and continued until 1952.
The war’s aftermath saw an immediate geographical compression of the Japanese diaspora as the fallen empire relinquished its colonies and Japanese nationals returned to the mainland in masses. Former colonies became understandably hostile towards anything Japanese as they regained their sovereignty. The forced end of Japan’s colonization program and repatriation of approximately 6.2 million nationals to a new, much geographically smaller, Japan between 1945 and 1950 involved tragedies of family separation, starvation, and death.11
Returnees and non-Japanese who had been brought to work in the mainland exacerbated overpopulation issues and added pressures to an economy struggling to recover. Any movement out of Japan during the occupation period was prohibited indeterminably, which interrupted the flow of resources and individuals that had previously characterized its relationship with the
Americas. Japanese immigrants living in the U.S. and South America supported relatives in their war-torn homeland, but this was only through relief materials that were screened by the United
States. In other words, exchanges were now one-sided and significantly restricted. These collective circumstances placed the Japanese diaspora in a temporary limbo until the end of occupation.
The Second Wave of Japanese Migration (1952-1970)
Immediately after the end of U.S. occupation, Japan established its Bureau of Emigration within its Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MOFA) in 1952. Government officials were swiftly dispatched to inspect and report conditions at potential emigration sites. Some have argued that this was Japan’s rushed attempt to resume the expansionist policies through which it had
21 previously engaged in warfare and built itself an empire.12 MOFA proposed three outrageous plans that would have collectively sent 49,000 nationals abroad in five years, another 426,000 over the course of ten years, and 101,000 more in another 5 year period.13 There are several similarities between this revamped emigration attempt and Japan’s policies during the pre-war period, including the government’s hasty acceptance of conditions posed by partner countries, its arbitrary assessment of potential settlement locations, and its circulation of misleading emigration propaganda to citizens in an attempt to encourage emigration.
In Exporting Japan: Politics of Emigration Towards Latin America, Toake Endo argues that “Latin American emigration was a political decompressor used by the pre-war and post-war state to remove perceived sources of current or potential instability and to restore order and national unity.”14 A less contentious argument is that renewing its emigration program was only a practical attempt by Japan to address overpopulation. Many Japanese, especially those returning from less than ideal conditions in the colonies, were disillusioned and even angry with their government, which pushed them to strongly consider migrating to Latin America. For example, in Okinawa, easily one of the regions most affected by the war with over 100,000 civilian casualties in just the Battle of Okinawa (1945), 172,000 people applied in 1951 to migrate either towards the mainland or overseas hoping for better opportunities.15
Skeptical of Japan’s motives and with its antagonism during WWII still fresh on their minds, many countries, especially those in Asia, outright rejected any Japanese immigration. In response, Japan instead sought agreements with any country willing to accept Japanese migrants, regardless of its political or economic conditions.16 Nearly all of these partnerships were with
Latin American countries. In its postwar re-emergence, Japan established bilateral treaties with both old and new partners, including the Dominican Republic in 1956 which would receive 4%
22 these new emigrants. Other post-war emigration destinations included Argentina, Bolivia,
Paraguay, the United States, and Brazil, which continued to be a preferred destination because of its extensive and well established community.
Some features distinguish post-war migrants from their pre-war counterparts, including increased participation by agricultural workers, migration in family units as opposed to as individuals, and a resolve to make their relocations permanent ones. In this way, an emigrant’s host country now became their adopted country. Japan’s rapid economic recovery in the mid-
1960s dissipated much of the financial incentives for emigrating abroad. This “second wave” of emigration programs ended just as quickly as it began, and Japan’s Central-South American
Emigration Bureau’s closed its doors in 1968.
Seeking New Futures in a “Caribbean Paradise” (1956-1961)
By 1941, Cuba hosted the Caribbean’s largest pre-war Japanese community with a population of 672 Japanese nationals. Although they were dispersed throughout the entire island, changes in the attitude of the second generation towards small farming as well as negative experiences during the war may have influenced their transmigration to the capital of Havana, or even to the Dominican Republic.17 Japan and the Dominican Republic had very few interactions with one another before the war, and these were completely interrupted when the U.S. declared war on Japan. The Dominican government responded to the attacks on Pearl Harbor by writing to
President Roosevelt, “We have the honor to declare that the Government of the Dominican
Republic has today declared war on the Japanese Empire.”18 As did several other Latin American countries, the Dominican Republic froze Axis assets within its country and cooperated in forwarding a few Japanese civilians along with a larger number of Germans and Italians to U.S.
23 internment camps.19 The Dominican Republic and Japan formally signed a peace treaty on
September 8th, 1951.
General Rafael Leonidas Trujillo Molina maintained unopposed rule over the Dominican
Republic between 1930 and 1961, a ruthless dictatorship that is often compared to those of Hitler and Mussolini. Under Trujillo, the Dominican Republic enacted several policies that attempted to whiten its population, and it is even rumored that the dictator often powdered his skin in order to lighten his complexion. One such policy welcomed Spanish and Hungarian immigrants as well as Jewish refugees from Germany and Austria to the Dominican Republic. Many of these immigrants remained there for only short periods before moving on to places with more opportunities such as the United States, Argentina, and Palestine.20 This process of
“Dominicanization” also evolved into a call for ridding the island of Hispaniola of its darkest ethnic groups, most of which lived in the Dominican Republic’s neighboring country of Haiti. In
1937, Trujillo’s army invaded Haiti under orders that massacred 25,000 Haitian men, women, and children.
As previously mentioned, the postwar Japanese government was quick to enter emigration agreements with any country that was willing to accept Japanese immigrants. It is unclear why Trujillo became interested in Japanese immigration, though establishing a political and economic connection with Asia was important in an increasingly globalizing world.
Dominican authorities also associated immigration, at least that of Europeans, with modernity and progress.21 Trujillo is assumed to have had already developed some partiality towards the
Japanese through his father, who admired their tactics during the Russo-Japanese war so much that he gave his daughter the epithet ‘La Japonesa.’ The proximity to the Haitian border of the lands Trujillo designated for Japanese colonization, in combination with the racial policies
24 endorsed by his regime, have led many to argue that the Japanese immigrants were used as a geopolitical buffer against Haitian entry into the Dominican Republic.22
Evidence suggests that Japanese authorities were made aware of agricultural limitations in the frontier region that the Dominican government proposed for settlement, and yet concealed this in their recruitment propaganda in order to accelerate the emigration project.23 The Japanese bureau’s methods for selecting which applicants were selected for emigration, and thus also who was rejected, have been deemed problematic.24 Trujillo was a megalomaniac who erected statues of himself throughout the republic, even renaming the capital after himself. The Japanese easily exploited these noncommittal fickle tendencies. Japanese officials secured the dictator’s backing by appealing to his narcissism—successfully organizing a campaign that projected a positive image of him and his country’s hospitality to the Japanese public.25 Yet, Trujillo would back out of the project just as often as he showed enthusiasm for it, and it was not until he was told that the ships had already been prepared for departure from Japan that the project finally materialized.
Japanese immigration to the Dominican Republic began on July of 1956 with a cohort of
28 families (186 individuals) who set sail from the port of Yokohama (See Figure 4).26 Families were actively recruited from prefectures all over Japan: Hokkaido, Fukushima, Kochi,
Yamaguchi, Fukuoka, Kumamoto, and Kagoshima. Their month long trip on the Brazil-Maru made stops in San Francisco before passing through the Panama Canal and then arriving in
Trujillo City. On the ship, families got a chance to meet not only their future neighbors, but also other immigrants making their way to Brazil and Paraguay. An air of excitement and feeling like they had “won the lottery” was only slightly subdued by passengers who shared concerns with one another.27 These immigrants were welcomed to the Dominican Republic with cheers from its
25 tan locals, and in return the Japanese proclaimed “Long live General Trujillo!” while disembarking. This group was later transported to La Vigia, located at the Dajabón-Haitian border in the northwest region, where a celebration with fireworks and even an appearance from
Trujillo himself awaited them (See Figure 5).
In October of 1956, the Africa-Maru arrived with the second group of families, which mostly settled in Constanza’s valley area, located at the country’s heart. This cohort also consisted of a small group of fishermen who were placed near Pepillo Salcedo, a town along the island’s northwestern shores.28 Over the course of the four years that followed, 251 families
(1319 individuals) set off for the Dominican Republic determined to make it their new home.
The immigrants were placed throughout the republic’s central and western regions, specifically in colonies established for them in La Vigia, Constanza, Pepillo Salcedo, Jarabacoa, Plaza
Cacique (Neiba), La Colonia (Duverge), La Altagracia, and Agua Negra (See Figure 6).
In recruiting for and promoting these settlements, the Japanese government again manipulated both national and local newsprint to over-glamorize conditions at the emigration destination. A March 1956 issue of the Asahi newspaper introduced emigration to the Dominican
Republic and outlined its application procedures, conditions offered by the host country, and eligibility requirements (See Figure 7).29 Among the many incentives were promises of fully furnished homes, minimum income guarantees, schools/medical facilities with translation services, and 300 tareas (approximately 47 acres) of land ready for agriculture work.30 This was an extraordinary offer for any Japanese family, let alone for one struggling to make ends meet.
Successful applicants included those who agreed to and were capable of agricultural work and permanent resettlement. Newspaper descriptions emphasized that the Dominican government’s generous offerings were unprecedented, implying that immigrating there was
26 better than heading elsewhere, even if elsewhere meant a more established emigration destination. “I saw the conditions and it all seemed much better than going to Brazil, so that’s how I ended up applying to go to the Dominican Republic,” wrote Fukutsuchi Yamamoto.31 The application process was competitive, and there were many more rejections than there were acceptances. One of my own interviewees who arrived in Constanza with the second group of immigrants, Choko Waki, explained to me how she convinced her husband to make the move:
One day, my brother-in-law approached me with a newspaper clipping saying
“look at what it says here.” It was about the arrival of Japanese immigrants to the
Dominican Republic. When I saw this, not knowing where the country was, or the
sort of people who lived there, without knowing absolutely anything about it, I
felt like this was our chance. I thought that we would never be able to escape
poverty if we let this opportunity pass us by, so I showed my husband the clipping
and tried to convince him. I was completely sure that there was no turning back.32
Waki arrived in the Dominican Republic with her husband and two children, as well as two of her husband’s brothers in order to meet the family size requirement. A message encouraging others to follow in his footsteps from Nobura Uda, one of the first pioneers, also reached a wide
Japanese audience via newspapers. In his letter, Uda described the Dominican Republic as a
“country of one’s dreams” where Sundays were for resting, women did not have to work, weather was nice year-round, and one could enjoy nice cool lemonade every day. Uda claimed that he no longer wanted to return to Japan, and the confidence with which he articulated this convinced anyone already on the fence to just go ahead and make the trip.33 Though it was something produced by an individual, such a letter had to first be approved by a government that
27 still held much control over media in Japan. It is no accident that this letter was allowed to reach and entice the masses.
Media during the earlier settlement stages was also responsible for an exaggerated and unfounded optimism towards the project. Press in the Dominican Republic such as El Listín
Diario and El Caribe had to answer to Trujillo, and so they had to portray the Japanese immigrants he had introduced into their country highly to the Dominican people.34 Japanese officials initially estimated that 500 families would migrate to the Dominican Republic, which somehow became 5,000 in Japanese newspapers and then skyrocketed to 50,000 in U.S. reports.35 This overenthusiasm, combined with the several articles praising the country’s hospitality and opportunities it provided for self-improvement, led many to emigrate expecting to arrive at the advertised “Caribbean Paradise.” They would find reality in the Dominican
Republic to be considerably different, and the continued arrival of immigrants would only exacerbate pressures on the colonies’ limited resources.
Challenges in the Dominican Republic and The Fall of Trujillo
One of the immigrants’ biggest complaints is that they received far less than the promised
300 tareas of farmland advertised by the Japanese government, though in their language,
Dominican officials had specified that they were offering each family “up to 300 tareas of land.”36 For example, families in Dajabón only received 85 tareas while those in Constanza only received 50.37 Especially if they were near the sweltering Haitian border, the immigrants found much of the “rich soil” they had actually received to be entirely barren—unsuitable for any sort of cultivation. To make matters worse, the Dominican government arbitrarily required them to plant things that were more difficult to grow such as maize, tobacco, and coffee.38 Personal safety issues, although rare, were still sometimes a concern in their surrounding communities. In
28 contrast to the paradise that they were so compellingly promised, some claimed that they had foolishly taken their families over with them to hell.39 After liquidating all of their assets in
Japan to afford the trip to the Dominican Republic, and plunging into endless debt hopelessly trying to establish themselves there, some saw no other form of escape than in taking their own lives.
Initially, Japan’s government either completely disregarded settler complaints or consoled them with more unfulfilled promises. It instead responded by dispatching even more unsuspecting emigrants to the Dominican Republic. The end of Trujillo’s regime, which was the only Dominican support keeping the immigration project alive, was imminent, and yet the
Japanese embassy still inquired about creating an additional colony on March 18th, 1960. This is just one of many examples of a concerning level of disconnect between the Japanese government and the citizens it was sending off. Dominican officials responded lamenting that they were not able to support any more expansion at the time, marking an end to the four year operation.40
As a U.S. supporter during the Cold War, the Dominican Republic became victim of occasional invasion attempts from neighboring communist Cuba.41 On June 14th, 1959, residents of Constanza received a scare when a Cuban air raid tried to land on an airstrip there.42 An increasingly tumultuous political climate culminated with Trujillo’s assassination on May 31st,
1961, ending the 30 year dictatorship and ushering in a new era for the Dominican Republic. A newfound freedom for the Dominican people introduced the voices of many who had previously lived in fear. This meant that some Dominicans could now openly express their resentment and hostility towards the Japanese immigrants, pointing out that it was Trujillo who had brought them over. Another of our interviewees, Yoko Nishio from Constanza, recalls hearing talk that the communist party was planning to take away the immigrants’ homes, though in the end
29 nothing came from these rumors. At demonstrations in Jarabacoa, protestors toppled statues of the general and yelled “Trujillo was a thief, and so are you! Give us back our land and go home!” at the Japanese (See Figure 8).43 In stark contrast to events in the Dominican Republic, Japan had been making a rapid structural and economic recovery that did not go unnoticed by these immigrants.
Exodus from the Colonies: Return and Transmigration
Horst notes that the settlement project failed due to four main reasons: colony placement in sites unsuitable for farming, a lack of infrastructure, a failure to address settler complaints by the Japanese government, and political instability within the Dominican Republic. The first immigrants to inquire about repatriation were outright rejected by their embassy. This was arguably justified as the settlers had in fact accepted permanency as one of the conditions for settlement in the Dominican Republic. It has been said that Japanese officials were really just concerned about having word of the immigrant project debacle reach a general public back in
Japan.44 It, of course, inevitably did. Media outlets in Japan were becoming more receptive as
Japan was being democratized. Families boldly contacted newspapers about how their experiences were completely different from what they had expected them to be.45 Pieces such as
“Five Families, their Dreams in Ruins” headlined Japanese newspapers. It took an immigrant’s plea for rescue making its way into Japan for their government to finally take action. The Law of
National Assistance for immigrants in the Dominican Republic was approved on September 12th,
1961.
Repatriation of Japanese immigrants from the Dominican Republic began in October of
1961. After returning to Japan, some immigrants even refused to disembark their ships until they were presented with reparations. As families arrived in Yokohama, where it all began for them,
30 even more in the Dominican Republic prepared to return in the subsequent months.46
Embarrassed by how public the issue became as settlers returned, the Japanese government encouraged those still in the Dominican Republic to instead consider relocation to South
America.47 Many did just that, already resolved to a life outside of Japan and committed to pursuing the paradise that had eluded them. The sixth and last group of returnees arrived in Japan on April 4th, 1962. Out of the original 1,319 settlers, 672 returned to Japan and 377 transmigrated elsewhere in Latin America by May of 1962.48
We must note the complexity behind these immigrants’ migratory trajectories as well as in the decisions that these individuals made. One settler who struggled in the Agua Negra colony was prepared to move to Brazil until his father in Japan sold all of his life savings in order to pay for his return. He arrived in Japan nearly unrecognizable with nothing but the clothes he had on his back.49 In another case, the Nishizawa’s had wanted to stay in the Dominican Republic but relocate to another colony where they could possibly have more luck. When their application was rejected, they saw no other choice but to return to Japan.50 Another family applied for relocation to Argentina but instead returned to Japan after being denied entry permits. A news reporter came across their story as the family prepared for remigration to Paraguay. “The language shouldn’t be a problem at all,” the father boasted, noting how much they had already learned during their short time in the Dominican Republic (See Figure 9).51
Immigrant Origins and Dispersion: Fluid Routes and Intersections
Although globalization was not formally defined until the 1961 edition of the Merriam-
Webster Third International Dictionary, many of its effects were already evident in this community over the short period between when they arrived and dispersed from the Dominican
Republic. Official statistics say that 54% of the immigrants to the Dominican Republic
31 originated from Japan’s southwestern region, places like Kochi, Kumamoto, and Fukushima, but they fail to mention that many of them had previously lived for extended periods, or were even born, outside of Japan. It was only the collapse of the Japanese empire and subsequent Allied occupation that had forced them to return to the mainland, even if only temporarily. Post-war remigration to Latin America was, ideologically speaking, easier for these people who already lacked strong ties with Japan. Such people were also among those who emigrated to the
Dominican Republic.
Masao Yamanaka was born in Yamaguchi prefecture but moved to colonial Manchuria which was believed to have more opportunities for land ownership. After having to return to
Japan at the war’s end, he decided to immigrate to the Dominican Republic, “believing all of the terms in the application, only to find troubles there.”52 Many migrants such as Yamanaka were disillusioned with Japan after it had lured them into going to Manchuria, also claiming it to be a
“paradise.” Mistrust of their homeland was only worsened by similarly disastrous experiences in the Dominican Republic. Horst’s interviews with members of the first generation in the
Dominican Republic confirmed that many were born in or had been long-term residents of the
Philippines, Manchuria, or elsewhere in East and Southeast Asia.53 The current head of the
National Association of Japanese Dominicans, Toru Takegama, lived in present-day S. Korea before returning to Japan and then immigrating to the La Vigia colony with his parents in 1956, at the age of 18.54
In a slightly different narrative, Fukuyama was a second generation Nikkei born in
Washington State in 1919.55 His grandfather had immigrated to Canada as a stowaway immigrant before crossing over into the U.S. In 1927, his family returned to Japan and brought
Fukuyama over with them. Never having visited before, Fukuyama had a difficult time adjusting.
32
He went on to marry and have children there, and they then moved together to Manchuria, from where they later repatriated. Fukuyama had remained hopeful of one day returning to the United
States, but after his emigration application there was denied, he decided that his next best option was the Dominican Republic. When life in the Dominican Republic for him and so many others was no longer viable, he opted for remigration to Brazil rather than go back to Japan. In the end,
Fukuyama died without ever realizing his dream of returning to his birthplace.
Even in the settlements’ earlier days, the Japanese immigrants were able to meet people of many diverse backgrounds in the Dominican Republic. In Dajabón’s border region, the immigrants met Haitians and contributed to the simultaneous mixing of three distinct cultures:
Japanese, Dominican, and Haitian. Constanza’s residents lived in Trujillo’s melting pot with
Spanish, Hungarian, and Japanese colonies placed close to one another. Dominicans were intermediaries in these encounters, at times referring to the Japanese as exemplary farmers in comparison to their “lazy” Hungarian counterparts. In truth, most European immigrants to the
Dominican Republic knew little about the agricultural work they were assigned to do, and had actually been engineers and trained specialists back in their home countries.
Latin American migrations during the Japanese’s exodus from the Dominican Republic vary widely and have been mostly documented through diaries and interviews. Official resettlement destinations included Brazil, Bolivia, Argentina and Paraguay. Masterson notes that some of these individuals may have also gone to Mexico because the Japanese community there was making a successful transition after the dislocation of the war years.56 Yoshimi Kokubun was born in the Philippines and had not really considered leaving Japan after being repatriated, but ultimately had to follow his family to the Dominican Republic.57 He and his three brothers later left La Vigia because they did not have enough land there for all of them to live off of. As
33 of Horst’s ethnography in the late 1990s, one brother had returned to Japan while the other three stayed in the Dominican Republic but dispersed domestically: one was a fisherman in Azua, another was a carpenter in Santo Domingo, and the third was a plantain farmer in Vicente Noble, near Barahona.58 In another case, a group of young friends who had been working together as fishermen up until the mid-1960s were more globally dispersed. One remained in La Vega as a copyist, one returned to Japan in 1989, another had been living in La Vigia but returned to Japan in 1998, and the last moved to Panama but still has a brother who lives in Jarabacoa (See Figure
10).59 Sue Higashimo arrived in the Dominican Republic in 1958 with her husband and three children, and later moved to Argentina fearing how hostile some Dominican locals had become.60
My own interviews reveal similar stories. A brother-in-law of Choko Waki married a local Dominican from Bonao and then together relocated to Honduras for agricultural work in the 1970s. He currently has an extensive family there with grandchildren and even great- grandchildren, though he still talks to Choko about one day returning to Constanza. Yoko Nishio chose to remain in the Dominican Republic, having recently married and moved from Dajabón to
Constanza where her husband lived. Her parents instead resettled in Brazil. She was never able to see them again.
Dispersals from the colonies resulted in the physical separation of friends and families.
Yet, these pioneers have and will always remain indelibly connected by their shared experiences on the island. The relationships this community established in the Dominican Republic back then and over the years that followed would only be strengthened by advancements in modern technology and the rise of social media, which will be further discussed in later chapters.
34
Shusuke Ueta: Rapid Dominicanization of the Japanese Immigrants
It is also worthwhile presenting an example of a returnee who was partly acculturated as a Dominican despite the short length of his time there. In Adios Mi Santo Domingo (1988),
Shusuke Ueta reflects on his experiences growing up in the colonies and on adjusting to life in
Japan after his return. Ueta was 10 years old when he, his parents and older brother left Kochi prefecture and settled in Constanza where they lived for two years. For them and several other families, migrating was an opportunity to do things over—another shot at life. Growing up in the
Dominican Republic, he recalls befriending not only Dominican locals but also the neighboring
Hungarian immigrants who would play “music that knew no borders” on their accordions. At first, Ueta got by without knowing any Spanish and it was not until he was 12 that he began learning it with the help of a Japanese textbook and a German priest. Since the textbook was written for adults, it was difficult for him to understand many of its kanji characters, and communicating with the priest was by no means easy either. Ueta ultimately acquired a command of the language through sheer perseverance and gestured conversations. As the arrival of more immigrants added pressure on Constanza’s resources, his family relocated to Jarabacoa where they spent another three years (See Figures 11a and 11b).
At one point in his process of acculturation, Ueta claims to have thought “I am
Dominican. I know that I came from Japan, but I am still responsible for and want to contribute to the Dominican Republic’s progress.” It was when Cold War tensions arose and a Dominican friend questioned Ueta’s neutrality that he realized he had to qualify his new identity, “Yes, your blood is Japanese, but you’re Dominican just like me so long as you’re here. You should want to fight with us.” Struggling to find opportunity for their family and attuned to the country’s declining morale, Ueta’s father made preparations to return to Japan. Ueta said goodbye to “his
35 second motherland” and promised friends that he would return when there was peace again.
Amidst cries from a little sister that was born during their six-year stay, Ueta and his family boarded their first flight ever from Trujillo City to Panama, where they boarded the Africa-Maru and headed for Japan on December 22nd, 1962 (See Figure 12).
One of Ueta’s earliest reverse culture shock experiences as a 16-year old in Japan came in drinking Japanese coffee for the first time. Accustomed to drinking it black while in the
Dominican Republic, common even for children there, Ueta thought to himself “Can you really call this coffee?” He was also taken aback by Japan’s quick modernization, especially in comparison to life in the Dominican Republic. Streets crowded with cars and lined with tall buildings were common in cities that had emerged following Japan’s post-war recovery.
Returning to his hometown in Kochi prefecture was not as difficult as he had expected it to be because it was common for people there to “come and go.” Between 1953 and 1980, 2,705
Kochi residents immigrated to Brazil, Paraguay, Argentina, Bolivia, and the Dominican
Republic.61 Prefectural communities such as those in Kochi regularly gathered to send families off and welcome others back. Within this culture of migration, the sharing of stories among returnees from Latin American countries made the transition all the easier.
Although already a teenager in Japan, Ueta resumed his education at an elementary school level, and then continued on to study Spanish at Kansai Gaidai University. He mentions one occasion in which he was extremely offended by a professor from Barcelona who had commented that Dominican Spanish was the most vulgar dialect that existed. Within the
Spanish-speaking community, Dominican Spanish is characterized for its quick pace and contractions, which makes it difficult for outsiders to understand. After hearing Dominican politicians speak standard Spanish on NHK and other Japanese media outlets, Ueta came to
36 realize that what he had learned as a child was not representative of all Dominicans, but rather a spoken form specific to the Cibao region. Finding out about this distinction somehow made recollections of his childhood even more special to him. Twenty years later, he claims to still feel uncomfortable whenever he hears mention of the word “Barcelona.” Noticing a lack of Japanese literature concerning the immigration project to the Dominican Republic, Ueta decided to write about his own experiences so that these stories not be forgotten.
Though their stays were shortened, the lives of those who returned to Japan, and similarly of those who transmigrated to other Latin American countries, were forever changed by their experiences under the Caribbean sun. In Ueta’s case, just a few of his adolescent years in the
Dominican Republic influenced the sort of life he ended up making for himself in Japan as a social worker. Cultural impact and processes of acculturation are heightened all the more for children as they can adapt to new environments with relevant ease in comparison to adults. Next, we must consider the factors that contributed to the rate of the acculturation process that affected the Japanese immigrants in the Dominican Republic.
Becoming Dominican: Community, Conflict, Resolution (1962-1998)
In contrast to their prewar counterparts who had emigrated for temporary work, the
Japanese families that arrived in the Dominican Republic had full intentions of making new lives for themselves abroad. Moreover, those who chose to remain after the exodus were determined to make any sacrifices necessary to see their hardships pay off. For some, returning to Japan, especially empty-handed, was simply not an option. Starting all over again in another Latin
American country also seemed pointless. Others had grown accustomed to life in the Dominican
Republic and begun calling it their new homes. Some had already even started marrying local
Dominicans.
37
Of the approximately 270 Japanese who decided to stay in the Dominican Republic, most were concentrated in just three colonies: La Vigia, Constanza and Jarabacoa. La Vigia had the largest community since it was the first and therefore most established of the colonies. Constanza and Jarabacoa are both located in the La Vega valley area, one of the most fertile farming zones within the country. It can be argued that those who remained there were doing, or at least starting to do, well enough for themselves that staying was most beneficial. The other five colonies, all of which had been placed along the Haitian border, were almost entirely abandoned by 1961.62
According to Masterson, Latin America’s smaller Nikkei communities such as those in
Bolivia, Paraguay, Chile, Colombia, Panama, and Cuba have several things in common. At least in their earlier years, none of these immigrant communities were able to sustain Japanese cultural traditions through schools and associations like those in Brazil and Peru. Moreover, the Japanese family structure was difficult to maintain in these countries because of high intermarriage rates with locals.63 Attempting to replicate their Japanese lives abroad was impractical, and so
Japanese aspects of their identities disappeared at a faster rate. For example, thirty years after the
La Colmena colony was established in Paraguay, only 15 percent of its Japanese population were consuming a primarily Japanese diet. It was only on special occasions that they cooked traditional foods such as soba and sukiyaki. Aspects of their Japanese culture and religious beliefs had also changed substantially.64
Similarly, the low settlement rate and geographical distance between the Japanese in the
Dominican Republic contributed to their rapid Dominican acculturation and loss of Japanese identity. There was very little access to basic resources in the Dominican interior during the
1960s, let alone to televisions, telephones, and other forms of media. Nishio recalls having to carry water buckets back and forth between her home and the communal water pump every day.
38
Electricity was limited to a few hours during the night. Lacking access to means of communication and busy with farm work, the immigrants connected very little with Japanese in the other colonies, and even less with those back in their homeland. A visit to the La Vigia colony by an American geographer found immigrants already using some Spanish and accepting
Catholicism as early as 1959.65 In 1967, another investigator wrote that the “Japanese move very much like Dominicans in some situations.”66
In one study from the late 1980s, Peguero examined how the processes of acculturation and assimilation affected both the Japanese and Dominican locals. She found that, despite their tempered animosity towards Haitians, Dominicans were generally friendly towards the
Japanese.67 The most hostility they faced were during the protests that followed Trujillo’s assassination, though those were mostly isolated events. Dominicans also felt more comfortable working for Japanese who respected them and paid them on time, which was not always the case with Dominican employers. Dominicans admired the Japanese for their peaceful nature and strong work ethic. Those from the first generation who lived through these earlier days shared similar impressions with me. “Things were great back then. If they saw you walking along the road they’d pull up to you and tell you to hop on. They didn’t really have to do that, especially not for free,” Nishio recalls memories from when she was 15 years old and Dajabón’s locals would drive the Japanese children to and from school rather than let them walk the long distance from their colony.
Having “grown up Japanese”, the first generation was the most reluctant about adopting local customs. With a population of blacks (15%), whites (15%), and mixed races (70%) in the
Dominican Republic, the immigrant’s exposure to new faces came as a shock to them. Similarly, most Dominicans had never even seen a Japanese person before the immigrants arrived. Curious
39 glances from both sides turned into stares, and differences in customs led to misunderstandings that were only exacerbated by the language barrier. From some immigrants’ suspicion of
Dominican plantains and avocados to the Dominicans who would jokingly hide the shoes the
Japanese left at door fronts, Peguero outlines some of the conflicts that arose from cultural differences. Japanese, who mourn death in silence, were stunned by the loud Dominican performative cries that came from those who had recently lost a loved one.68 The Japanese practice of removing one’s shoes before entering a house was considered a lack of refinement by
Dominicans.69 Their restrained mannerisms contrasted starkly with Dominicans who spoke their minds and relied heavily on body language.70
Over time, both groups learned enough about each other to overcome their differences. In truth, they had no choice but to learn how to cohabitate in a rural countryside where Dominicans and Japanese alike had little access, either physically or through media technology, to anything outside of their immediate vicinities. One of Peguero’s interviewees complained that they lived in “rabbit hutches, with no light or water.”71 Forced interactions with one another also allowed them to discover several shared similarities. For example, their cultures are strongly connected by a common love for baseball. Rice is also the most important part of both a Japanese and
Dominican meal, though their portions and methods of preparation vary drastically. Much of this mutual understanding, however, came about from the Japanese immigrants’ inescapable acclimation to their host society. In other words, it is not so much that the Japanese immigrants had to become Dominican in the Dominican Republic, but that it was extremely difficult to be anything else in the country during that time. Keep in mind that Dominican nationalism had also been heavily promoted through Trujillo’s La Patria Nueva Dominicanization program, and the effects of this pride for “being Dominican” continued well beyond his death.72 Limited access to
40 media items that would connect them to the outside world made it difficult for the immigrants to avoid these influences. One of Peguero’s interviewees comments that “the change from Japanese tatami to Dominican rocking chairs made me feel dizzy at first, but now I like it.”73
One positive result of Trujillo’s government was in the expansion of the nation’s schooling system, especially in the country’s more rural areas. According to a Japanese study on education in Latin America, attendance rates at elementary schools in Dominican farming communities already ranged from 72-77% by 1963.74 Distances between the remaining Japanese settlements and the small size of their community made structuring an educational program specific to the needs of their children nearly impossible.75 Education was highly valued amongst
Japanese parents, and so they consistently sent their children to attend the local public schools while they worked the fields. Zaudia Bautista, a teacher in one of La Vigia’s schools taught her
Japanese students Spanish using Merengue lyrics and melodies. She also taught them tango and ballads from other Latin American countries.76 It was especially in the schools that the second generation befriended local children, quickly picked up the Spanish language, and were subconsciously indoctrinated to Dominican society, adopting Dominican, Hispanic, and Latino identities. Many children still learned and spoke their mother tongue and acted as interpreters for their parents, sometimes even exchanging Spanish lessons for ones in Japanese with them at home.77
In one Japanese newspaper, a father wrote: “Our children are adjusting well and making many friends at school. My son studies Spanish diligently every night so that he can talk more with a Dominican girl he’s met recently. Watching him, I can’t help but think about how our children are becoming bridges between our two countries. In a matter of ten years we’ll probably have Dominicans in our families as well.”78 Another member of the first generation says, “My
41 grandchildren are biracial and they’re more beautiful than my own children!”79 By 1985, 671
Japanese were living in the Dominican Republic, of which 390 were born there and 281 were born in Japan. Out of a total of 180 Nikkei families, 57 were a result of mixed marriages with
Japanese men tending to marry Dominican women and Japanese women more likely to marry within the Japanese community, adhering to their parent’s wishes.80
Defining Nikkei in Dominicana
Counter-acculturation is a refusal of external influences “wherein a people come to stress the values in aboriginal ways of and move aggressively, either actually or in fantasy, toward the restoration of those ways.”81 It is no surprise that the immigrant’s children had a much easier time adjusting to life in the Dominican Republic, or more so, in becoming Dominican than their parents did. The first generation was the most insistent about preserving tradition and so, to a certain extent, continued to arrange their children’s marriages with other Japanese families (See
Figure 13). Children with two Japanese parents were more connected to their Japanese roots than those from intermarriage families since the Japanese parent in those marriages was already more open towards accepting Dominican culture. In response to a rapid loss in Japanese tradition, the first generation spearheaded movements to preserve Japanese identity in future generations.
Educational programs for descendants of Japanese immigrants were initiated in 1973, and several other organizations as well as a study abroad program came soon after.82 There were over
100 students enrolled in Constanza’s Japanese school during the mid-1980s.83 The Japanese Club of Constanza was established as a cultural center for its local community and venue for large annual events that gather the national community (See Figure 14). Many of these attempts to maintain Japanese culture have been made possible by financial assistance from Japan’s
Embassy and the Japanese International Cooperation Agency (JICA). One such contribution
42 includes assigning a number of JICA volunteers to teach at the Dominican Republic’s Japanese schools. Whereas later generations may show disinterest in Japanese culture, the first generation was adamant about making their homeland accessible in their adopted country. This has meant that they adopt leadership roles in their community and volunteer much of their time towards ensuring that it remains fully functioning.
Many members of the second generation that I spoke to grew up with minimal exposure to Japanese language and culture, especially if one of their parents was Dominican. Contact between Japanese families in the Dominican Republic, and also with the ethnic homeland, increased because of a combination of increased funding and advances in media. The 1970s saw a technological revolution with the invention of RAM/microprocessors. It also defined the beginnings of convergence: print, film, recording, radio and television and all forms of telecommunications being thought of as part of a single complex. Home computers were introduced in 1977 and became more common throughout the 1980s. With this, we saw the development of global convergence: the process of geographically distant cultures influencing one another despite the mountains and oceans that may physically separate them.84 This also shapes contemporary globalization so that it is fueled by communication and transportation technologies.85 Yasuko Takezawa points out that people could now move transnationally more quickly and less expensively than ever before. Moreover, people were not only crossing physical boundaries but also those through global mass media with which they could learn about the lives of others and compare them to their own. Takezawa argues that yearnings for “different worlds” and new lifestyles that are displayed in media have urged people to move.86
Since then, the Nikkei-Dominican community was further solidified both in real life and in thought. Mixed marriage families also became more common, increasing from 34 to 47
43 percent by the 1980s.87 Though their children appear less phenotypically Japanese, a look at their family names reveal a glimpse into their pasts. With increased media access, the third generation had many more opportunities to tap into their Japanese identities, regardless of whether or not they found other Nikkei in their communities.
Relocating outside of one’s assigned colony was strictly prohibited when the immigrants first arrived in the Dominican Republic. After Trujillo’s ousting, the immigrants and their descendants began dispersing all over the country in pursuit of economic opportunities. 72 families were living in 27 distinct communities throughout the Dominican Republic in 1981.88
As Santo Domingo and Santiago de Los Caballeros flourished, so did the financial incentives in these cities. By this point, the Japanese were no longer just farmers but also teachers, doctors, engineers, etc.89 In connecting their professions to their Japanese roots, some Nikkei established martial arts schools and others worked for Japanese relief agencies and trading companies within the Dominican Republic.90 The 1990s saw the second and third generations move collectively towards urban centers where they attended universities and found employment (See Figure 15).
The aging first generation, in contrast, have remained in the rural colonies where they first arrived.91 The number of Japanese residents in the Dominican Republic grew to 831 by 1991, a
45% increase in just over two decades.92
Overall, the Japanese immigrants and their descendants have played a significant role in defining Japanese-Dominican state relations. The project agreement that brought them there marked the beginning of meaningful diplomatic and economic relations between both parties.
The first shipment of Dominican sugar arrived in Japan in 1954. In 1958, Japan ranked as fourth largest receiver of Dominican exports, after the U.S., Great Britain, and the Netherlands.93 By
1973, Japan was supplying 13 percent of the Dominican Republic’s imports. Japan has also
44 consistently been one of the Dominican Republic’s top five ODA (Official Development
Assistance) providers, granting upwards of $10 million per fiscal year.94 It is thought that consideration for the Japanese who remain there has something to do with this. Before his visit to
Japan in 2000, then Dominican President Leonel Fernandez, who is remembered for his pro- internationalization policies, attempted to resolve the long standing land claims made by the settlers. By offering the immigrants lands in an area called La Luisa in 1998, Fernandez catalyzed the moment that divided the Nikkei Dominican community within a series of lawsuits, disputes and disagreements that continue to this day.
Conclusion
The settlement attempt in the Dominican Republic is remembered by many as one of the biggest Japanese emigration failures. Japan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs closed its Bureau of
Overseas Emigration in 1999. Within the Dominican Republic, the immigrants are revered for their vast contributions in the agricultural and fishing industries, as well as for the new crops and cultivation techniques they introduced to locals.95 If it did not affect the earlier generation of those who remained, the process of acculturation without a doubt influenced their children and grandchildren, perhaps even making them Dominican. This migration has produced Japanese people who speak Cibaeño, dance Merengue, and enjoy drinking mamajuana. We can also similarly find Dominicans drinking sake, practicing martial arts, and speaking Japanese.96
Understanding of the past is crucial for interpreting current Nikkei narratives, wherever the individual may be. This community’s entry and acculturation to the Dominican Republic stands as a comparative basis for how their global interactions and migrations occur today, which are the topics of the chapters that follow. Next, we will look at Nikkei Dominican entry into
45 various global communities and the sorts of implications media has on their experiences in comparison to those of their parents and grandparents.
46
Figure 1 Comparison of Japanese emigration destinations during the prewar vs postwar periods. (Retrieved from Japanese Diasporas : Unsung Pasts, Conflicting Presents, and Uncertain Futures)
47
Figure 2 “Let’s move our families to South America!” Early 19th century Japanese emigration propaganda recruiting citizens for relocation to Brazil. (Retrieved from Google Images)
48
Figure 3 Newspaper advertisement from 1934 soliciting for migration to Brazil. (Retrieved from the Japanese International Cooperation Agency (JICA) Emigration Museum in Yokohama, Japan)
49
Figure 4 Brazil-Maru leaving the port of Yokohama with the first group of immigrants in 1956. (Retrieved from The Odyssey of Japanese Colonists in the Dominican Republic)
Figure 5 President Rafael Trujillo with La Vigia’s Japanese women and children in 1957. (Retrieved from The Odyssey of Japanese Colonists in the Dominican Republic)
50
Figure 6 Chronological overview of Japanese arrivals in the Dominican Republic under the immigration project. (Retrieved from The Odyssey of Japanese Colonists in the Dominican Republic)
51
Figure 7 This clipping from a 1956 copy of the Asahi Newspaper introduces immigration to the Dominican Republic with conditions that are described as “fresh and new.” (Retrieved through Asahi Shimbun Archives using Kikuzo)
52
Figure 8 A group of Dominican locals protesting the Japanese colonies in Jarabacoa after Trujillo’s assassination in 1961. (Retrieved from Adiosu Mi Santo Domingo: azamukareta Dominika ijuusha no kiroku)
Figure 9 An Asahi newspaper clipping of a family preparing for remigration to Paraguay after having returned to Japan from the Dominican Republic in 1962. (Retrieved through Asahi Shimbun Archives using Kikuzo)
53
Figure 10 Four Japanese immigrants on the beach of Manzanillo Bay, near Pepillo Salcedo, in the mid-1960s. (Retrieved from The Odyssey of Japanese Colonists in the Dominican Republic)
Figure 11a Ueta (right) and his older brother in the backyard of their Dominican home in 1959. (Retrieved from Adiosu Mi Santo Domingo: azamukareta Dominika ijuusha no kiroku)
54
Figure 11b Ueta (left), his friend Gomez, and his older brother in Jarabacoa. (Retrieved from Adiosu Mi Santo Domingo: azamukareta Dominika ijuusha no kiroku)
Figure 12 Ueta (left) and his family on the snowy morning after they arrived in Japan in 1962. (Retrieved from Adiosu Mi Santo Domingo: azamukareta Dominika ijuusha no kiroku)
55
Figure 13 Nishio and her husband in Constanza on the day of their wedding in 1961. Her marriage was arranged by her parents before they left to Brazil. (Photo courtesy of Yoko Nishio)
Figure 14 Musical performance at the Japanese Club of Constanza during the 1970s. (Retrieved from El Paraiso del Caribe. Medio Siglo de Alegria y Tristeza: Hoy dia todavia nos encontramos vivos aqui)
56
Figure 15 Distribution of Japanese families by district between 1959-1993. By 1993, the majority of them had moved to the capital, Santo Domingo. (Retrieved from The Odyssey of Japanese Colonists in the Dominican Republic)
57
58
1 Jennifer Robertson. “Blood Talks: Eugenic Modernity and the creation of new Japanese.” History and Anthropology 13, no.3 (2002), 192 2 Several. (Nobuko Adachi. Japanese Diasporas : Unsung Pasts, Conflicting Presents, and Uncertain Futures / Edited by Nobuko Adachi. Routledge Studies in Asia’s Transformations: 11. London ; New York : Routledge, 2006, 45; Mayumi Itoh. Japanese War Orphans in Manchuria: Forgotten Victims of World War II. Palgrave Macmillan, 2010.) 3 Adachi, Japanese diasporas: Unsung pasts, 72 4 Adachi, Japanese diasporas: Unsung pasts, 11 5 Itoh, Japanese War Orphans in Manchuria 6 Toake Endo. Exporting Japan : Politics of Emigration toward Latin America. Urbana : University of Illinois Press, 2009, 158 7 Adachi, Japanese diasporas: Unsung pasts, 9 8 Masterson, The Japanese in Latin America, 52 9 Kikumura-Yano, Encyclopedia of Japanese, 31 10 Masterson, Japanese diasporas: Unsung pasts, 150 11 Kikumura-Yano, Encyclopedia of Japanese Descendants, 42 12 Adolfo A. Laborde Carranco. “La Política Migratoria Japonesa Y Su Impacto En América Latina.” Migraciones Internacionales 3, no. 3 (2006): 155–61. 13 Endo, Exporting Japan, 91 14 Ibid., 198 15 Masterson, The Japanese in Latin America, 184 16 Endo, Exporting Japan, 91 17 Masterson, The Japanese in Latin America, 113 18 U.S. Department of State 1941 Hispanic America Report 19 Harvey Gardiner. “The Japanese and the Dominican Republic.” Inter-American Economic Affairs [0020-4943] Volume 25, no. 3 (Winter 1971), 24 20 Valentina Peguero. Immigration and Politics in the Caribbean: Japanese and Other Immigrants in the Dominican Republic. Coconut Creek: Caribbean Studies, 2008, 51 21 Ibid., 35 22 Several. (Harvey Gardiner. La Política de Inmigración Del Dictador Trujillo : Estudio Sobre La Creación de Una Imagen Humanitaria / Por C. Harvey Gardiner. Publicaciones de La Universidad Nacional Pedro Henríquez Ureña. Santo Domingo, R.D. : Universidad Nacional Pedro Henríquez Ureña, 1980; La migración japonesa hacia la República Dominicana. Santo Domingo, República Dominicana: [s.n.], 1994, 5) 23 Despradel, La migración japonesa, 26 24 "Shuudan kikoku aitsugu dominika ijuuchi wo miru. ” Asahi Shimbun 1 January 1962. 25 Despradel, La migración japonesa, 39 26 "Dominika imin soukoukai.” Asahi Shimbun 26 June 1956. 27 Yukiharu Takahashi. Karibukai no "rakuen”: Dominika imin sanjuunen no kiseki. Ushio Shuppansha. 1987, 38 28 Peguero, Immigration and Politics, 111 29 “Nihon imin wo ukeireru dominika hokuhoku no jouken de.” Asahi Shimbun 31 March 1956. 30 Interviews with Mukai and Tabata in the Dominican Republic conducted by Horst in July of 1991. 31 Takahashi, Karibukai no "rakuen,” 18 32 Excerpt from Choko Waki’s Diary.
59
33 “Yume no kuni dominika imin kara hatsu no tayori.” Asahi Shimbun 5 November 1961. 34 Several. (Roger Sanjek and Valentina Peguero. Caribbean Asians: Chinese, Indian, and Japanese Experiences in Trinidad and the Dominican Republic / Edited by Roger Sanjek. Asian/American Center Working Papers. [Flushing, N.Y.] : Asian/American Center at Queens College, CUNY, 1990, 100; El Caribe 30 January 1958.) 35 Several. (Hispanic American Report 9, 1956; Nippon Times November 11th 1954.) 36 Despradel, La migración japonesa 37 Endo, Exporting Japan, 48 38 Ibid., 47 39 Takahashi, Karibukai no "rakuen” 40 Despradel, La migración japonesa, 76 41 Endo, Exporting Japan, 50 42 Shusuke Ueta. Adiosu Mi Santo Domingo: azamukareta Dominika ijuusha no kiroku. Minami no fusha. 1988, 58 43 Ueta, Adiosu Mi Santo Domingo, 75 44 Endo, Exporting Japan, 50 45 “Yume yabureta go kazoku dominika imin kikoku.” Asahi Shimbun 5 November 1961. 46 “Gaijin butai hairi wo tsutsumerareta” dominika imin sanjin kikoku.” Asahi Shimbun 12 December 1961. 47 Dominika iju 15 shunen kinensai hensan iinkai. Dominika iju 15 nenshi. Morimitsu Insatsusho. Tokyo, 1972, 44 48 Masterson, The Japanese in Latin America, 211 49 “Dominika kara mata imin kaeru.” Asahi Shimbun 20 April 1963. 50 “Kikoku no negai kanau.” Asahi Shimbun 6 September 1961. 51 “Paraguai he saiijuu.” Asahi Shimbun 24 February 1962. 52 Takahashi, Karibukai no "rakuen,” 18 53 Oscar Horst and Katsuhiro Asagiri. “The Odyssey of Japanese Colonists in the Dominican Republic.” Geographical Review, 2000. 54 Peguero, Immigration and Politics, 254 55 Takahashi, Karibukai no "rakuen,” 10 56 Masterson, The Japanese in Latin America, 212 57 Takahashi, Karibukai no "rakuen,” 18 58 Horst, The Odyssey of Japanese Colonists, 336 59 Ibid., 350 60 Federacion de Asociaciones Nikkei en la Argentina. Historia del inmigrante Japones en Argentina, I., 339-343. 61 Kochi Prefecture Foreign Division on Agriculture and Economics 62 Horst, The Odyssey of Japanese Colonists, 345 63 Masterson, The Japanese in Latin America 64 Ibid., 198 65 John P. Augelli. “Agricultural Colonization in the Dominican Republic”. Economic Geography: XXXVIII No. 1. 1962. 66 Joseph Schaeffer. Field Report, Dajabón, D.R. Teachers College, Columbia University Consortium for Caribbean Research and Training, 1967. Caribbean Studies 11.3 (1971) 67 Peguero, Caribbean Asians, 102 68 Ibid., 106
60
69 Ibid., 105 70 Peguero, Immigration and Politics, 86 71 Ibid., 84 72 Allen Wells. Tropical Zion: General Trujillo, FDR, and the Jews of Sosua. Duke University Press Books, 2009, 11 73 Peguero, Caribbean Asians, 106 74 Kaigai ijuu jigyoudan. Aruzentin Paraguai Dominika Boribia oyobi Burajiru no kyoiku tokei. Research Volume no.35, July 1964. 75 Kaigai ijuu jigyodan. Present conditions and problems of education in the settlements, 62-65, Tokyo 1966. 76 Peguero, Immigration and Politics, 245 77 Nishio, Y. 2015. Interview with Omar Pineda. Constanza, Dominican Republic, 23 November. 78 “Dominika no nougyou imin.” Asahi Shimbun 25 January 1960. 79 Peguero, Immigration and Politics, 256 80 Ibid., 233 81 João Leal. “The past is a foreign country?” Acculturation theory and the anthropology of globalization, History and Anthropology, Volume 15 (2), 2011. 82 Peguero, Immigration and Politics, 244 83 Nishio, Y. 2015. Interview with Omar Pineda. Constanza, Dominican Republic, 23 November. 84 Jack Lule. Understanding Media and Culture: An Introduction to Mass Communication, Flat World Knowledge, 2013. 85 Charles Scribner. “Globalization." Encyclopedia of American Foreign Policy. 3 vols. 2nd ed. Reproduced in History Resource Center. Farmington Hills, MI. 2002. 86 Kikumura-Yano, Encyclopedia of Japanese descendants, 310 87 Dominika imin genchi chousa dan. Dominika imin jittai chousa hokoku sho. Tokyo, 1992, 62 88 Horst, The Odyssey of Japanese Colonists, 348 89 JICA 1985 90 Horst, The Odyssey of Japanese Colonists, 353 91 Shanya Cordis. “Historical Analysis of Japanese Colonization in the Dominican Republic.” The Penn State McNair Journal: 1, 2008. 92 Dominika imin jittai chousa, 62 93 Hispanic American Report 12, 1959 94 Japanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs, 2012 95 Ryoko Endo. “The Japanese Immigrants who Enriched Dominican Tables: The Dominican Republic—50 years after Japanese agricultural immigration.” Kikkoman Institute for International Food Culture: No. 23, 2013. 96 Peguero, Immigration and Politics, 256
61
Chapter 2 Los Que Quedaron: Nikkei
Dominican Diversification, Reverse
Acculturation, and Internationalization
“Hoy han pasado ya cinco décadas y tenemos un panorama totalmente diferente al que encontraron nuestros padres y abuelos al pisar tierra dominicana, donde ni siquiera había democracia. Hoy tenemos un mundo abierto, con acceso a la comunicación, a los idiomas, a la educación, tanto así que muchos han hecho carreras profesionales dedicándose a otra rama del mundo.” (Original)
「私達の両親や祖父母が初めてドミニカ共和国の土を踏んだ時からもう５０年が 過ぎて行ってしまいました。その時と比べ、現在の展望はその時とは、随分、違 うものになっています。あの頃のドミニカ共和国はまだ民主主義などとはほど遠 いものでしたが、今の世界は、信じがたいほど開けていて、教育や言語や伝達に より私達の中からも多くが世界の隅々で活躍しています。」
“Already five decades have passed and we now have a completely different panorama compared to the ones our parents and grandparents found upon stepping foot on Dominican soil, where democracy had not even existed. Today, we have an open world with access to several means of communication, language, and education—so much so that many of us have already made professional lives in other corners of the world.” -Hiroshi Waki’s keynote address as youth representative at the ceremony commemorating the immigrant’s 50th anniversary in 2009. Adopting the role of the ethnographer, I visited the Dominican Republic’s Japanese community in November of 2015. This chapter provides the most up to date ethnography on this group and examines the effects of reverse acculturation as efforts are made to reclaim and memorialize their ancestral Japanese roots. In re-incorporating some Japanese elements into their everyday lives, this group has created a new Dominican and Japanese hybridized identity. This chapter also resumes the narrative begun in Chapter 1, outlining the well-publicized 2000 lawsuit that divided these settlers and received media attention from all over the world. Lastly, it looks at the significance of the Nikkei Dominican community’s recent hosting of COPANI 2015, and their consequently resituated place within the imagined global community of Nikkei.
62
Migration to the Cities and Beyond: Today’s Nikkei Dominican Community
After arriving in Constanza, I telephoned Yoko Nishio to set up an interview. I was told that I would not need directions and that I could just get to her house by asking around for Doña
Inez La Japonesa, or the Japanese Miss Inez. “There are two of us, so make sure to ask for the
Japanese one. Also, try to stop by before 3pm, that’s when my telenovela starts,” she warned.
The Japanese colonies are well known in towns such as Constanza where locals have been living with the Japanese for over five decades. Walking from Constanza’s outskirts, I came across the
Japanese Club and a weathered sign that welcomed me to La Colonia Japonesa (See Figure 1).
It is common knowledge that very few Japanese remain in Constanza today and that those still there belong mostly to the first generation. Their descendants have opted for more urban lives in Dominican cities and abroad where they have found more opportunity. With the exception of a few families in Constanza and Jarabacoa that have continued to work in agriculture, the original Japanese colonies have been left practically abandoned. This dispersion has led to an increase in interactions between Nikkei and Dominican locals, many of whom had no idea that a Japanese community existed in their country.1 Only 11 Japanese families currently remain in Constanza. Nishio comments that those still left are mostly older female widows who have at one point or another had to care after their ill husbands.
Similar to other Nikkei groups in the Latin America, Nikkei in the Dominican Republic tend to be proud of their Japanese ancestry and have relatively higher social status in comparison to locals. A value for education led most immigrants to send their children to universities such as
Universidad Autonoma de Santo Domingo, Universidad Catolica y Maestra, and Universidad
Nacional Pedro Henriquez Ureña.2 On a national level, the Japanese have acquired many personal, economic, and cultural connections in the Dominican Republic that tie them more to
63 the present than to their ancestral pasts.3 Japan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs estimates that, as of
2013, a total of 1,673 Japanese descendants were living in the Dominican Republic.4
There are also a considerable number of mixed-race Nikkei couples who met in Japan and have more recently settled in the Dominican Republic. For example, Koki and Naomi Sato, two residents of Constanza, are raising their two daughters in a household fused with Dominican,
Brazilian, and Japanese cultures.5 Koki’s parents were immigrants to the Dominican Republic and Naomi’s parents had been immigrants in Brazil. They met in Japan, neither of them speaking the other’s native language, or much Japanese for that matter, and then married a few months after. Living in Japan was such a life-changing experience for them that they have made
Japanese the primary language spoken in their home. In another story, a Nikkei Dominican woman who had been living in Honduras married a man from Moca and they now live together in Jarabacoa.6 I found a similar diversity through a list of Nikkei residents in the Dominican
Republic and their respective nationalities. In 2006, Dominicana’s Nikkei families held Japanese,
Dominican, dual Japanese and Dominican, Spanish, French, Venezuelan, Brazilian, and Chinese nationalities.7 For one family in particular, the Nishimes in Santo Domingo, three siblings each had dual nationalities with Japan and a different Latin American country: the Dominican
Republic, Bolivia, and Paraguay.
I met with Nishio in her living room, welcomed by her large collection of owl figures from all over the world (See Figure 2). The first owl was a gift from her late husband who had brought it back with him from a trip to Colombia in 1983. Nishio’s friends and have family have continued with this tradition by bringing back owls for her from wherever they visit. The largest owl, a gift from one of her sons, stands 3 feet tall as a vigilant keeper placed at her home’s entryway. Nishio now has owls from countries such as Brazil, Tunisia, Venezuela, Uruguay,
64
Peru, Ecuador, Panama, Cuba, Nicaragua, Honduras, and Guatemala, just to name a few. “There are about 750 of them in total. I have all of them. I think I’m just missing Paraguay,” she comments. When I met up with her, Nishio had recently returned from an annual trip she and a friend always take to distribute kaki fruits to other Japanese families on the island. They grow these fruits themselves and have been taking these trips together for the past 12 years. She says,
“We only visit homes where there are still first generation issei because they are the ones who appreciate them the most. They know its taste from having grown up with it in Japan.” Still excited about the trip, she says “I also got to eat some of the best mofongo I’ve ever had!”8
These yearly trips are also opportunities for Nishio to reunite with old friends in Dajabón, where she had lived for her first four years in the Dominican Republic, arriving with her parents, seven siblings, and a brother in law. Before that, Nishio had lived in Manchuria where her father worked for a railroad company until she was four, and she then lived in Japan until she was fifteen, before immigrating to the Dominican Republic. All of her family members except for two brothers either re-migrated to Brazil or returned to Japan in the 1960s. One of these brothers passed away 10 years ago, and the other passed away 6 years later. She remembers how difficult it was for her to learn Spanish with nothing but a set of Spanish-Japanese and Japanese-Spanish dictionaries, both of which used many complicated kanji that she never had the opportunity to learn while in Japan.
Nishio has witnessed many changes in both the Dominican Republic and its Nikkei community over the past 54 years. She still vividly remembers being told to pack her luggage by the Japanese embassy in the 1960s when U.S. and Brazilian peacekeeping forces occupied Santo
Domingo after Trujillo’s assassination. In terms of the immigrants’ agricultural work, their machetes have been replaced by modern tractors and water irrigation systems. While the Nikkei
65 community has grown in numbers, it has lost a disproportionate amount of representation because of disinterested youth. Nishio remembers there being over 100 children participating in the country’s undoukai events 30 years ago. Today, Japanese school enrollments have significantly dropped, and the one in Santiago de los Caballeros has already been dissolved.
Yoko showed me a picture from their 25th anniversary celebration and began to point out the children: “This one is a ballerina in Russia now, this one has a son in Peru, and look, this other one is in Las Vegas! Would you believe that?” When a tsunami struck her hometown of
Fukushima in 2011, Nishio’s concern for her homeland and family members there was documented by domestic media such as El Listin Diario.9 Three years ago, she traveled throughout the Dominican Republic collecting relics that the immigrants had brought over with them when they immigrated. Nishio regrets not having done this earlier because many families have already disposed of these items when relocating. She hopes to someday display them in a museum. Within her own family, Nishio has seen all of her children and grandchildren grow up and ultimately leave Constanza (See Figure 3). She jokes, “they run away from here as soon as they see a way out.”
Just a ten-minute walk away, I met with Choko Waki on the estate where her family business, La Floreria de Teruki, grows its flowers (See Figures 4, 5, and 6). At an admirable age of 84, Choko says that she is now more Dominican than she ever was Japanese. She explains,
“Well, I no longer plan on returning to Japan, and we already have many Dominican friends here. I also really like Dominican food too. The locals here are very good people; very warm and friendly.” One luxury she can now enjoy is access to NHK television through satellite cable, though she still religiously follows a number of Spanish telenovelas. Choko says that she is glad to be living her older days in the Dominican Republic where the weather is temperate and
66 customs have children look after their parents. “Things are changing though. Many of them go to
Santo Domingo to study and decide to stay over there. Nobody wants to come back to the countryside,” she laughs. Reflecting on over 50 years in the Dominican Republic, Choko wishes that future generations remember that the Japanese immigrants went through a lot of trouble to be where they are today. She hopes that they remain grateful and disciplined as they continue making contributions towards improving the Dominican Republic.
Just as her family was separated after being repatriated from colonial Manchuria, and similar to the eclectic set of owls that adorn her home, Nishio’s friends and family are scattered all over the world: Brazil, Japan, and the U.S. Her eldest son lives in the capital but rarely visits because of work obligations. Her childhood friends live throughout the prefectures of Mie, Shiga and Aichi in Japan. Nishio also notes how much she has seen migration change over time:
“Nowadays, if you want to immigrate somewhere else, you can just go, but back in the day we had to follow our spouses and families. I want to see my grandchildren get ahead, so I can’t really hold them back from going wherever they can find more opportunity.” In some ways, she envies Doña Choko who is always surrounded by her children, grandchildren, and great grandchildren. In comparison, Nishio only has her grandson with her, and he will soon be leaving for university in the capital. “I have to tell them that I’m alright so that they won’t worry about me, but it’s not easy. These are just the cards that I’ve been dealt.”
Nishio also notes how much easier life for them in the Dominican Republic has become.
“Look, we did not even own televisions before. Later on, things got a bit and my daughter started sending me television recordings from Japan. As of maybe 15 or 16 years ago, we even started getting NHK World here.” Nishio admits to how lucky she now is to have technology through which she can remain connected with her family. Her son bought her an iPad three years ago,
67 and though she was skeptical at first, she now enthusiastically uses it to Skype her children and keep up with her grandchildren in Nagano and in New York using Facebook. She says, “I told him no, that’s not for me, but I’ve learned to like it little by little and even know how to browse the internet on it now.” Technology makes things easier for her, but she comments “Although we now find ourselves in the era of the internet and modern systems of communication, I would very much enjoy having them with me in person, to spend some time talking and laughing with them. That would be the ideal.”
I was also able to meet up with two of Choko’s grandsons who now live in the capital.
Koji Waki makes up part of the second generation and grew up in Constanza (See Figure 7).
During the ‘90s, he and his brothers lived Japan for 7 years, specifically in a town called Aikawa.
While in Japan, one of his brothers married a Nikkei-Chinese-Peruvian and later followed her to live in Peru, though they currently once again live in Japan. During his time in Japan, Koji dedicated himself to studying Japanese, English, and Photography whenever he was not working in a factory. Because he spoke both English and Spanish, he was transferred to Alabama by his company when they closed down their Aikawa branch. In Alabama, Koji helped train Mexican laborers and was also introduced to many new cultures, regularly attending gospel shows his
African American co-workers would invite him to. After three years, he returned to the
Dominican Republic and moved to Santo Domingo where he has worked as a photographer for the past 6 years. Koji speaks English, Spanish, and a bit of Japanese, though he only really speaks Japanese with his grandmother. He identifies as Japanese-Dominican and says that one of the biggest ironies he has faced is that he is called Japanese while in the Dominican Republic, but is seen as Dominican while in Japan.
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Although Koji does not participate in many Nikkei events, his brother Hiroshi is an active leader in several of these organizations. However, Koji does feel a personal connection to Japan because of friends he currently has there, and he occasionally watches NHK to keep up with its current events. Once in a while, he uses Google Maps to “walk” through Aikawa’s streets and reminisce about the years he spent there. Koji says, “To be honest, I would go back and live in
Japan again if I could. But I just got married 3 months ago and my wife’s Dominican, so it would be very difficult for her to adapt to the language and culture there. She would also be very far away from her family.” Alternatively, he says that his second choice for preferred location of residence would have to be Atlanta, GA since delinquency and high unemployment rates make it nearly impossible to lead a sustainable life in the Dominican Republic.10
Lastly, I was also able to meet up with Soussette Sousa Yamaki, a third generation
Nikkei living in Santiago de Los Caballeros, the Dominican Republic’s second largest city (See
Figure 8). Soussette currently studies marketing at her university. Her mother was born to
Japanese parents in Constanza where she met her father, whose parents had Spanish and Middle-
Eastern origins. She says that her mother hardly taught her anything about her Japanese heritage and that she has learned most of what she does know through her own efforts. “I knew that it’s customary to bring a present whenever you visit someone’s home, but that was pretty much it,” she says. Soussette does not hold this against her mom, who probably thought that there was no reason to teach her daughter Japanese since she intended to stay in the Dominican Republic. She does feel like she missed out on something though, and now wishes that she was given more access to that world when she was younger. Soussette was able to attend Santiago’s Japanese school before it closed down when its enrollment dropped to 4 students. She laments, “there aren’t as many of us here anymore, and still, there’s very little interest or incentive for us to go.”
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Soussette claims that she feels as if she does not belong to any particular group, and that the only thing that makes her Dominican is her nationality. Like Koji and many others in the third and fourth generation, Soussette does not see herself staying in the Dominican Republic for much longer, and since she also holds Spanish nationality from her father’s side of the family, she is considering living in Europe after graduating. Until then, she hopes to learn more about what it means to be Nikkei. Soussette enjoys watching anime and reading manga and has also started self-studying Japanese, just as she has done with English. More recently, she has tried to connect with other Nikkei, but says that this is difficult because Santiago lacks the sort of community that exists in Santo Domingo. Online communities and access to Japanese media over the internet have helped fill this void and allowed her to make new connections with other
Nikkei, though they are not necessarily from her country. Soussette was further motivated after meeting several other Nikkei her age in person during this past summer’s Pan American Nikkei
Conference. According to Soussette, the biggest distinction between Nikkei Dominicans and those of other countries is in their low Japanese fluency. However, this is expected to change as more efforts are made to reinvigorate Japanese culture in the Dominican Republic.
Festivals, Monuments, and Anniversaries: Preservation of Memory and Culture
Similar to other Nikkei communities in Latin America, albeit a bit delayed in comparison, the Nikkei Dominican community has made several attempts to preserve Japanese culture in the Dominican Republic. Much of this means reclaiming a Japanese identity through reverse acculturation, which in a global context refers to fully acculturated individuals returning to their ancestral roots.11 Like Nikkei in Brazil, Nikkei Dominicans have had to negotiate their identities and create their own personal space within Dominican society.12 These attempts manifest themselves most clearly in one of two ways: celebrations of holidays/traditions from
70 their native homeland and commemorations of their immigration to the Dominican Republic.
Both of these methods have been established and maintained mostly through efforts from the first generation. Leadership in the Nikkei Dominican community is just recently beginning to transfer down to members of the second and third generations, though the process has been slow.
Nikkei Dominicans celebrate several Japanese festivals and holidays, though they have modified some of their dates in order to align them with weather in the Dominican Republic.
According to one of my interviewees, Japanese diplomats in the Dominican Republic are surprised by how this community still celebrates festivals that are seldom observed even in Japan today. I found that the first generation in the Dominican Republic is actually preserving an old version of Japan that they brought with them in the early 1960s. For example, their spoken
Japanese has archaisms such as the word shashinki instead of the loanword kamera for camera.13
In general, the first generation is more likely to practice some Japanese customs, using tatami mats and opting for baths instead of showers.
Some Japanese traditions celebrated in the Dominican Republic include undoukai sport tournaments at schools, the seijin no hi Coming of Age holiday for 20 year olds, the oshougatsu
Japanese New Year, hinamatsuri Girls’ Day, and bon odori to honor ancestors who have passed away. The immigrants originated from prefectures all over Japan, few knew one another, and different dialects limited communication.14 Some have still maintained more localized Japanese prides by celebrating regional festivities such as kagoshima kenjinkai and fukushima kenjinkai
(See Figure 9). Most of those I interviewed were part of the former, which has been consistently celebrated every year since 1958. Whether region specific or not, these events are open to the entire Nikkei Dominican community, as well as to any Dominicans interested in learning about
Japanese culture. Celebrations are usually held at the local Japanese schools, which act as
71 cultural centers for the community’s Nikkei. Santo Domingo’s Japanese school was a donation from the Japanese government to the National Association of Japanese Dominicans in 1996 as a symbol of friendship and cooperation between the two countries.15 It is the largest in the
Dominican Republic and serves as the main hub for cultural events that bring the Nikkei
Dominican community together on a national level. There are also other events that have been traditionally held outside of the capital, such as the biannual baseball tournaments in Jarabacoa.
In Constanza, there is an annual Cherry Blossom festival, and the seeds for those Sakura trees were brought over by Nikkei from Brazil.16
During my fieldwork, I was able to attend an ohanashitaikai, or Japanese speech competition (See Figures 10, 11a, 11b, 12, and 13). After attending Dominican public schools during the weekdays, Nikkei children are sent by their parents to Saturday Japanese classes administered by JICA. Once a year, these children come to Santo Domingo from as far as
Dajabón (a four hour drive each way) where they compete with other students by age groups.
Students either recite a Japanese poem they have memorized, or essay responses to prompts from their instructors. One student talked about his summer vacation to New York where he visited his cousins, and about wanting to visit his grandfather in Spain next summer. Some students spoke about their goals for the next 10 years—dreams of living in America, England, or Japan. Older students talked about their recent JICA funded trips to Japan where they made Nikkei friends from Mexico, Venezuela, and Colombia. These students also presented a PowerPoint about their trips in an attempt to encourage their kouhai juniors to continue studying Japanese and take advantage of these opportunities. Participants were judged on their accuracy and pronunciations by a panel of diplomats from the Japanese embassy. Once the competition was over, I was handed a pair of chopsticks and invited to eat with a family that gathered around their obento
72 boxes filled with tempura and gohan they had prepared. One of my interviewees says, “It’s nice that they still keep up with the traditions. You know, sometimes we get lazy and just call in some
Kentucky Fried Chicken, or order a pizza.”
Nikkei Dominican interactions, especially with officials from Japan, confirm that they are no longer one in the same people—a combination of their Dominican acculturation and in changes in conceptions of what it means to “be Japanese.” In events such as the ohanashitaikai, we are able to observe all generations together: how they differ from one another, and the incredible diversity that exists within this community today. For example, I met one woman named Joselyn Seto whose Japanese mother and Chinese father met in Boca Chica. She identifies more with her Japanese side because she found the Dominican Republic’s Japanese community to be much more institutionally organized. Chinese presence in the Dominican
Republic dates back to 1864, and although there was never an official immigration project for them like there was for the Japanese, many Chinese transmigrated there from surrounding countries such as Cuba and Jamaica. During the 1960s, there were about 1,060 Chinese immigrants in the Dominican Republic, and it is projected that there are up to 15,000 descendants in the country today.17 Joselyn is married with a Dominican local and is now raising her daughter, a participant in the speech competition, under a Nikkei Dominican household.
Events like the ohanashitaikai allow Nikkei Dominicans to feel the palpable sense of camaraderie that fuels their community. Although all of them do not necessarily know of one another, they share a unique sense of the Nikkei experience specifically within the Dominican
Republic, and thus together make up an imagined community. As Peguero puts it, mutual aid among the Japanese is a part of daily life “essential in a society that values the collective group more than individualism, and even more than the individual.”18 Although this is similar to a low
73 sense of individualism among Dominicans themselves, a more specific sense of collectivism emerges with Nikkei in the Dominican Republic who sometimes feel out of place among the dominant majority. Their most immediate response is to attribute this Othering to their
Japaneseness. Inclusion in the Nikkei Dominican network is determined by one’s participation in events. Joselyn says that it is important that her daughter participate because having the Nikkei community as a support system will be useful to her later in life. She has recently been trying to encourage her sister to do the same with her own children. Considering how phenotypically diverse the community has become, many descendants no longer “appear Japanese” and are not as easily recognizable as Nikkei unless they are part of this inner circle. Non-participants may still be recognized if they have kept their Japanese family names.
Part of preserving Japanese culture in the Dominican Republic has involved keeping alive the memory of the immigration project that brought them there. Publications and monuments have served as important physical reminders that their Japanese parents and grandparents arrived not too long ago, and that they too have roots elsewhere. In 2008, students at Santo Domingo’s
Japanese School re-enacted their ancestor’s immigration to the Dominican Republic in a
Japanese language play.19 These reminders are meant for members of the Nikkei Dominican community as well as local Dominicans who can learn about a buried aspect of their country’s history. Small monuments have also been erected in Dajabón and Jarabacoa (See Figure 14). The most significant of these statues was established in 2012 at the Port of Santo Domingo, where the immigrants first arrived (See Figures 15a and 15b). It is inscribed with a message of hope for eternal fraternity between Japan and the Dominican Republic.
Though the immigrants’ arrival is formally celebrated every summer, their 15th, 25th and
50th year anniversaries have been especially important. The National Association for Japanese
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Dominicans has memorialized these years by publishing compilations of messages and acknowledgements from Japanese and Dominican high officials, historical images, and stories solicited from community members. The end of each book includes statistics and records of all families registered under the association, with additional information on things such as their addresses and Japanese hometowns. These publications ultimately serve to grant community members a voice and public platform where they can reflect on their experiences, good or bad, in the Dominican Republic. The first generation issei also use this opportunity to leave future generations messages encouraging them to live respectable and honorable lives. One member of the first generation, Sonoko Kato, writes:
The moment has come for our grandchildren and great grandchildren to continue
writing our stories. I would be eternally elated if, in the future, one of them would
marry wearing my kimono, and proclaim ‘Long long ago my grandma and
grandpa arrived from Japan and established the Kato family in this country.20
Modernity has increased media’s accessibility such that its consumers can now also be its producers. Print media has provided Nikkei Dominicans with opportunities for securing agency and self-representation that will stand the passage of time. Compilations such as these provide spaces for individuals to tell personal stories that have gone unnoticed for far too long.
Representative of the two worlds this community now takes part in, these anniversary publications are printed in both Japanese and Spanish.
The 50th anniversary in 2006 is particularly interesting because it was reflective of an uncomfortable division within this community. For the first time in celebrating their history, there were two of everything: two organizations, two commemorative ceremonies, and two publications (See Figure 16).21 Conflicting memories are thus formed and perpetuated as one
75 piece works to emphatically reiterate the immigrants’ suffering, while the other hardly touches the lawsuit subject, and instead focuses on expressing gratitude towards the Dominican Republic.
In the version written by the National Association for Japanese-Dominicans, one contributor named Eliza Iguchi expresses her frustrations towards the Japanese government:
Do you think you can just erase, with pretty words, long days of sacrifice from
sunrise to sunset? Ignore that we have forgotten what it means to be happy, what
it feels like to enjoy life? Mother is not she who births but she who raises. And it
was here [in the Dominican Republic] where I found my place. Where, under the
shade of the palms, I found strength.22
Hiroshi Waki, the president of the smaller group that chose not to join in on the lawsuit, the
Association for Fraternity between Japanese Dominicans, said to me:
Unfortunately, there have been many disputes, especially among those who are
older. We still have not come to an agreement and there’s been a division ever
since, but you don’t really see it among the younger ones. I won’t say all of them
are, but the majority of my Nikkei friends are actually from the other organization
and we never even talk about that [lawsuit]. The older people don’t let go of
grudges easily though, so I imagine that there will be conflict as long as they are
around.23
Still, the two organizations have more in common than they do in differences. They are both committed to bettering the lives of Nikkei in the Dominican Republic, and devote themselves to their adopted country’s success. Yet, Hiroshi says that he is still unsure of what will happen for the 60th anniversary celebration this coming summer.
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We can also observe other Japanese influences throughout the island country. In February of 1990, a Japanese garden was created within Santo Domingo’s Jardin Botanico Nacional Dr.
Rafael M. Moscoso (See Figures 17 and 18). It was funded in part by the Dominican
Government and by the Association for the Commemorative Global Exposition of Japan. It features red Japanese tori gates and native plants shaped into an oriental style that attracts many international and local guests alike. Often reserved as a wedding venue, it is the most popular and well-kept area in the botanical gardens, and has even been featured in several films and music videos. The same Japanese architect also designed El Monumento’s garden area in
Santiago de Los Caballeros, one of the most iconic Dominican symbols. In Santo Domingo’s
Japacafe, authentic Japanese cuisine is prepared by a chef who remained in the Dominican
Republic after volunteering there as a JICA language instructor about 10 years ago.
Japanese families in the Dominican Republic have tended to keep to themselves, but community leaders have recently been trying to encourage more youth participation and cooperation. Their hope is that most of the next generation will at least know of one another.
Preservation attempts, including frequent constructions of memory, can help ensure this small community’s strength and survival in the Dominican Republic. This is especially necessary as
Nikkei Dominicans see many of their potential leaders emigrate in search of more stable livelihoods in other countries. However, an even larger threat to the community actually emerges from within: disagreement and division over the 2006 lawsuit against Japan.
‘Imin ha Kimin’: Demands Against the Mother Country and Increased Global Awareness
Many of the immigrants who stayed expected their conditions in the Dominican Republic to improve with financial assistance from the Japanese government. Over the years, things took a turn for the worse, but the Japanese government was no longer willing to respond to their
77 complaints. Their pleadings would evolve into formal demands, and raise the first and only lawsuit by a group of Japanese emigrants against the government of Japan—an affair that propelled this small forgotten community into international infamy.
Peguero provides us with a timeline of the case’s development.24 Individuals and families began making claims between 1956 and 1959, soon after arriving in the Dominican Republic.
They then made more collective demands between 1959 and 1987, asking for fulfillment of the promises that had brought them there. Legal proceedings officially began in 1987, seeking reparations for material and emotional losses incurred after emigrating under deceptive conditions. Towards the end of the 1980s, a delegation travelled to Japan to begin dialogue there.
Although they came away empty-handed, the plaintiffs were able to establish a team of legal advisors, and also saw some of the immigrants who had returned to Japan join their cause. On
July 18th, 2000, a group of 126 plaintiffs officially filed a lawsuit claiming that “Japan failed to realize the settlement conditions that it promised to the immigrants upon recruitment.” The group requested remuneration of up to 2.5 billion yen ($24 million in 2000) from JICA and Japan’s
Ministry of Foreign Affairs.25 Among the damages was the irreversible suicide of 12 immigrants.26
In 1998, then Dominican President Leonel Fernando unsuccessfully attempted to resolve this issue by offering the immigrants lands in the La Luisa area. Some accepted the offer, but others vehemently rejected it, arguing that it was due time for the Japanese government to be held accountable. The La Luisa offer presented many issues of its own. Much of this area was informally occupied by Dominican peasants, and it turned out that its lands were no better for farming than those the Japanese already owned. This situation not only created discord between the immigrants and the Dominican government, but also led to confrontations between the
78 immigrants and the Dominican locals they displaced.27 Within the Nikkei community, a division began forming between those who accepted the land in La Luisa and those who did not, and this determined who would participate in the 2000 lawsuit.
Some families remained neutral throughout the entire process. According to Peguero, approximately 16% of the community was opposed to the lawsuit and preferred to leave things as they were. One of Peguero’s interviewees who did not participate says that “the immigrants themselves are responsible for some of their problems because they came thinking that they were going to find ‘El Dorado’ in the Dominican Republic. When they didn’t find it, they gave up and blamed the Japanese government for their failure.”28 Similarly, one of my interviewees, Hiroshi
Waki, says that this group only decided to sue Japan because they knew that they could get a lot more from Japan than they would ever get from the Dominican government. Some saw the emigrant’s lawsuit as an act of betrayal against their own country. It is important to note that much of the Japanese immigrant experience in the Dominican Republic depended on where they were placed, and that prosperity came easier for those who happened to be settled in areas more favorable for agriculture. Until the lawsuit, the Dominican Republic’s Nikkei community had been united under one association, but the disagreements and antagonism that emerged because of it led them to officially split up into two different organizations: the National Association of
Japanese Dominicans, and the Association for Fraternity between Japanese Dominicans.
Very few people, whether in Japan or within the Dominican Republic, even knew that a
Japanese community existed there until this court case was introduced. Part of the plaintiff’s case strategy was in drawing the media’s attention, and even producing media items of their own, to garner support at home and internationally. In other words, they used media as a means for receiving affirmation of their troubles and lived experiences, which helped ensure their success.
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Plaintiffs recruited the help of Japanese academics and television/news reporters who organized volunteer groups to cover the case.29 Together, they created a 40 minute long Japanese language documentary titled “We Found No Paradise” in which viewers learn about the history of the immigration project and follow the court case. In it, we learn about this narrative through the lens of the Japanese immigrant who has spearheaded the case and been its spokesperson, Toru
Takegama, who has also been the president of the National Association of Japanese Dominicans since its inception. The documentary repeatedly accuses the Japanese government of neglect in its use of kimin seisaku, or a policy that abandons its people and leaves them to fend for themselves. With rhetoric such as “We’re not nobodies to be easily tossed away, we’re Japanese citizens just like you,” the documentary provides them with an opportunity to be heard by not only the Japanese government, but also by the Japanese people. The plaintiffs also emphasize how pressing the need for reparations is considering that many in the first generation have already passed way. “We Found No Paradise” even features commentary from Dominican scholars such as Alberto Despradel, with Japanese subtitles for his spoken Spanish underneath.
After being nominated for an award in 2004, the documentary was broadcasted on television networks throughout Japan, and particularly in Kagoshima where about a fifth of the immigrants originated from.30 By 2006, the number of plaintiffs grew from 126 to 170, of which only 141 were still living in the Dominican Republic.31
The fact that a relatively small group of immigrants was boldly going up against the government of Japan quickly drew attention from media outlets globally. In 1999, the Kyodo
World News released a statement in which Japan’s Minister of Foreign Affairs, Masahiko
Komura, acknowledged the immigrants’ “long hardships amid disparity between their realities and the initial plan.” His successor, Yohei Kono, reiterated similar sentiments.32 The immigrants’
80 struggles were further legitimized in 2006 by U.S. newspapers such as the Washington Post and the Associated Press, which not only followed the court case but also gave this community an outlet through which to tell their stories of migration and life in the Dominican Republic to a wider audience. Before then, there had only been one English-language news article on this community, written in 1999 by the Seattle Times.33 In short, modern media elevated them to an international field where their demands were more likely to be met. It granted them the autonomy and support they needed in order to stand a chance in their case.
One June 7th, 2006, Tokyo’s district court found that the Japanese government had failed to conduct proper field research prior to the emigration project and had not provided the immigrants with accurate information.34 However, the plaintiff’s demands were dismissed because they were made over twenty years after the incident. Their allotted reclamation period had long expired. The verdict came just a month before the Nikkei Dominican community would celebrate the 50th anniversary of their arrival in the Dominican Republic. Then Prime Minister
Koizumi Junichiro dispatched a special envoy to this ceremony where they presented attendees with a formal apology and alluded to future reparations, despite their loss in the court case.35
Those still living in the Dominican Republic were given $17,260, those who had returned to
Japan received $11,200, and those who did not participate in the lawsuit were offered $10,360.36
Prime Minister Koizumi’s actions have several implications for the Nikkei Dominican community. For one, the reparations affirmed for the community that their 50-year long struggles were not all in vain. In the name of Japan, Koizumi formally apologized “for causing immense suffering due to the government’s response at the time.”37 Koizumi’s decision went against most in his government, but it is believed that he acted in this way because the re-emergence of a similar case was very unlikely given that most of the plaintiffs were already in their late
81 seventies.38 Nevertheless, there is much symbolic meaning in having the highest seat of one of the most prosperous nations in the world publicly admit to his country’s mistakes. Despite their small size, the Nikkei Dominican community is worthy of being acknowledged and listened to, even by some of the world’s strongest forces. Publicized recognition from Japan disseminated to other developed countries, and especially to Nikkei communities worldwide that have continued to consume Japanese media items.
With television segments regularly encouraging people to vacation there, the Dominican
Republic suddenly became common knowledge in Japan. A 2012 episode of “Discovering
Japanese People Around the World: Why Are They There?,” a program about Japanese people living in obscure places, featured a coffee farmer named Mr. Tabata.39 Although most of the immigrants who decided to stay in the Dominican Republic during the 1960s opted for relocation to one of the three successful colonies, some individuals such as Tabata in Pedernales chose to make lives for themselves in the distant desolated colonies. Since the case, Japanese news outlets have continued to keep up with events relating to the Nikkei Dominican community. The most recent article on them was written by the Asahi Shimbun newspaper in 2014.40 Other international outlets responded similarly. The Spanish version of BBC World ran a three-minute segment on the Waki family back in 2012.41 Domestic Dominican interest and news coverage on its Nikkei community increased as well.42 Modern Japanese cultural items such as cosplay, dressing up as a character from a Japanese manga or anime, also first started gaining popularity in the Dominican Republic in 2006.43
The Nikkei Dominican community has benefitted from several structural improvements following the court case. Individuals were offered technical assistance, loans, and
“improvements to the infrastructure in the areas where they lived.”44 In 2004, JICA donated 67
82 million Dominican pesos ($1.2 million) for rebuilding an aqueduct in Constanza and improving the country’s quality of water.45 Throughout the years, the Japanese government has donated resources to the Dominican Republic such as garbage trucks, community centers, and a therapy facility for autistic children in Santiago.46 By 2015, 211 Dominican youth had benefitted from a
13-year long exchange program between both countries. Many Japanese youth have similarly completed study tours of the Dominican Republic.47 Increased funding for Nikkei organizations and language schools has helped advance Japanese culture for the third and fourth generations.
Nearly 8 years have passed since Prime Minister Koizumi’s apology. Yet, the community still remains divided into two organizations. A relatively small group aimed determinedly high and successfully used what they could to build momentum. Their success, albeit indirect, came from their exploitation of media’s potential, and is also somewhat attributed to their strong local ties in the Dominican Republic. Drawing international attention for the case also allowed them to recruit many supporters who still actively keep up with their community. The lawsuit helped increase overall awareness of the Nikkei Dominican community’s existence among several new audiences: Japanese, Dominican, English-speaking, and Nikkei. Heightened international interest from these groups continue to this day, and they culminated within the global Nikkei community in particular this past summer.
COPANI 2015: Dominican Inclusion within the Global Nikkei Community
A couple of months before beginning this project, I was able to attend a traditional
Japanese instrument practice session at the Peruvian-Japanese Association in Lima, Peru. When I mentioned the small community of Nikkei in the Dominican Republic, the group responded, “Oh really? Ah yes, after arriving in South America, small groups transmigrated to other Latin
American countries like that.” They had not known that Nikkei lived there, let alone that an
83 official immigration project similar to the one that brought their Japanese parents and grandparents to Peru also occurred in the Dominican Republic. Given the small size of the
Nikkei Dominican community, this is understandable. Just recently, their existence became more widely known among Nikkei when they were chosen to host the 18th Pan American Nikkei
Convention this past summer of 2015.
The first of these Nikkei events took place in 1981. A group of Mexican Nikkei organized a conference in an attempt to “promote a mutual understanding of the unique but common experiences of the Nikkei in the Americas.” It drew Nikkei in from all over North and
South America under the slogan “Let us be better citizens in our continents!” and led to the creation of the Association of Pan American Nikkei (APN).48 Since then, the conference has been held biannually in one of the member countries, and it has become the most important international Nikkei event in Latin America. Its official members include Argentina, Bolivia,
Brazil, Canada, Chile, Colombia, the Dominican Republic, Japan, Mexico, Paraguay, Peru,
Uruguay, the United States, and Venezuela (See Figure 19).49
The conference is often referred to by its acronym, COPANI, which is an abbreviation for its Spanish title, Convencion Panamericana Nikkei. It has been the only way in which so many different members of the international Nikkei community come together outside of Japan. It is a chance for them to meet others like them, and also learn about different Nikkei experiences, especially about those within the country that is hosting the event that year. In an economic sense, COPANI provides Nikkei businesses with opportunities to form deals with one another.
Having served as its president from 1981 until 1995, Carlos Kasuga Osaka, a Mexican businessman and public speaker, has been a prominent figure at these events and a common name in the Latin American Nikkei community.50
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COPANI XVIII took place in Santo Domingo between August 7-9th, 2015.51 In truth, the event originally came about accidentally. At the end of COPANI 2011 in Cancun, Mexico,
Carlos Kasuga announced that it was about time to host COPANI in the Caribbean. Most
Japanese in the Caribbean are concentrated in either Cuba or the Dominican Republic, and only the latter is a member of APN. Kasuga’s words were directed to two young Nikkei Dominicans sitting in the audience. Bewildered, they quickly accepted, inadvertently speaking for the entire
Nikkei Dominican community. In reality, neither of them was actually affiliated with any Nikkei
Dominican organization back home. They were in Cancun on their own, and the news that they brought back with them came as a shock. Many immediately responded that it would be impossible, doubting that they could gather the resources necessary for an event of that scale.
The Nikkei Dominican community’s small size also meant that there were few people willing, or able, to take on planning responsibilities.
I learned about COPANI 2015 and its planning stages through an interview with Eiko
Kokubun, its acting president (See Figures 20 and 21). Eiko’s mother arrived in the Dominican
Republic from Kagoshima, and her father from Fukushima (See Figure 22). As was common back then, her parents met through a miai, or an arranged marriage, in Vicente Noble. Eiko moved to the capital because there were, and still are, very few higher education and employment opportunities for those in the Dominican countryside. She did not grow up with much exposure to the Japanese language because her parents came from different prefectures and each had their own dialects. She learned most of what she does know from living in Japan for three years. In Japan, Eiko initially lived with many other Dominicans in a town called Aikawa, but she left from there because she sought a different environment:
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I decided to move out because the environment in which they live is completely
Dominican, and I thought to myself, “I didn’t come here [to Japan] to learn more
Spanish. I came to study Japanese.” And let me tell you, it was horrible being in
Tokyo without any family or friends, but I learned a lot. A lot about Japanese
idiosyncrasies and their way of living.52
Rather than surround herself with other Latinos while in Tokyo, Eiko opted for a more immersive experience, though this just turned out to be with foreigners who did not speak
Spanish. Her closest friends were her instructors and other Japanese language students who were migrant workers from China, the Philippines, and Thailand. Because she appeared Asian but spoke very little Japanese, she was often mistaken for being Korean or Chinese.
Eiko returned to the Dominican Republic in 2003 following her mother pleas, and also because she ultimately could not adjust to life in Japan. After returning, she began working for a real estate company through which she handles the living arrangements of Japanese visitors and officials. She also became much more active in the country’s Nikkei organizations. Eiko identifies with both her Japanese and Dominican sides, and she says that her value for collectivism is what makes her Japanese, commenting “I always try to look for ways to contribute my skills. I’m always there trying to help with what I can.” Eiko’s family is now spread throughout the Dominican Republic, Japan, and the U.S. She is unsure of where she will live in the future, but finds it hard to imagine staying in the Dominican Republic. When the
Nikkei Dominican community was unexpectedly thrust with taking charge of COPANI, Eiko says, “We didn’t necessarily ask for it, or were given any time to think it over. It just presented itself to us all of a sudden, and there was no backing out. I couldn’t just let us look bad. Not just
86 because we are proud of our community, but because we would be representing the Dominican
Republic to the rest of Latin America.”
Although the Dominican Republic is an official APN member, they have rarely been represented at COPANI events. Eiko apprehensively accepted the event’s presidential role, which rotates every two years, but she knew very little about what COPANI was even about. In
2013, Eiko attended her first COPANI, the 17th Pan American Nikkei Conference (COPANI
2011), which took place in Buenos Aires, Argentina. In 2014, representatives from member countries met in the Dominican Republic to discuss general logistics for COPANI 2015 in more detail. In August of 2015, approximately 300 delegates from all APN countries, as well as from
France and Japan, converged in the Dominican Republic. This became the most diverse group of
Nikkei to ever set foot on the island. Although a casual dress code was encouraged, there were, of course, some delegates who proudly donned traditional clothes from their country, like the
Mexican Charro suit. Just a few months before the event, the planning committee received financial support from Japan’s ambassador to the Dominican Republic, Takashi Fuchigami, and
JICA’s sub-director, Kenichi Kato.53
Over the course of three days, guests participated in group panels (scheduled for youth, women, businesses, etc.) to reflect on the state of the Nikkei community, and discuss plans for future cooperation. Attendees learned about the history of the Japanese immigration project in the Dominican Republic from none other than Dominican scholar Valentina Peguero. They also visited the Japanese Immigration Monument at the Port of Santo Domingo. One dinner commemorated members of the first generation for all of the hardship they experienced in making new lives there. As is tradition for these conventions, COPANI 2015 allotted a portion of its program for guests to learn about the host country’s culture. They toured Santo Domingo’s
87 historic Zona Colonial, and danced Bachata and Merengue throughout the nights. The conference ended in true Dominican spirit with La Hora Loca, or The Crazy Hour, a high energy song and dance routine in which everyone stands up and dances around the room.
Despite COPANI 2015’s success, its planning committee encountered some setbacks along the way. Although these events are usually held at the Japanese embassy of the hosting country, most of COPANI 2015’s activities took place in a hotel in order to defer costs. Eiko and her team were constantly criticized, mostly by the older generations, for things that perhaps broke with tradition, such as including English songs in the Karaoke contest for the first time.
Though COPANI is usually held in September, COPANI 2015 took place in early August in order to align with the vacation times of the event’s volunteers. The team had also originally expected to hold some of their events at Santo Domingo’s Japanese school, the country’s unofficial national Nikkei Dominican cultural center, but could not secure permission from the
National Association of Japanese Dominicans. Given the circumstances, doubt, and skepticism they faced, its organizers skillfully put the Nikkei Dominican community on the map.
In the end, much of the dedication and time that COPANI 2015 demanded came from the younger generation. They not only volunteered several hours, but also recruited the help of many relatives who were, up until then, not necessarily involved in Nikkei affairs. COPANI 2015 was an opportunity for the youth to prove themselves to elders who were still too hung up on their lawsuit disagreements. The event was an opportunity for the youth to reiterate their union despite the official national division into two organizations, which is most intense among the first generation. Through COPANI 2015, the younger generations took charge of creating the image of the Nikkei Dominican community that would be presented to the rest of the world. In terms of
88 pride of their Japanese roots, reverse acculturation efforts have already begun taking hold of the younger generations.
As Anthropologist Nobuko Adachi puts it, it is important for us to look at organizations in order to appreciate the complex relationships between independent countries and their cultures.54 The Association of Pan American Nikkei helps bring this large group together under a common ideology. Over the past century, the international Nikkei community has remained cognizant of their Japanese roots, but also been influenced by the languages and cultures of their new countries. The Nikkei experience is unique in that it is both distinct from Japan and the host country, but lives inextricably within this dichotomy. It has evolved to form a culture and community of its own. Therefore, the community to which Nikkei feel a sense of belonging to does not necessarily have to belong to a specific country, but can rather be a larger transnational
Nikkei construction, be it Hispanic, Latino, or Pan American.
COPANI is one of the most practical means for meeting and cultivating relationships with other Nikkei from Latin America. That Nikkei Dominicans were also able to facilitate this sort of celebration is significant. There is a collective consciousness in the international Nikkei community through which most groups know of one another. Nikkei Dominicans have just recently joined and claimed their place in this dialogue. COPANI 2017 will be in Lima, Peru, which will be followed by COPANI 2019 in a U.S. city to be determined. Eiko says that she and many of her friends are looking forward to attending.
Conclusion
In comparison to the immigrants who first arrived in the Dominican Republic, their children and grandchildren now have many more options when forming their identities. Reverse acculturation, through the celebration of Japanese traditions and production of memory, has
89 stimulated their Japanese roots. Propulsion of media and advancements in technology have made it easier for them to maintain a connection with Japan and access its culture. The younger generations are thus proud of their Nikkei identities and have begun adopting leadership roles in their community. This has contributed significantly towards their survival as a group.
Globalization has also allowed Nikkei Dominicans to meet others like them in other countries throughout the world. Media has helped them cultivate these new relationships, as well as maintain old ones. Meanwhile, these same advancements in media and technology have compelled community members to imagine lives for themselves elsewhere, leading them to leave the Dominican Republic.
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Figure 1 Constanza’s Japanese Club during my visit in November of 2015.
Figure 2 Yoko Nishio in her living room with some of her owls decorating the wall behind her.
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Figure 3 A wall marking the growths of Nishio’s children and grandchildren over the years.
Figure 4 Present-day Choko Waki in her home’s patio.
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Figure 5 Choko Waki, her husband, and two children in Constanza during the early 1960s. (Photo courtesy of Choko Waki)
Figure 6 Three of Choko Waki’s grandchildren, Hiroshi, Shinji and Kenji Waki with a family friend near their home in Constanza in the mid-1970s. (Photo courtesy of Koji Waki)
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Figure 7 Koji Waki and his wife in Santo Domingo. (Photo Courtesy of Koji Waki)
Figure 8 Sousette Yamaki at a Brazilian-Taiwanese tea shop in Santiago de los Caballeros.
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Figure 9 First generation members of the Dominican Republic’s Association for Natives of Kagoshima. Picture taken in 2012 at Santo Domingo’s Japanese School. (Photo courtesy of Eiko Kokubun)
Figure 10 Students competing at an Ohanashitaikai speech competition during my visit to Santo Domingo’s Japanese School. Japanese officials form the panel of judges on the right.
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Figure 11a Students received school supplies for participating in the contest.
Figure 11b The anthem for the Dominican Republic’s Japanese Schools. (Photo Retrived from Volando Por Republica Dominicana, a blog by a Japanese Language JICA 2010-2012 volunteer in the Dominican Republic)
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Figure 12 Three generations of the Hidaka family, who travelled to Santo Domingo from Jarabacoa for the speech contest.
Figure 13 Hiroshi Waki, his wife, and two of their children. His daughter participated in the speech contest.
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Figure 14 A commemorative piece for the immigrants in Dajabón, established for the 25th year anniversary on July of 1981. (Photo Retrieved from Seiun no shou: Dominika kyouwakoku nihonjin nougyou ijuusha 50-nen no michi)
Figure 15a A statue commemorating the Japanese immigrants in the Dominican Republic faces the Port of Santo Domingo, where they arrived nearly 60 years ago.
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Figure 15b The Dominican Republic’s statue, and those for Japanese immigrants in other countries, shares a striking resemblance with the one in Japan’s Kobe Port. Kobe’s was erected on April 28th, 2001 in memory of the first emigrants from Kobe to Brazil.
Figure 16 Copies of the two different commemorative pieces for the 50th anniversary, side-by- side. On the left is the one written by the National Association for Japanese Dominicans while the one on the right was published by the Association for Fraternity between Japanese Dominicans.
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Figure 17 A red bridge at the Japanese section of Santo Domingo’s Jardin Botanico Nacional.
Figure 18 The Japanese garden’s current head keeper started off as part of its cleaning crew before receiving his licensure in horticulture. He now has a team of his own and is responsible for managing the garden year-round.
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Figure 19 Nikkei populations by Latin American country in 1998. These numbers do not include those who return migrated in large numbers to Japan during the 1990s. (Retrieved from The Japanese in Latin America)
Figure 20 Eiko Kokubun during an interview for COPANI in August of 2015.
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Figure 21 Eiko Kokubun, Carlos Kasuga (center), and the rest of COPANI 2015’s organizers, including Hiroshi Waki in the second row.
Figure 22 One of Eiko’s relatives learning how to dance Merengue in the 1960s. (Photo Courtesy of Eiko Kokubun)
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1 Peguero, Immigration and Politics, 199 2 Ibid., 98 3 Ibid., 272 4 Valentina Peguero and Milagros Tsukayama. Inmigracion Japonesa a la Republica Dominicana. Discover Nikkei 13 November 2015. 5 Peguero, Immigration and Politics, 235 6 Hiroshi, W. 2015. Interview with Omar Pineda. Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, 19 November. 7 Association for Fraternity between Japanese-Dominicans, El Paraiso del Caribe: Medio Siglo de Alegria y Tristeza Hoy Dia todavia Nos Encontramos Vivos Aqui. Comite Ejecutivo de la Conmemoracion del Cincuentenario de la Inmigracion de Japoneses al pais Dominicano. 2009. Appendix. 8 Mofongo is an Afro-Puerto Rican dish with fried plantains as its main ingredient. 9 Several. (Juan Guiliani Cury. La Tragedia de Japon. El Listin Diario 18 March 2011; Doris Pantaleon. Japoneses en RD oran por su pais. El Listin Diario 13 March 2011; Adolfo Paniagua. La comunidad japonesa esta muy preocupada. El Listin Diario 12 March 2011.) 10 World Bank October 2013 Report. 11 Kirsten Lindsay Chan. “Reverse acculturation – a global rebalancing phenomenon.” 2013 12 Jeff Lesser. Negotiating National Identity : Immigrants, Minorities, and the Struggle for Ethnicity in Brazil / Jeffrey Lesser. Durham, N.C. : Duke University Press, 13 Jonathan Katz. Japan Families Come to the Dominican Republic. Washington Post 25 July 2006. 14 Peguero, Immigration and Politics, 86 15 Placard posted at the entrance of Santo Domingo’s Japanese School. 16 “Viaje a Constanza: Festival del Cerezo.” Youtube. Accessed 27 March 2016. 17 Several. (Edith Wen-Chu Chen. You are like us, you eat platanos: Chinese Dominicans, Race, Ethnicity, and Identity; “Inmigracion China en Republica Dominicana by Oscar Grullon and La Fundacion Prensa Civil Quisqueyana.” Youtube. Accessed 6 October 2015) 18 Peguero, Immigration and Politics, 95 19 “Presentacion de la Escuela Japonesa de Santo Domingo en Gakushu Happyoukai 2008.” Youtube. Accessed 27 March 2016. 20 Paraiso del Caribe, 78 21 Several. (El Paraiso del Caribe; Libro recoge 50 anos de la inmigracion japonesa a RD. El Listin Diario 31 October 2009; Toru Takegama (National Association for Japanese- Dominicans). Seiun no shou: Dominika kyouwakoku Nihonjin nougyou ijuusha 50 nen no michi.) 22 Seiun no shou: 50 nen non michi 23 Hiroshi, W. 2015. Interview with Omar Pineda. Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, 19 November. 24 Peguero, Immigration and Politics, 206 25 Endo, Exporting Japan, 157 26 Soko ni rakuen wa nakatta: Dominika imin kutou no hanseiki, Fuji TV, 2004. Documentary. 27 Peguero, Immigration and Politics, 212 28 Ibid., 208 29 Ibid., 207
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30 Soko ni rakuen wa nakatta: Dominika imin kutou no hanseiki, Fuji TV, 2004. Documentary. 31 Court Rejects Dominican Immigration Demand. UPI Newspaper 7 June 2006. 32 Peguero, Immigration and Politics, 208 33 John Riley. Japanese Farms Feed Dominican Republic. The Seattle Times 5 December 1999. 34 Endo, Exporting Japan, 157 35 Several. (Endo, Exporting Japan, 158; Peguero, Immigration and Politics, 217) 36 Peguero, Immigration and Politics, 217 37 Jonathan Katz. Japan Families Come to the Dominican Republic. Washington Post 25 July 2006. 38 Endo, Exporting Japan, 157 39 “Tabata koohi nouensan.” Sekkai no mura de hakken! Konna tokoro ni nihonjin. TV Asahi. 40 Several. (Kuurou kataritsugu kinenhi dominika nihonjin imin. Kyodo News 17 January 2013; Maki Okubo. Japanese Immigrants in Dominican Republic recall half-century of hardship. AWJ by Asahi Shimbun 18 April 2014) 41 Several. (La Colonia Japonesa de los “Alpes del Caribe.” BBC Mundo 30 August 2012; Teruaki Ueno. Aged Japanese emigrants to Dominican Republic sue government. Caribbean Net News 6 June 2006.) 42 Several. (“Buen Vivir Entrevista al Sr. Teruki Waki Constanza, Rep. Dom.” Youtube. Accessed 28 March 2016; Lesdia Rodriguez. Colonia Japonesa en Republica Dominicana. Zona 5 9 December 2014; 54 años de la llegada de Japoneses a RD. El Caribe 7 August 2010; Jorge Pineda. Japanese leave their mark, descendants in Dominican Interior. Dominican Today 13 April 2009.) 43 Yara Simon. “Inside the World of Dominican Cosplayers.” Remezcla 14 March 2016. 44 Peguero, Immigration and Politics 45 El Listin Diario 26 March 2004. 46 Several. (El Embajador del Japon y los Representantes de Nueve Organizaciones Firman Acuerdos de Donacion. The Japanese Embassy in the Dominican Republic 18 December 2012; Adolfo Paniagua. Gobierno de Japon dona cinco camiones cabildo Constanza. El Listin Diario 7 August 2009.) 47 Embajada de Japon y Ministerio de la Juventud realizaran intercambio cultural. El Listin Diario 8 May 2015. 48 Kikumura-Yano, Encyclopedia of Japanese Descendants, 219 49 “Asociación Panamericana Nikkei.” Accessed 6 October 2015.
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Chapter 3 Migration of Work: Return
To the Native Homeland and Arrival in the Dominican Diaspora
Y un atardecer pintó de canvas el cielo\Caminé la playa de Momochi, mi anhelo Y se me escapó una sonrisa del alma\Aquí me enseñó “arigato gozaimasu” Yo canté tu Bachata aquí en Fukuoka (Original) 空に描かれた夕焼け 懐かしい「シーサイドももち」での散歩 心の底からの微笑 「ありがとうございます」ということを学んだここ 君のバチャタを歌ったここ On one evening, the sky was painted like a canvas I walked Momochi’s beaches, oh how I miss them And a smile escaped from deep inside\It was here that I learned “arigatou gozaimasu” I sang your Bachata here in Fukuoka
Lyrics from Dominican singer/songwriter Juan Luis Guerra’s “Bachata en Fukuoka.” Guerra wrote this after performing in Fukuoka where he was surprised to see many Japanese locals dancing Bachata and Merengue.1 The song reached number one on the Billboard Hot Latin Tracks in 2010.
Just as their ancestors left Japan, Nikkei have left their homes in the Dominican Republic in pursuit of opportunities abroad. This chapter looks at temporal and location based changes in
Nikkei Dominican migrations and their processes of acculturation at their destinations. One of
Japan’s largest minority populations is in its community of Nikkei return migrants who entered the country in high numbers during the 1990s. In January of 2016, I visited areas of Japan with concentrations of Nikkei Latinos expecting to find Nikkei Dominicans living among them. How have Nikkei Dominicans arrived in Japan and come to terms with their ancestral origins?
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Technology has made it so that moving to far off lands does not necessarily translate to complete separation from one’s country, but do some roots run deeper than others?
To be from Japan but not be considered Japanese becomes a narrative of its own genre— the Nikkei category and hybridized culture. It is one that manifests its own sort of solidarity, specificity, and exclusivity, sometimes even separating itself from the Japaneseness that defines their commonality. Yet, it took traveling halfway across the world for many in the imagined transnational Nikkei community to meet one another, reuniting generations later in the ethnic homeland. Takeyuki Tsuda has been studying Brazilian migrant workers in Japan since the
1990s, and his extensive work has provided a valuable framework for many scholars to examine other Latin American Nikkei groups in Japan.2 While the Nikkei intersect on many fronts, they differ from one another after diversifying and undergoing unique acculturation experiences in their respective host countries. For example, Japanese from Peru tend to be more conservative and less animated than those from Brazil, which has made adjusting in Japan easier for them.3
Nikkei Dominicans in Japan not only differ from their Nikkei counterparts, but also differ between one another. Angelo Ishi, a third generation Nikkei Brazilian from São Paulo who has lived in Japan since the 1990s, is recognized for his work on media and cultural issues dealing with return migrants. He proposes that differences within the Nikkei Brazilian community in
Japan are based on four things: a person’s length of stay, concern for their self-image, ability to get along with the Japanese, and on their willingness to integrate, demonstrated through things such as learning of the local language.4 Though his keen observations were made back in 1994, my own recent interviews with members of Japan’s Nikkei Dominican community revealed similar differences. The stories that follow serve as the first ethnography of Nikkei Dominican return migration to Japan, and in part, also introduces their migration to the Dominican diaspora.
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Maria Hoshikawa at Tokyo’s Dominican Embassy
I met with Maria Hoshikawa at the Dominican Republic’s Embassy in Tokyo (See Figure
1). She was the second of the immigrant’s children to be born in the Dominican Republic, that is to say, she is the second member of the second generation. The first was Rafael Bienvenido, born on March 21st, 1957, and godson to the Dominican dictator, Trujillo himself.5 Hoshikawa came to Japan for her first time in 1990 when she was 32 years old, intending to study and work. She was one of 17 Nikkei students from Latin America who won “scholarships” to Japan that year. A month after arriving, Hoshikawa was told that she owed the university a million yen, and realized that this had been more of an acceptance letter than a scholarship. They had also neglected to tell her that she could only work 4 hours a week as a student. She says, “I couldn’t even feed myself on that, let alone pay for school.” Many other second generation Nikkei went to
Japan hoping to develop careers they had begun in the Dominican Republic, but they faced difficulties because of the language barrier. In 1995, Hoshikawa returned to the Dominican
Republic where she became involved in the government sector, and also headed the country’s national Nikkei youth group for 4 years.
In 2000, Hoshikawa began working for the Dominican embassy in Miami, Florida. A
Dominican immigrant community had been thriving there since the 1970s. Florida is an ideal location for migrants in search of a Spanish speaking area with a tropical climate similar to that of their country.6 Today, an estimated 160,000 Dominicans live in Florida state alone, most of whom have either directly immigrated from the Dominican Republic or moved there from New
York City. Though there were few of them, Hoshikawa met other Nikkei Dominicans like herself while in Miami. After seven years of working at Miami’s Dominican embassy, Hoshikawa was asked to transfer to the Dominican Embassy in Tokyo because they needed someone proficient in
108 the Japanese language there. She was reluctant to go for many reasons. For one, the high costs of living in the world’s largest metropolis could not compare to her easy-going life in Miami.
Hoshikawa notes that the new generation of Nikkei Dominicans has many more opportunities than she did growing up. She still remembers how non-Nikkei Dominicans were given priority for scholarships to Japan before as governments tried to promote more “real” cross-cultural exchanges. Nowadays, JICA offer Nikkei youth from all over the world scholarships for studying at Japanese universities, and also for shorter study tours. One of
Hoshikawa’s nieces received a degree from Kyoto University on one of these scholarships before continuing on to Harvard University where she studied Architecture. She now lives in New
Jersey where she is raising a family of her own.
Just as globalization’s effects brought Japanese to the Dominican Republic, Dominicans have similarly made lives for themselves in Japan. Some non-Nikkei Dominicans charmed and married Japanese JICA volunteers who worked throughout the Dominican Republic during the
1990s. Tokyo’s Dominican embassy estimates that a total of 1,500 Dominicans currently live in
Japan with about 800 of them registered through the embassy, though no official statistics exist.
The majority are mestizo, or children from Japanese intermarriage with Dominicans, and this figure also includes “Dominican-Dominicans,” or Dominicans who lack any Japanese roots.
Dominicans are dispersed throughout the country, going wherever work calls, and hoping to save up as much as possible. However, there are a couple of places with relatively high concentrations of both Nikkei and non-Nikkei Dominicans. These include the prefectures of Saitama and
Kanagawa in the north, and Kagoshima and Kochi in the south. Hoshikawa comments that there are many Dominicans in China as well.
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Similar to the situation their parents met during their early days in the Dominican
Republic, large distances from one another make it difficult for the Dominican community to establish a formal organization in Japan. This stands in contrast to those that Nikkei Brazilians and Peruvians have formed. It is also nearly impossible for them to take time off as dekasegi workers. Many of them work long hours across six day weeks with little vacation time.
Dominicans in Japan have attempted to form clubs and associations, but these have usually dissolved within a couple of months. Tokyo’s embassy hosts a number of events, most popular of which is a reception honoring the Dominican Republic’s Independence Day every 27th of
February. Dominicans from all over Japan come to Tokyo for the ceremony, but it is by no means an easy trip for them to make. For example, the train ride from Saitama to Tokyo alone takes two hours, but attendees are eligible for train fare reimbursements provided by the embassy. In the past, their annual Dominican Independence Day event has been hosted in
Kanagawa prefecture in consideration of the majority of Dominicans who already live there.
Dominicans there also plan many non-official gatherings and events for themselves, especially during the summer, including baseball games and barbecues.
Many Nikkei Dominicans arrived in Japan as hopeful students, only to be pulled in by monetary incentives and end up as exploited dekasegi workers. While most Nikkei Dominicans in Japan hold double nationality, some have relinquished their Dominican nationalities and plan on staying there permanently. Some have been in Japan since the 1990s and have already adjusted to life there. Marrying and starting families in Japan also makes repatriation difficult.
Most Dominicans in Japan are factory workers, despite having been skilled professionals back in the Dominican Republic. A select few Dominicans have built businesses of their own, and they have thrived especially as distinguished dance instructors. Life for Dominicans in Japan can be
110 confining, and Hoshikawa comments, “El que estudia, estudia, y el que trabaja, trabaja,” meaning “Those who study, study, and those who work, work.” From her own experiences,
Hoshikawa notes that unless a Nikkei is mixed with another non-Japanese ethnicity, their environments in Japan pressure them into “becoming Japanese.” In particular, the factory workplace is structured to reinforce a Japanese-Foreigner dichotomy.
Nikkei Dominican interactions with others in Japan also depend on the factors that Ishi proposes in his study of Nikkei Brazilians. Similar languages and cultures lead Dominicans in
Japan to associate themselves more with Nikkei and non-Nikkei Latinos than with the Japanese.
There has consequently been a significant amount of intermarriage and cooperation between these groups, and Hoshikawa calls Kanagawa the mata, or trunk, of all this mixing.
The Other in Japan and a Hidden Diversity
Out of a total of 127 million residents in Japan, fewer than 2 million are non-Japanese nationals.7 Within what seems like a negligible 1.5%, we can find people who have lived their entire lives in Japan, know nothing other than it, and yet are considered foreigners there. In order to decipher this phenomenon, we must first look at how Japan perceives foreignness in its country. Japan prides itself in its people’s homogeneity and claims that this is what has allowed them to rise as a global power. Dating back to the Meiji period (1868-1912), much of
Nihonjinron theory, or the study of Japanese people, attributes a sense of social harmony to
Japan’s racial homogeneity.8 It also introduces the concept of the family nation state in which all
Japanese are thought to be connected by common ancestors from the Yamato clan. Nihonjinron essentially defines what it means to be Japanese by distinguishing it from anything Other.9 It says that you are either Japanese, or you are not, and that it is better to be the former. Uchi or
Soto—you are either in, or you are out. A prime example of this is the child of a Japanese parent
111 with a foreign spouse. They are only allowed to hold dual citizenship until they are 23, at which point Japan asks them to give up one or the other. A few years ago, a Japanese soccer player renounced his Japanese nationality to play soccer for a Southeast Asian team. Many Japanese saw this as an act of betrayal. When his contract expired, the soccer player was not allowed to reclaim his Japanese nationality. He is now limited to residency status, treated like a foreigner.10
Many Japanese scholars and politicians have used Nihonjinron to defend upholding monoethnicity and “racial purity” in Japan.11 The presence of anyone who appears or thinks differently in Japanese society threatens their unique identity. Living in such a society means that many Japanese still have trouble grasping terms such as ethnic diversity and multiculturalism.
Despite its aging population, plummeting birth rate, and shrinking workforce, the Japanese widely oppose immigration.12 To make matters worse, Japanese media often goes out of its way to sensationalize crimes committed specifically by foreigners, which has created hysteria at the mention of foreign migrant worker entry.13 In Japan, diversity is pointed out as the root of racial tensions affecting countries such as the United States. So, who makes up this population of 2 million foreigners who have managed to pass through Japan’s strict immigration policies?
First, we must acknowledge Japan’s own domestic minority groups who are just as marginalized and seen as outsiders. These communities include the Burakumin from a Tokugawa period caste system, the Ainu people in Hokkaido whose plight is similar to that of Native
American groups in the U.S., and Okinawans whose ancestors made up the Ryukyuu Kingdom before being colonized by Japan. Intermarriages between Japanese and foreigners often take the form of relationships between a Japanese woman with a Western man, or a Japanese man with a
Southeast Asian “picture bride.” Their mixed-race children are called Hafu, and they also face challenges from living in a society that denies them half of their identity. This group in particular
112 received more public attention in 2013 with the release of a documentary titled Hafu, and again when Ariana Miyamoto, the daughter of a Japanese woman and an African American man, was crowned Miss Universe Japan 2015. As expected, she was criticized for “not being Japanese enough.”14
By region of origin, Japan’s foreign population in 2004 was from Asia (74.2%), South
America (18.1%), North America (3.3%), Europe (3%), and Australia (0.6%).15 In order by largest to smallest population size, Japan’s registered migrant groups were from North/South
Korea, China, Brazil, the Philippines, Thailand, Peru, the U.S., Vietnam, Indonesia, and the
UK.16 By 2012, this list became China, North/South Korea, the Philippines, Brazil, Vietnam,
Peru, the U.S., Thailand, Indonesia, Nepal, and Taiwan.17 Their narratives differ in terms of how they arrived in Japan, and in their experiences within the country and with its people.
Zainichi Koreans, sometimes referred to as Zainichi which means “living in Japan,” are remnants of Japan’s colonization of the Korean peninsula. Under its empire, Japan attempted to eradicate all of its colonized people’s languages and cultures, and make them “better” by making them Japanese. Under its assimilation programs, Japan granted these people Japanese nationality, though it kept them inferior in status through social and institutional restrictions. By the end of the war, approximately 2 million Koreans had been brought to work in Japan’s war factories, or in the case of comfort women, to be sexually and physically abused by the Japanese army.18
Only 600,000 Koreans remained in Japan after post-war repatriation, by which point Japan had rescinded their Japanese nationalities and left them nationless as the Korea they had originated from became two separate countries. Among Zainichi Korean descendants are people who have never left Japan, and speak more Japanese than Korean, but reject any Japanese identity. Not being considered Japanese means that they are essentially foreigners with permanent residency
113 status. While this group can blend in phenotypically with the majority, it encounters trouble when their Korean names, and therefore their non-Japanese backgrounds, are discovered. The most prominent forms of discrimination for Koreans are in employment and marriage.
Most Asian migrants have arrived in Japan under either short term education visas or under a trainee program that was established in 1989. Many come under false pretenses and end up illegally overstaying their visas. Some of these migrants, particularly women from the
Philippines, enter the country on 3-6 month entertainer/tourist visas to work in Japan’s lucrative sex industry.19 On the other side of this spectrum, westerners are mostly employed by the
English language teaching industry. Regardless of their country of origin, foreign migrant workers are generally overqualified for the work that they do, and in some cases, their work even forces them to compromise their morals and personal values. The economics behind migration allow the majority of these workers to earn more as factory workers in Japan than as professionals in their home countries. Especially in the case of South American and Southeast
Asian workers, these migrants are often breadwinners for their families back home.
Japan has been ranked as having one of the harshest immigration policies, keeping tight control over who can enter its society.20 This is yet another way in which Japan attempts to reinforce a Japanese-Foreigner dichotomy it has constructed over the past century. More specifically, Japan’s expectations for these foreigners (their occupations, the length of their stays, etc.) work to keep them subjugated within Japanese society. Yet, a hierarchy does exist within the foreigner category. For example, the Japanese admire western culture and language but look down on those of neighboring Asian countries. Japan’s Chinese community is its fastest growing minority group. They remain deeply rooted to their home country, coming and going frequently, rather than attempting to integrate, and are thus considered a “model minority.”21 Nevertheless,
114 being simultaneously Othered by Japanese society creates a sense of community, cooperation, and solidarity among foreign groups, if not between all of Japan’s minority groups. Communities separated from Japanese society grant residents an autonomy that they otherwise lack as foreigners in Japan. Nikkei Brazilians have spearheaded these communities, and can determine who is allowed in as well as who is kept out. Within the intersection of transnationalism and cultural diffusion essential to their lives in Japan, we see Nikkei Brazilians limiting their interactions with the Japanese and instead acting as a unifying force for Japan’s foreign migrant community.
A migrant’s occupation and lived experiences in Japan are inherently based on how they are seen by the dominant majority. Perceptions depend on factors such as the migrant’s physical appearance, country of origin, nationality, etc. The 1980s saw the entry of a significant number of Nikkei return migrants, some of which still appear Japanese and hold Japanese nationality, but are considered foreigners in Japan nonetheless.
Economic Booms and the Nikkei Loophole
Japan enjoyed economic prosperity for much of the post war period up until its financial bubble collapse in the early 1990s. Although immigration was never formally accepted, many unskilled foreign workers entered Japan during this period and were overlooked because they fulfilled its growing demand for labor. By 1985, Japan had amassed a population of about
985,000 foreign laborers, mostly working in factories that fueled its booming economy. Many of them were workers from countries such as Nepal, Iran, and Pakistan who had stayed under expired visas. This sort of unregulated and unacknowledged immigration ended in 1989 when
Japan introduced the Immigration Control and Refugee Recognition Act, affirming its ban on foreign unskilled labor and increasing penalties for offenders. Migrants on overstayed visas were
115 ineligible for benefits such as health insurance, and they worked as liabilities to companies who could be fined for employing illegal workers.22 In 1990, an estimated 16,608 foreigners were working illegally in Japan.23
Despite officially opposing immigration in its policy, Japan has created a number of
“back-door” measures to deal with its economic realities. The most obvious feature of Japan’s immigration policy is in the contradiction between what it claims and the reality that has been brought about because of its policies.24 Immediately following its 1989 ban on immigrants, Japan introduced two new policies in order to maintain a flow of inexpensive unskilled labor, and also be more selective about who it would let in. The first policy created the Industrial Training
Program which provides three-year visas and equips foreigners, mostly from continental Asia, with skills to take back to their developing countries. Participants became a new pool of unskilled labor that Japan could regulate more easily. Later in 1993, the Technical Intern
Program was established as a network of broker organizations connecting applicants to potential employers. Those who do not qualify for either of these programs find other ways to enter Japan, and tougher visa regulations have only made illegal modes of entry more common.
Although these philanthropic trainee programs are government sponsored, they leave many ambiguities that make it easy for employers to take advantage of their workers. Foreigners become vulnerable to forced labor, exploitation, and withheld wages, especially once their visas expire.25 Many end up being deported before they can even repay the loans they made in their home countries in order to get to Japan. Those who manage to stay longer claim that "compared to people from home who went to other first world countries, I don't feel like I've bettered myself.”26 When they are ready to return home, these foreign workers form long lines at Japan’s
116 immigration centers to surrender themselves. They are prohibited from re-entering Japan. These narratives of migration, workplace abuse, and broken dreams continue to this day.27
Another policy introduced in 1989 removed Nikkei work restrictions under the premise that they should be allowed to visit extended family in Japan for longer 90 days, and also be able to earn some money while there. Japan expected Nikkei returnees to act according to their
Japanese lineage—an attempt to reconcile labor shortages with their desire to limit social disruption. This new policy also allowed Nikkei to bring their spouses and children with them to
Japan, regardless of their Nikkei status. For many Nikkei, this was an opportunity to not only connect with their Japanese roots, but also earn much higher wages than they were making in their home countries. Many Latin American countries with Japanese populations were experiencing political and economic tumult during this period. With a population of nearly 1.5 million Nikkei, the largest concentration of people with Japanese ancestry outside of Japan,
Brazil has sent a proportionally large number of return migrants to Japan (See Figure 2).
Brazilians have consistently made up roughly 80% of Japan’s Latino community. Other returnees have mostly come from South American countries: Peru, Paraguay, Bolivia, and
Argentina (See Figure 3). In 1989 alone, 29,241 Brazilian nationals immigrated to Japan.28 By
2000, there were 254,294 Brazilians living in Japan. This increased to 312,582 by 2008.29,30
As Japan anticipated, dekasegi Nikkei workers met labor demands in 3K jobs the
Japanese were less willing to do: the dirty (kitanai), the dangerous (kiken), and the difficult
(kitsui). They are subjected to high-risk stressful work and are often physically injured. Losing a finger on the assembly line could mean getting fired by an employer who considers their workers easily replaceable.31 Japan essentially removed its unwanted ethnic groups and replaced them
117 with those it deemed more acceptable: the Nikkei. In this case, more acceptable meant more like themselves.
Japan’s underlying expectation that Nikkei would easily integrate because of their
Japanese ancestry was completely shattered. Even if they looked Japanese, the Nikkei had already become so far removed in their cultures, languages and mannerisms. In wrongly assuming that it was bringing back its own people, Japan initiated few, if any, measures to integrate them. This has led to the same social clashes between foreigners and Japanese that the
Nikkei policy was trying to avoid. For example, Japanese complain that Brazilians play their music too loudly, do not abide by curfews, and fail to respect the garbage recycling system.32 In being denied the Japanese identities that had distinguished them from others back home, Nikkei
Brazilians have generally embraced a heightened Brazilian nationalism after going to Japan.
They have also formed their own self-segregated network and imagined community, establishing their own food and entertainment businesses, newspapers/publications, and organizations that free them from interactions with mainstream culture and the dominant majority.33
Japan’s economic bubble burst 1992. Although unemployment rates increased in Japan, these policies remained and contributed to the growth of transnational communities of trainee workers and Nikkei returnees.34 Rather than support unemployed immigrant families following the 2008 global recession, Japan passed a law in 2009 which provided the Nikkei with financial assistance for them to return to their home countries if they agreed not to come back. Only
20,000 out of approximately 366,000 total Nikkei in Japan at the time took the offer. Having made lives for themselves there, and intending to stay long term, many Nikkei were outraged.
Japan’s re-entry ban on those who left during this period was lifted in 2013.35
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Rumbo a Japón: Dominicans Arrive in Japan
My own fieldwork revealed that Dominicans in Japan, regardless of their Nikkei backgrounds, generally fall under four nonexclusive categories: entertainers such as baseball players and dance instructors, spouses of Japanese nationals, government diplomats, and Nikkei return migrants. In all four cases, their entries into Japan peaked during the 1990s, a period in which many other foreigners had migrated to Japan for work.
At first glance, it seems unlikely that Japan and the Dominican Republic, two countries separated by at least two oceans, over 8,000 miles, and such distinct cultures, share similarities with one another. One has the world’s third largest developed economy and a population of 127 million, while the other has less than a 10th of their population and ranks at #71 for GDP globally. If asked about what they know about Japan, Dominicans will mention popular media related terms such as Ninja, Samurai and Dragon Ball Z. The Dominican Republic has minimal international soft power in comparison to Japan or the United States, and yet many Japanese are able to identify it for its stellar baseball players and popular dance styles.
In 1492, Christopher Columbus had actually been trying to go to Japan, or Cipango as it was known back then, when he arrived on the island of Hispaniola. This area in the Dominican
Republic’s northern region is now known as the Cibao valley.36 Both Japan and the Dominican
Republic are island countries, which means that they are more likely to have political stability and are less affected by “border cultures.”37 They were both first introduced to their national sport, Baseball, in the late 19th century, although Japan’s was a direct import from the U.S. and the Dominican Republic’s came with the Cubans who fled there during the Ten Years War.38
More than anything, the two largest imports of Dominican culture in Japan are baseball and
Bachata/Merengue dances, both of which have helped strengthen cultural bonds between these
119 countries. In fact, with over 67,000 views on Youtube, one of the first videos you will find after a search with keywords “Japan” and “Dominican Republic” will be of a pair of women dancing
Merengue and rooting on Dominican baseball players on a Japanese TV show. They sing “Ike ike Dominicano” in both Japanese and Spanish.39
Many Dominican youth see baseball as a trampoline to fame and prosperity. Baseball has become an international sport with 29% of America’s professional baseball players coming from countries such as the Dominican Republic, South America, Canada, Australia, Japan, Korea, and
Taiwan.40 Professional baseball in Japan is similar, importing players from Venezuela, the
Dominican Republic, Taiwan, and the United States. Japanese scouts have been actively recruiting players in the Dominican Republic for over 20 years. In 1990, the Academia de
Beisbol Hiroshima Toyo Carp was founded in the Dominican Republic. It currently trains over
30 promising Dominican youth with dreams of getting contracted by the Japanese league. Its current director, Shohei Yamane, says that “There are many excellent baseball players in the
Dominican Republic. Their arms and legs are longer than the Japanese’s.”41
Biases in favor of “ethnically pure” teams in Japan have limited foreign players to 4 per
25 person roster.42 In comparison to an average career of 9.09 years for Japanese players, the careers of U.S. and Dominican players average out to be 1.79 and 1.89 years, respectively.
Asians from Taiwan and Korea who can blend in more easily, and sometimes even change their names, have careers that are twice as long.43 Having to give up their Dominican sancocho for
Japanese sushi, Dominican players experience culture shock in Japan.44 Though their dreams are often cut short in Japan, many Dominican baseball players have used careers there as stepping stones to other opportunities. Alfonso Soriano played for Hiroshima Toyo Carp for two years before signing on with the New York Yankees in 1998. Soriano changed between U.S. Major
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League Baseball teams over the years, and he recently ended his career with the Yankees in
2014. Timo Perez also played in Japan before joining the New York Mets in 2000. A New York
Times article from back then joked that he spoke more Japanese than English.45
Most attempts to establish Dominican businesses in Japan have failed in comparison to those of other migrant groups. The Dominican community’s small size makes it so that they have to depend more on Japanese clientele in order to succeed, which has not always been sustainable.
Café Atabey is a coffee retailer and distributor that imports coffee from Bonao in the Dominican
Republic. One of its largest buyers was a restaurant on Tokyo’s Ginza street called “The Santo
Domingo,” which was the only Dominican owned restaurant in Japan until recently closing down
(See Figure 4). One of my interviewees told me that “restaurants can’t survive here if they don’t match their flavors with the Japanese’s tastes.”
Some Dominican entrepreneurs have instead collaborated with other more established
Latin Americans in Japan’s Latino social spaces.46 For example, Tokyo’s “Latin Bar” serves a bustling customer base of foreigners and Japanese alike. While Latinos attempt to momentarily re-create the nightlife of their home countries, the Japanese come in search of contact with the
Other. Jose Duluc formed “Ga’Caribe” in Osaka in 1998. From 2000-2001, the music group released several CDs and performed extensively throughout Japan, New York and the
Caribbean.47 Duluc is recognized for his efforts to resurrect deep rooted Afro-Dominican music, and for teaching Japanese audiences about Dominican culture.
In mentioning my research topic to people in Japan, I was time and time again directed to television sensation Yuji-kun. Thomas Yuji Gordon is a famous American-Japanese hafu actor, model, and common TV personality in Japan (See figure 5). His father, actor Michael Gordon who later featured in Bad Boys II, had actually met Yuji’s Japanese mother when they were
121 studying at Sophia University in Tokyo. Michael was there because his father, Charles Gordon, was the Dominican Republic’s ambassador to Japan. Charles’ father, Yuji’s great grandfather, was actually the 46th president of the Dominican Republic, Silvestre Antonio Guzman
Fernandez. Yuji’s parents later married and settled in Miami, Florida where he was born. After his parents divorced, Yuji’s mother brought him with her to Tokyo at the age of five, and he has lived there ever since.48 During his appearances, Yuji’s ethnic background frequently becomes the topic of discussion. He has usually gone by Japanese American, and it is this same idolatrized western identity that has allowed him to rise to fame. His Dominican background was only recently uncovered.
In general, Dominicans have established lives in Japan in three different ways. There are actually very few countries Dominicans can visit without visas, but in Japan, they are easily granted 90-day visas on arrival. This is extremely rare for Japan, and other Latin American nationals from countries such as Brazil and Peru do not have the same privilege.49 Nikkei
Dominicans are granted long-term visas after providing evidence of their Japanese bloodline, and they can also later apply for permanent residency. Non-Japanese Dominicans are eligible for permanent residency if married to a Japanese spouse. Nikkei Dominican youth are issued student visas to attend Japanese universities. Some Nikkei Dominicans already hold Japanese nationality if they were properly declared at Santo Domingo’s Japanese embassy. No direct flights exist between the Dominican Republic and Japan, and so those with U.S. visas usually have layovers in New York City. Otherwise, the trip between both countries can take them upwards of two days through Amsterdam, which does not require transit visas for Dominicans.50
Like their Latin American Nikkei counterparts, Nikkei Dominicans also took advantage of Japan’s Nikkei policy in the 1990s. In Horst and Asagiri’s 1990s ethnography of the Japanese
122 in the Dominican Republic, the authors note that while many in the younger generation flocked to larger Dominican cities, others had found employment in Japan.51 Dominican applications for residency in Japan consequently increased.52 By late 1998, Japan’s Nikkei population included
250,000 Brazilian, 40,300 Peruvians, 3,300 Bolivians, 3,300 Argentinians, and 1,400
Paraguayans.53 No accurate figure exists for Dominicans in Japan during this period, but Peguero claims that there were at least 50 registered Dominican youths either working or studying there in 2000. She also mentions that as with other Nikkei, Japanese natives tend to look down on
Nikkei Dominicans and claim that they are not true Japanese. In the context of her ethnography of Nikkei in the Dominican Republic, Peguero claims that Nikkei Dominicans who have been to
Japan are then expected to help preserve Japanese culture in the Dominican Republic after returning.54
With one exception, all of the Nikkei Dominicans I interviewed had been in Japan during the 1990s, nearly all at the same time. All but four still lived there when I visited. According to
Yoko Nishio, a Japanese woman came to Constanza during around the 1990s looking to recruit a group of young people for contracted work. At the time, many of Constanza’s Nikkei had finished high school, but very few were intending on going to college. Nishio’s daughter had recently gone to Miami to live with a friend, and she was actually considering moving there permanently. She visited her mother in Constanza and heard about this opportunity to go to
Japan. Nishio grudgingly let her to go, but only after making her promise that she would come back one day. In total, about 7 or 8 second generation Nikkei left Constanza under two-year work contracts, including Nishio’s daughter and one of her sons. They arrived in Kanagawa prefecture to meet other Nikkei who had similarly been recruited from other parts of the
Dominican Republic. For the most part, they worked at a factory that dealt with car parts. Some
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Nikkei Dominicans also found work in other prefectures such as Kagoshima, regions from which their parents had originated from and where they still had distant relatives. Many non-Nikkei
Dominicans also made their way into Japan during this period through their Nikkei spouses or close friends.
Once their contracts were up for renewal, Nishio received a phone call from her daughter saying that a Nikkei Brazilian had asked for her hand in marriage. Nishio’s daughter had originally gone to Japan in 1991, and she would not return to the Dominican Republic until 2003.
Nishio’s 16-year old grandson, Keigo, is thus Nikkei-Brazilian-Dominican, and he had actually lived in Brazil as an infant before his mother brought him to the Dominican Republic. Nishio’s daughter has remarried since then, and she recently returned to Japan to settle there with her
Dominican husband and four year old son, this time in Nagano prefecture.55 Keigo stayed behind in Constanza with his grandmother, though he recently spent a month in Tokyo with a JICA scholarship.
During the 1990s, many of the original immigrants to the Dominican Republic found themselves returning to Japan to visit their children who were now living there. As acculturated
Dominicans, they were seen as foreigners despite having been born there. The immigrants also experienced culture shock in Japan and were particularly surprised by how much things had changed since the 1960s. The last time Choko Waki went to Japan was 12 years ago, and she was most taken aback by how different the youth behaved. She says, “In our time, our parents raised us properly and we respected older people, but they’ve sort of lost that over there. I think that all other countries have lost it too. That’s what I didn’t really like [in Japan]. Also, the kids dye their hair too much now.” Nishio returned to Japan in hopes that doctors there could help her ill husband when those in the Dominican Republic could do very little for him. He was able to live
124 for three more years in Japan before passing way. Nishio then moved in with her son in
Kanagawa prefecture until she returned to the Dominican Republic in 2001. Her flight back through New York was only a few months after the 9/11 attacks, and just 12 days after American
Airlines Flight 587 with route from John F. Kennedy Airport to Santo Domingo crashed shortly after take off.56
Other immigrants, heavily indebted to JICA after years of borrowing, had also returned trying to take advantage of Japan’s high wages. In 1992, Kyuuno Arai arrived in Kanagawa
Prefecture’s city of Hiratsuka with his wife, Hiroko. They were still living in the same apartment there eight years later.57 Arai immigrated to the Dominican Republic when he was 12 years old, and he started borrowing money from JICA after all of his harvesting attempts failed. With 10 years of accrued interest, he now owed JICA five times the amount of money he originally borrowed. While Arai worked at a factory, his wife spent her days cleaning residential buildings.
Arai says, “Even though I was never able to establish myself there, I want to return to the
Dominican Republic as soon as possible. It’s my country. We’ve already picked out our burial sites there.” Meanwhile, a young Nikkei Dominican couple who arrived with two children in
1996 lived two floors below them. I found Nikkei Dominican families still living in this same area two decades years later.
Yanerys Sasaki in Aikawa-machi: Then and Now
Yanerys Sasaki welcomed me into the living room of her apartment in Aikawa-machi with a tazita de café. A large Dominican flag stared down at me from the wall as she passed me a serving of arroz con leche. Yanerys is a second generation Nikkei Dominican originally from a small village in Vicente Nobles, Dominican Republic (See Figure 6). There, her Dominican mother met her Japanese father, an immigrant from Kagoshima who arrived in the Dominican
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Republic with his parents and three siblings when he was eight years old. Because she was raised by her Japanese grandmother, Yanerys knew some things about Japanese food and culture, as well as some simple words such as arigatou, before she first came to Japan in 1995. She says,
“There are some of us who come here at zero. I’m not going to lie to you though, I can’t tell you that I know the language, but I at least know how to say thank you and ohayou, good morning. A bit here and there.” Growing up, she attended a nun’s school in Vicente Noble, and it was not until later in her life that a Japanese school was opened an hour away from her house. By that point, she was about to celebrate her 18th birthday and preparing to leave for Madrid.
In 1990, Yanerys decided to emigrate to Madrid because she wanted to start earning money immediately after graduating from high school. Back in those days, Dominicans and other Latinos were automatically granted tourist visas upon arrival in Spain. This led to the rapid growth of a diasporic Dominican community in Madrid, though Spain’s government has responded by changing regulations regarding Dominican entry into the country since then. In some ways, Dominican migration to Spain was thought of as a return to “la Madre Patria,” or to their motherland.58 Madrid now has the third largest Dominican migrant community in the world.59 For Yanerys, immigrating to Spain made sense because some of her relatives already lived there. It was a relatively easy transition for her because she was young, spoke the local language, and had access to a quickly growing Dominican community there. Within four years,
Yanerys met her first husband, another Dominican immigrant, and together they had a child named Maho. The couple separated soon after, and Yanerys was looking for a change of pace, or in her words, “I wanted a sort of escape from my life in Spain.” Two of her brothers had recently moved to Japan and were insisting that she join them there where she could earn higher wages.
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In 1995, Yanerys arrived in a town called Aikawa-machi, located within Kanagawa prefecture’s city of Atsugi. The Sasaki family name made entering Japan easy for her, and she was automatically granted a 3-year work visa to start off with. Yanerys says that the change from her rural village hometown in the Dominican Republic, to Spain, and then to Japan was quite a shock to her. There were still very few Dominicans when she first arrived in Aikawa, though many other Latinos from other countries were also living there. Many Nikkei and non-Nikkei
Domincans would arrive, it would seem almost all together, soon after.
Just as their parents faced several difficulties in adjusting to life in the Dominican
Republic, the transition for Nikkei Dominicans in Japan was by no means an easy one.
Dominicans were puzzled by traditional squat-style toilets in Japan. Dominicans also missed their food, especially the yucca and platanos essential to their meals back home. One of my interviewees told me about a time he tried to pass a pack of Dominican salami through Japanese customs at the airport. The customs officer who stopped him put his arms in the Japanese batsu
“x” formation, meaning to communicate that the item was prohibited. Confused, the Dominican thought that the “x” represented a cutting motion, and that the officer was only asking for half of the salami. Not wanting to lose all of it, the man begrudgingly agreed to share. The situation escalated when the officer confiscated the entire salami and the Dominican thought that the officer was unfairly trying to take it all for himself. He said to me, “You know us Dominicans, we bring salami with us wherever we go.” Staple Dominican plates such as sancocho or habichuelas con dulce were either never prepared or limited to very special occasions. One contact told me that, thankfully, nowadays, they can find plantains more easily in Japan, but that they are imported from the Philippines and “just don’t taste the same.”
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In one story, a Dominican was handed an oshibori washcloth at a restaurant, only to respond with, “how do you expect me to eat this?” Others have naively chewed through the plastic leaf-life dividers used in pre-packed obento meals before realizing that they were inedible. Some did not know how to use chopsticks and complained that they were not given enough time to eat their lunch meals at the factories. A couple of Aikawa’s Dominican residents formed a music group called “Zona 809,” the area code for calls in the Dominican Republic.
Their hit-song, Al Reves – Que Tu Haces en Japon, is about how everything in Japan is different, or the other way around, compared to life in the Dominican Republic (See Figure 7). They have gained much popularity among Dominicans as well as many Latino groups in Japan. One of their lyrics reads, “You can go make your money in dollars or euros, but I’ll make mines in yen.”
Clerks at Japanese stores usually greet their guests with a high-pitched animated “Irrashaimase!”
This spooked many Dominicans who wondered whether they had done something wrong. Many
Dominicans have also been surprised to find one-person restaurant establishments where their server is also their cook, who then also happens to be their cashier. Unless they had lived near the Dominican Republic’s coastal areas, where they would have met tourists, Dominicans had very little contact with foreigners before coming to Japan.
Dominican children in Japan have especially experienced some of the pressures of living between two worlds, more so than their parents. One boy thought that his Japanese schoolmates were provoking him by saying dame, which means “that’s no good” in Japanese, but means “hit me!” in Spanish. Other words commonly misunderstood include baka, which means idiot in
Japanese, but means cow in Spanish, and aho, which is another word for idiot in Japanese, but means garlic in Spanish. The language barrier led Dominicans to communicate with others using creative hand gestures. In Aikawa, one Dominican who did not speak Japanese was sent by his
128 wife to buy eggs at a konbini grocery store. When the Japanese clerk did not understand what he was looking for, the distressed man flapped his arms like a chicken and yelled “Huevos! I’m looking for some eggs!” For those who have been able to learn the language, moving around domestically has been disorienting as they encounter region-specific dialects.
Yanerys has worked several different jobs while in Japan. Her first had her organize truck parts, and though it was laid back, one of its downsides was that workers had to endure the cold winters with nothing but small portable heaters. She later worked at a seatbelt factory, a glass factory, and then in obento food preparation. During the 1990s, employers generally preferred hiring Nikkei over other foreigners such as Pakistanis.60 Many of Aikawa’s factories even favored Dominicans over other Latinos because of their reputation as good workers. Though
Nikkei Dominicans benefitted from preferential treatment, their subordinate status within
Japanese society meant that they were fired before any “real Japanese” would be. Yanerys is not resentful about this though, and she understands that everyone is, to some extent, attracted to their own blood. She says, “I was able to save up a lot during that time, I can’t complain. We were living in glory. I usually don’t enjoy leaving jobs, but the thing is, they fire you when production goes down. I can’t lie, there are jobs that I’ve left, but there are jobs that have fired me.”
Over the years, especially as its economic momentum slowed down, Japan began cracking down on illegal overstayers in migrant communities. Many non-Nikkei Dominicans who were not able to legalize themselves, either through marriage with a Nikkei or by having a
Nikkei child, were deported. Particularly in South American countries, mafia organizations began selling forged passports non-Nikkei could use to claim Japanese residency status with.
Some have borrowed travel documents from their friends, paid to arrange marriages, or even
129 gone as far as undergoing plastic surgery just to get into Japan.61 While Dominicans in Aikawa could easily switch between jobs in the 1990s, factory employers gradually became stricter and began asking for proof of visa and work permits. Some Dominicans have left because they were satisfied enough with their earnings and had become homesick. Others had formed relationships with other Latinos in their community and, in some cases, either brought them back with them to the Dominican Republic, or relocated to their spouse’s country. For example, one of Choko
Waki’s grandsons now lives in Peru with his Nikkei Peruvian wife.
This past January, Yanerys celebrated the 21st anniversary of her arrival in Japan. She says that she had never imagined staying for so long, or that she would even adjust to life there.
“Fue lo que me tocó. These are just the cards I’ve been dealt.” Yanerys now holds permanent residency status, as do her four children, although three of them were born in Japan. There are many aspects of life in Japan that she has taken a liking to, such as its medical system, which she describes as sugoi, or outstanding. She also notes that there are many government initiatives in place to help single mothers by providing them with housing subsidies that are nearly nonexistent in the Dominican Republic. Yanerys confided in me, “You know, there’s nothing like your own country. But, I think that I can’t adjust to living in my own country anymore.
There’s a lot of comfort and convenience living in these developed countries, you know? Same thing that happens to us in the United States.” Though she is grateful for the life she has made for herself in Japan, this does not mean that she has fully integrated, or that she plans on staying there for the rest of her life.
Things have changed quite a bit for Dominicans in Aikawa since Yanerys first arrived in the 1990s. Yanerys says that their taxes and costs of living have only increased while their wages have remained relatively the same. She says, “I think Japan was a country you could see results
130 in before, but that’s not really the case anymore. The work supply has gone down…there were many many more jobs before. You can live in peace and all of that but you’re really just living paycheck to paycheck, just working to survive.” These disincentives are the primary reason why there are now more Dominicans leaving Japan than there are entering. Yanerys estimates that there are maybe only 50 Dominicans living in Aikawa, and a few more families in the surrounding Atsugi and Zama areas.
Although many Domincans have left Aikawa, either to other parts of Japan or to other countries, Yanerys has her reasons for staying. Aikawa makes it fairly easy for its residents to be
Latino, or more specifically in Yanerys’ case, to be Dominican despite living in Japan. Aikawa’s
Latino community, which includes its own markets of imported goods, banks, and nightlife entertainment, allows its members to go without having to interact as much with the Japanese, or even speak their language. Nowadays, you will find Dominican Brugal rum alongside Peruvian
Inca Kola soda and Brazilian Pastel at Brazilian and Peruvian co-owned markets like Sabor
Latino (See Figure 8). Aikawa also has “Peruvian taxis” that will charge you much less than their Japanese counterparts. A high concentration of Dominicans in the area meant that they did not necessarily even have to interact as much with other Latino groups either. Brazilians and
Peruvians I met described Aikawa’s Dominican community as cliquish, saying “You’ll never see one without the other!” However, things have changed more recently, and the outflow of
Dominicans has made interactions with outside communities increasingly necessary for those who have remained. Similarly, Aikawa’s residents have grown accustomed to foreigner presence, and you can witness the effects of cultural diffusion with a ballad by Marco Antonio
Solis playing at a local Japanese owned stationary store.
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More recently, Yanerys returned to a factory job she had been let go from 12 years ago when the company outsourced its jobs to the United States. This is the same factory in which
Koji Waki worked, but since he could speak English, he was instead transferred to Alabama to help supervise workers there. Yanerys has been there for about a year now. The job pays an hourly wage of 1,000 yen (approximately $10), and also has air conditioning and central heating for its workers. “I won the lottery with that one,” she says. Yanerys learned most of the Japanese that she does know, necessary phrases such as arigatou, ohayou gozaimasu, and sumimasen, through years of working with Japanese locals. Despite their self-segregation in Aikawa,
Dominicans have undoubtedly had to acclimate to elements of Japanese society after living there for extended periods. Although she may not realize it, Yanerys also uses several Japanese loan words (daijoubu, gomen, samui, etc.) intermingled in her Spanish. This is comparable to the mixture between English and Spanish that has given birth to Spanglish among Latino immigrants in the United States.62 Throughout our interview, Yanerys often ended her sentences with the
Japanese phrase “ne?” which is similar to “no es?” in Spanish, and translates to “right?” in
English. Although employers now ask for a bit more Japanese proficiency than they used to,
Yanerys was given her job back because she had worked for them for six years before.
Today’s Aikawa has a bit of everything: Dominicans, Peruvians, Brazilians, Bolivians,
Argentinians, Paraguayans, and of course, Japanese. With two Nikkei half-brothers and two
Dominican half-sisters living nearby, Yanerys is never too far away from family members who help her feel at home. She is also neighbored by other Dominican families in her apartment complex, which they jokingly refer to as “Chavo’s neighborhood” after a famous 1980s Mexican sitcom show. Aikawa’s Dominican community is most active during the summer, when they organize baseball games and cookouts by the rivers, continuing their favorite pastimes from the
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Dominican Republic. Curiously enough, Aikawa’s temperate weather and mountainous surroundings reminded me a lot of my visit to Constanza in the Dominican Republic. Though
Yanerys has raised her children to speak Spanish at home, she laments that there are some
Dominican parents who either choose not to, or do not have enough time to do the same.
More recently, it has become easier to find Dominican goods such as plantains and yucca in Japan, especially if these are items that the Brazilian majority also enjoys eating. Dominicans can now instantly stay up to date with current Bachata hits through iPhone applications, whereas before, they had to wait months for friends to travel between the countries with physical CD or
DVD copies. Yanerys says that she does not really enjoy watching Japanese television because she cannot understand what they are saying. Instead, she has an online subscription of
TeleImagen with which she watches programs from the U.S., the Dominican Republic, and
Mexico. She notes that these are advantages they just did not have before, and says:
I remember back in the day, when I first got here, communication was very
difficult. You had to go very far to find a telephone booth just to call home. One
short direct call could cost you $50! Can you imagine that? But no, not anymore,
we can’t complain. Everything was harder when we first got here, and supposedly
the Dominicans who were here before me went through even more hardship.63
Yanerys has also seen the composition of her community and friends change. As Dominicans left
Aikawa, Yanerys befriended more Brazilians and Peruvians with whom she shares several similarities, though they each have their own country-specific customs. She has taught some of them how to make Dominican sancocho, and has likewise learned how to prepare Peruvian ceviche and papa a la huancaína. Their biggest commonality is in the fact that the Japanese see them all as gaijin, or foreigners, regardless of whether or not they are Nikkei.
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Though she claims to be 100% Dominican, Yanerys says that she would feel like something was missing from her life if she stopped, for example, eating Japanese food. Yanerys feels that she has unintentionally become somewhat Japanese by getting too used to life there.
She feels most Dominican while in the Dominican Republic, but says that she will proudly defend and represent her homeland wherever she goes. Although she had often traveled to the
Dominican Republic before, going halfway across the world with children nowadays is too expensive for her. Her last visit to the Dominican Republic was 9 years ago.
Many Nikkei Latinos immigrated to Japan without any intention of returning to a country offering few opportunities for securing a future for themselves.64 For example, many Peruvians left their country during the 1990s and settled in the United States and Europe.65 Dominican outward emigration was similar, but many Nikkei Dominicans, especially those who lacked any strong ties to their Nikkei identities, simply went to Japan because it happened to be their most legally viable option. In contrast to other Nikkei, very few Nikkei Dominicans had any intention of staying in Japan for the long term. Meanwhile, high intermarriage rates in the Dominican
Republic meant that Nikkei Dominicans actually had many non-Nikkei relatives who were immigrating to cities such as Madrid and New York. Those communities have grown while incentives to remain in Japan disappear by the day. If they no longer wanted to stay in Japan, but did not want to return to the Dominican Republic, many Nikkei Dominicans found themselves being pulled to other parts of the Dominican diaspora by spouses, siblings, or cousins.
Many Dominicans have come and gone from Aikawa over the last two decades. Yanerys’ sister moved to New York City after marrying a Dominican-American, and she complains about not liking it there. Yanerys has noticed that those who have gone off to New York from Japan dislike it, and that similarly, those who come to Japan from New York do not like it there either.
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In other words, it has been difficult for Nikkei Dominicans to undergo significant adjustments to new environments after having done it once before.
Yanerys has also considered moving to New York, though she worries about the language barrier and does not know how she would manage staying there for longer than her 6- month visa permits. Even if she wanted to, she doubts that she can stay in Japan long term since factories will be less willing to employ her as she gets older. “Things here are killer. It’s quiet and peaceful here, the whole country is, I’ll give them that. But living under the same routine day in and day out gets to you.” Yanerys thinks that her children would have more opportunities in
New York, and she would also enjoy living closer to the Dominican Republic. When I asked her about when she expected to make the big move, she responded, “Yo voy con lo que me toca. I just go with the flow. I’ll leave Japan when I feel like it’s my time to go. Or maybe I just won’t leave. I don’t plan things, I just let them happen.” Meanwhile, other Nikkei Dominicans who arrived in Japan during the 1990s made this decision long ago. They have either committed themselves to permanent resettlement, returned to the Dominican Republic, or moved on to other countries.
Conclusion
Nikkei Dominicans in Japan have experienced varying levels of integration within
Japanese society. Nikkei returnee acculturation processes in Japan revolve around a constant
Othering by the dominant majority that still expects, and at times demands, that they “behave
Japanese.” Their unequivocal subordinate role as foreigners, and the employment this social construct limits them to, have led Nikkei Dominicans to find community and solidarity with other migrant workers in Japan. More significantly, Nikkei Dominicans have created a
135 community of their own in Kanagawa prefecture that has allowed them to continue living as
Dominicans with minimal contact with others.
As is evident in Yanerys’ story, media and technology have made it increasingly possible for Dominicans to maintain ties with the people and culture of their homelands, and also live separated from others within their host country. Yet, physical contact with other Dominicans is also important, and as Japan’s Dominican community shrinks, it has become increasingly necessary for those who stay to integrate themselves into larger groups. Similar status and cultures have led Dominicans to strengthen relationships with other Nikkei. Looking forward, we explore where Nikkei Dominicans have migrated to from la mata, Hoshikawa’s term for Aikawa as the origin of all Nikkei Dominican mixing with other Nikkei.
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Figure 1 Maria Hoshikawa at the Dominican Embassy in Tokyo, Japan. Photo taken in January of 2016.
Figure 2 Nikkei population levels in the mid-1990s, by host country. (Retrieved from The Japanese in Latin America)
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Figure 3 Return migration to Japan from the five largest sending Latin American countries in 1997. (Retrieved from The International Nikkei Research Project)
Figure 4 The Santo Domingo Dominican restaurant on Tokyo’s Ginza Street. Though it has recently closed, the restaurant still catered for events as of January 2016.
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Figure 5 A Japanese television appearance by famous personality Michael Yuji Gordon.
Figure 6 Yanerys Sasaki poses for a picture in front of a Dominican flag in her living room. She celebrated her 21st anniversary in Japan a few weeks after this photo was taken.
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Figure 7 A still from Zona 809’s music video for “Al Reves – Que tu haces en Japon.” Zona 809 is a Dominican music group from Aikawa, and performs for Latino concerts throughout Japan.
Figure 8 Banners in front of Mi Brasil Mercado: Rio de Janeiro alongside Machu Picchu.
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1 “Terra entrevista con Juan Luis Guerra y su Bachata en Fukuoka.” Youtube. Accessed 13 Feburary 2016. 2 Masterson, The Japanese in Latin America 3 Ibid., 243 4 Charles Tetsuo Chugusa. Quem e’ Quem no tribunal da discriminacao [Who is who in the tribunal of discrimination]. In A Quebra dos Mitos: The dekasegi phenomenon through personal accounts] 5 Peguero, Immigration and Politics 6 Several. (“Dominican population in Florida grows, consul says.” Dominican Today 12 January 2009; Janey Fugate. “A new look in Little Santo Domingo: Miami’s Allapattah área gets a face-lift.” Miami Herald 3 August 2014.) 7 Several. (John Haffner, Tomas Casas, and Jean-Pierre Klett. Japan’s Open Future: An Agenda for Global Citizenship. Anthem Asia-Pacific Series, 2009; “Foreigners make up 1.5% of populace.” Japan Times 23 August 2013.) 8 Harumi Befu. "Hegemony of Homogeneity: An Anthropological Analysis of "Nihonjinron"." The Journal of Asian Studies, 2003: 276-278. 9 Michael Weiner Japan's Minorities: The Illusion of Homogeneity. London: Routledge, 1997. Print, 8 10 Sasaki, C. 2016. Interview with Omar Pineda. Aikawa-machi, Japan, 9 January. 11 Jennifer Robertson. “Blood Talks: Eugenic Modernity and the creation of new Japanese.” History and Anthropology 13, no.3 (2002). 12 Kwan Weng Kin. "Japan can't close door on immigrants." The Straits Times, 5 March 2015. 13 Robert Stuart Yoder. Deviance and Inequality in Japan: Japanese Youth and Foreign Migrants. Bristol, UK: Policy, 2011. Print,153 14 Several. (Hafu. Japan Foundation & Center for Asian American Media, 2011. Documentary; Peter Holley. “Japan’s half-black Miss Universe says discrimination gives her ‘extra motivation.” The Washington Post 13 May 2015.) 15 Japanese National Institute of Population and Social Security Research, 2006. 16 Yoder, Deviance and Inequality, 60 17 Japan Ministry of Foreign Affairs 2012 18 Sonia Ryang, and John Lie and John Lie. Diaspora Without Homeland: Being Korean in Japan. University of California Press, 2009. 19 Rhacel Salazar Parreñas. Parreñas, Rhacel Salazar. Illicit Flirtations: Labor, Migration, and Sex Trafficking in Tokyo. Standord University Press. 2011 20 Several. (Talia Ralph. "The world's 5 worst immigration policies." Global Post, 25 June 25 2012; Jonathan Soble. "Japan stands by immigration controls despite shrinking population." Financial Times 2 June 2014.) 21 Andrea Vasishth, A model minority: The Chinese Community in Japan in Japan’s Minorities 22 Overstay. Ann Kaneko and the UCLA Department of Film and Television, 2011. Documentary. 23 Japan Ministry of Justice: Immigration Control Office 24 Kitawake Meiji, Nihon no gaikokujin seisaku: seisaku ni kansuru gainen no kentou oyobi kuni. Chihou jichitai seisaku no kenshou. 25 Sour Strawberries. Tilman Konig and Daniel Kremers, 2008. Documentary. < http://www.cinemabstruso.de/strawberries/English.pdf >
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26 Overstay. Documentary. 27 “Japan’s foreign trainee program suffering from shocking lack of oversight.” Japan Times 12 August 2014. 28 Japan Ministry of Justice 29 Takeyuki Tsuda. Strangers in the Ethnic Homeland: Japanese Brazilian Return Migration in Transnational Perspective. New York: Columbia UP, 2003. 30 Human Rights Osaka. "Life as Dekkasseguis: The Brazilian Community in Japan." FOCUS, 2009. 31 Yamashita, Circle K Cycles 32 Joshua Hotaka Roth. Brokered Homeland: Japanese Brazilian Migrants from Japan. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 2002, 106 33 Ibid., 93 34 Eigo Murakami. "The Consequences of Policy Reform: Japanese Industrial Training Programs and Female Migrant Workers." Journal of International Economic Studies, 2007: 33-51. 35 Tomohiro Osaki. “Ban Lifted on ‘nikkei’ who got axes, airfare. But Japanese-Brazilians must have work contract before coming back.” Japan Times 15 October 2013. 36 Peguero, Immigration and Politics, 75 37 Dana Ott. Small Is Democratic: An Examination of State Size and Democratic Development. New York: Garland Pub., 2000, 128 38 “MLB DR History.” MLB Website.
58 “Los Dominicanos en el exterior.” El Nuevo Diario 12 January 2014. 59 “Immigration policy in Spain to affect thousands of Dominicans.” Dominican Today 1 July 2008. 60 Overstay. Documentary. 61 Masterson, The Japanese in Latin America, 239 62 Alberto Cañas Spanglish: The Third Way. Kanazawa, Japan: Hokuriku University 63 Yanerys Sasaki. 2016. Interview with Omar Pineda. Aikawa-machi, Japan. 9 January. 64 Hirabayashi, New Worlds, New Lives, 263 65 Masterson, The Japanese in Latin America
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Chapter 4 Voy Pa’lla: Long-Term
Overseas Resettlement and the
Next Generation of Nikkei Dominicans
“Mi familia se dispersó desde el inicio de nuestra inmigración a la Republica Dominicana. Al ver que en la actualidad está sucediendo la misma disgregación, me siento otra vez un poco triste y miserable. Muchas veces he pensado que si mi familia se hubiese quedado en el Japón nada de esto hubiese acontecido.” (Original)
「私の家族はドミニカ共和国に着いた途端に離れ離れになってしまいました。 今でもそのようなことが起こるのを見るたびに悲しみに打ちひしがれてしまい ます。時々、思うのですが、もし私達が日本を離れなかったら、家族がばらば らになったりはしなかったのかもしれないなどと思うことがあります。人生は 山あり谷ありと言いますが、私の山は高すぎ、谷は深すぎたように思えてなり ません。」
“My family has been dispersed since the moment we arrived in the Dominican Republic. Seeing the same sort of disintegration occur today, I once again feel sad and miserable. I often think about what could have been had my family stayed in Japan and none of this happened. They say that life is made up of mountains and valleys. My mountains were too high, and my valleys ran very deep.”
-Yoko Nishio in “Quando quiero hacer feliz a mis padres” from El Paraiso del Caribe. Nishio’s childhood friends are in Japan, and her siblings are currently in Brazil. Her daughter lives in Nagano, and one of her sons lives in New York City.
This chapter returns to the migratory narrative begun in chapter three. From Aikawa,
Nikkei Dominicans have once again diversified and branched out to new places, both near and far. Some have returned to the Dominican Republic, having failed to adjust to life in Japan.
Others have independently spread out to other Japanese cities in Nagano, Fukuoka, Fukui,
Kagoshima, and Saitama. Meanwhile, a third group has forward migrated to cities in the
Dominican diaspora, specifically to Miami, New York City, and Madrid. After relocating several
144 times throughout their lives, often struggling to define “home,” some have finally found where to put down roots. Nikkei Dominican permanent resettlements are based on an anchoring system through which they are pulled towards wherever their spouses and relatives live. How have
Nikkei Dominicans integrated themselves among Nikkei Brazilians or Americans? Born outside of the Dominican Republic, do their children still identify as Dominican, or has this identity been compromised? Here, we measure acculturation in terms of an individual’s spoken languages, education, and their responses to questions about how they identify. I conducted most of the fieldwork for this part of my thesis in the Nagoya area and in New York City’s Washington
Heights neighborhood.
The Kawazoes: From Constanza and Aikawa to Ogaki
I was put in contact with the Kawazoe siblings by their brother, Martin, who I met in
Constanza. Coincidentally, Martin happened to be a distant relative of a high school friend of mine. Josefina is a second generation Nikkei Dominican currently in her 50s. Her father immigrated to the Dominican Republic at a young age, and her mother was a native Dominican.
Josefina still remembers hearing her grandparents speak Japanese in their Kagoshima dialect, and learning standard Japanese herself during the weekends while growing up. As a child, she learned to associate Japaneseness with being soft-spoken and having a calm demeanor.
Josefina went to Japan for her first time in 1994. Like many other Nikkei Dominicans, she arrived in Kanagawa prefecture where her brothers had already been living for a couple of years. She says that “the Nikkei in the Dominican Republic always had their dreams about visiting Japan one day, and this was the perfect opportunity to do so.” As a 28-year-old, she believed that going to Japan would be an opportunity for her to reconsider what she wanted from life, and that it would also open doors to future prospects for her. After a year and a half in
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Kanagawa, Josefina returned to the Dominican Republic, separated from her husband, and then returned to Japan, this time bringing her two daughters with her. The second time around, she arrived in Nagano where one of her other brothers was living. Josefina says that things have always been this way: the Kawazoe siblings have always pulled one another to new places.
Josefina met her current husband, a Nikkei Brazilian, at a factory in Nagano, and together they moved to Ogaki in Gifu prefecture. They have been living there for the past 13 years (See
Figure 1). Josefina has a Dominican passport and holds permanent Japanese residency, but all in all, she says that she does not feel any deep connection to any particular country. Instead, she considers herself to be multicultural, and she is open to learning about different languages and cultures. Josefina loves learning Japanese kanji. She recently passed the N3 level Japanese competency exam, meaning that to a certain extent, she can communicate herself in Japanese that is used in everyday situations. Knowledge of the Japanese language has become increasingly important for her as she begins to transition out of factory work. She is also fluent in Portuguese, which she mastered through dating her husband to-be. She now finds herself speaking
Portuguese more than anything else, and I found that she has lost much of her Dominican accent when speaking Spanish. Instead, her Spanish now sounded more like a Brazilian person who had learned Spanish rather than the Spanish of a native speaker.
When asked about what makes her Dominican, Josefina responded, “Let’s see…For one,
I was born there. Lots of human warmth, and maybe a bit of scandal too.” Josefina has found, and been attracted by, many of those same qualities in her Brazilian husband. She enjoys working more with the Japanese than with foreigners, and most of her friends are also Japanese, but she notes that a lot of this is because she has been living among them for so long. Her
Japanese friends often tell her that she does not seem Dominican in comparison to others they
146 have met. Josefina says that, in contrast with other Dominicans, she is Japanese because of her punctuality and appreciation of self-reliance. Josefina’s daughters have lived nearly all of their lives in Japan. One of them lives in Fukuoka and already has a son of her own. Although
Josefina notes that there are many Japanese qualities she wants her grandson to have, there are some she would rather he avoid. She also never wants to see him under the sorts of expectations and pressures many Japanese parents place on their children.
In terms of her community involvement, Josefina is contracted by the municipality to help prepare children of Spanish speaking families (mostly Peruvian) for pre-school. She teaches them about the etiquettes that will be expected of them, which they perhaps might not have learned in their own countries or households. Josefina takes Japanese lessons for adults at this same center. Although the majority of her community’s minority members are either Chinese,
Korean, or Filipino, government agencies provide these services for any group that might need them, even if it is just for one person. The center also hosts events that attempt to bring these different groups together. Josefina mentioned to me that she was looking forward to an international food event in which participants teach others how to prepare a plate from their own countries.
Josefina says that she can no longer adjust to life in the Dominican Republic. She is also not willing to give up the safety and comfortable lifestyle she has found in Japan. She says:
Not everyone here has decided just yet because some of them are still young, but
my husband and I made our decision long ago. We always dreamed of owning our
own home, and so we bought this house. We don’t have that idea or fantasy to,
you know, go back one day. We’re going to live the rest of our lives in Japan.1
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She followed her husband to Ogaki because he found better work there. After seeing how many more opportunities the Nagoya region offered, Josefina convinced her brothers to move there with their own families.
Johnny Kawazoe arrived in Aikawa during the 1990s and currently lives in Ogaki with his Nikkei Dominican wife and three sons (See Figure 2). Josefina helped him and her other brothers find jobs through her network of Japanese friends. Johnny currently works at a butchery, and he notes that he and some relatives are the only Dominicans working there, or even living in the area. Today, his friends and family are dispersed throughout the Dominican Republic and the
United States, though he has some of his closest family members with him in Japan. One of his brothers lives in Nagano, and he has friends in Aikawa and in Yokohama. Recently, Johnny was buying groceries at a Brazilian market only to find out that the person attending to him in
Portuguese at the register was a childhood friend from Constanza. It was their first time seeing each another in over 10 years.
I met up with Johnny at his nephew Renji’s 1st birthday party, where I was taken aback by the diversity of guests. A Japanese family sat at one table, and another table had a Chinese family. Peruvians sat at another table, and Brazilians sat at the table across theirs. The Kawazoes and their Dominican families sat across two tables. In many ways, this event is representative of the Nagoya area’s transnational community, or community of “individuals or groups that are established within different national societies…and use networks to strengthen their solidarity beyond national borders.”2 They knew each other from either currently working or having worked together in the past. Although some Japanese were also present, it is important to note that they were also probably marginalized by Japanese society in some way, which is why they work in factories with foreigners. Johnny explains to me how they became friends:
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There are few of us foreigners here so we try to look out for each other. It doesn’t
matter that you’re Dominican and I’m Brazilian, I don’t care about any of that.
What matters is that we’re all foreigners. Look, this little girl right here is my
Chinese co-worker’s daughter…We’re few so we try to be united. It must be
different in the United states though, wow, there’s some of everything over there.
It’s not like that here.3
Johnny also told me that although he mostly speaks to his Chinese friend in Japanese, they joke around at work by teaching each other some of their native languages. In comparison to Aikawa,
Johnny says that he prefers life in Ogaki because Dominicans here, though much fewer in number, do not segregate themselves as much from other groups. Johnny thinks that this is a more appropriate place to raise his children, free from el tigueraje, or from being corrupted by potentially bad Dominican influences. Johnny visits friends in Aikawa from time to time whenever he feels homesick and wants to “let loose.”
The Kawazoes can now effectively navigate themselves around Japanese society, especially because of their command over the language. Johnny only has permanent residency, but his wife and children hold Japanese nationalities. In his daily life, including when at home,
Johnny finds himself speaking more Japanese than Spanish. He says that before he realized what was happening, his first born would only talk to him in Japanese. He is currently trying to do things differently with his younger son, and he says that knowledge of Spanish will “open another opportunity, another world for them that others don’t have.” Even if they do not speak the language, Johnny’s sons know that they are Dominican and will claim so with pride. His oldest son used to eat nothing but white rice and miso soup, but he has recently been making
149 more efforts to eat Dominican locrio and sancocho. He also now talks to Johnny about wanting to visit the Dominican Republic.
Johnny acknowledges that his experiences in Japan have indelibly changed him. He says that he only came to understand why his father was the way that he was after coming to Japan.
Whenever he visits the Dominican Republic and enters someone’s home, he finds himself having to run back to the doorway to put his shoes back on, forgetting that he is not in Japan. Johnny says that things were not always as nice for Dominicans in Japan as they are today. They were only able to purchase their own cars and homes after years of non-stop strenuous work. Johnny also showed me a group chat that he and other parents had for their children’s little league baseball team, commending the Japanese’s attention to detail and organization. The other parent’s joke around about his son’s baseball talent, saying “He’s Japanese and Dominican, that’s not even fair!” Despite coexisting with them for over 20 years and generally feeling welcomed by them, Johnny still finds himself in situations where he is made to feel different. He has encountered Japanese who are racist, but he has also befriended many others, and he points out that racism exists anywhere, even in the United States. Johnny has learned to always be wary of others’ intentions and enters any situation prepared for the worst. He has found Japan’s younger generations to be much more accepting of foreigners, however. In terms of media items he consumes while in Japan, Johnny says that “we can be as Dominican as we want to be, sure, but we also need to watch Japanese television to know about what’s happening here.”
Johnny and his wife have still not decided where to live long term because of their children. Johnny says, “If it was up to me, I would go back right now. I can’t just think about myself though; I need to think about them too. They say that they’re Dominican because I tell them that they are, but the truth is that they’re more Japanese than anything else. So I have to
150 admit that it’s better for them here, and I can’t leave them until they’re older.” Johnny admits that he has also become too accustomed to Japan and that it will be hard for him to sacrifice life there for an unsure future in his country.
I then met a third couple, Johnny’s cousin, Emilio Montes de Oka from Constanza, and his wife, Diana Tanaka, a Nikkei from Cali, Colombia (See Figure 3). They both originally came to Japan as temporary dekasegi workers, and later met through their workplace in Nagoya in the early 2000s. For the past 10 years, Emilio and Diana have been raising their two daughters and adamantly teaching them Spanish. Ogaki’s Dominicans have a heightened sense of their foreigner status because of their small numbers. They are not only minorities within Japan’s foreign migrant community, but also among Latinos, and even among Spanish-speakers. Nikkei
Brazilians make up the majority (80%), and they are followed by Nikkei Peruvians who generally dominate Hispanic culture in Japan. Diana has met few other Colombians while in
Japan and says that in the 15 years that she has been there, she has learned more Portuguese than any other language. Translation services for Nikkei at hospitals and at parent-teacher conferences are provided first and foremost for Portuguese language speakers.
Emilio says that his heart and mind are in the Dominican Republic, and that his dream is to start a business there someday. He says that “the dream is always to return to your country, your food, and your people. This is just temporary. Japan is just a necessary stepping stone for us to do better things.” As is often the case in these narratives, Emilio’s life was absorbed by the factories, and it became harder for him and his wife to leave once his children were getting older.
He does have some reservations about going back though. Emilio worries about the sorts of futures his daughters would have in the Dominican Republic if delinquency and a lack of respect
151 for the law persist there. Diana says that she wants to be closer to her family in Colombia, but that that she is willing to move to the Dominican Republic, if necessary.
Lastly, I also met a younger couple from Constanza, Kenichi Takayoshi and Angela
Cepeda (See Figure 4). Kenichi came to Japan alone in 2007 when he was 19 years old, but requested to bring Angela over with him a few years after. He works alongside Johnny at the butchery, and Angela works on a car assembly line. Kenichi says that adjusting was not as difficult for him because he had a sort of sense of what Japan would be like growing up. Angela, who is not Nikkei, says that the shock only really set in for her about two months in: “It was hard at first because we’re so used to having constant noise over there, but you don’t hear anything at all here. It made me anxious.”
Kenichi has two passports: Japanese and Dominican. One of his sisters lives in Long
Island, New York and an aunt of his lives in New Jersey. They each actually have three passports because they have naturalized themselves as U.S. citizens. Kenichi says that he feels most
Japanese when in the Dominican Republic, where his nickname growing up was “Samurai.”
Kenichi’s grandmother spoke very little Spanish, and so he often overheard Japanese conversations between her and his father. He also attended Japanese school and regularly participated in Japanese cultural events. When asked about how he identifies, he responded:
I’m Dominican, 100%. I say that because a strong racism exists here. For
example, I’m technically Japanese because that’s the ID I carry with me wherever
I go. But if you asked a Japanese person if I was also Japanese, they’d say “No,
he’s just a descendant, but he’s not Japanese.” Also, if you don’t speak the
language very well, they automatically downgrade you. That’s why I say that I’m
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Dominican, no matter where I go, I’m Dominican. I may look Japanese but I’m
proud of being Dominican.4
Angela often feels stared at and marginalized as a foreigner in Japan. Although her co-workers at the factory are usually mingled with one another, foreigners and Japanese are separated into two different lines whenever a supervisor visits. That being said, Angela has fallen in love with
Japanese culture, especially with food items such as sashimi, sukiyaki, and karee.
Angela and Kenichi also comment that the Japanese group all foreigners under one category. They sense that the Japanese’s demeanors change whenever a foreigner enters the room, especially if a foreigner-committed crime has been recently broadcasted on the news. In this way, they feel burdened with having to represent all foreigners in their everyday actions with the Japanese. Their common marginalization by the Japanese majority thus brings them together both within and outside of the workplace. Kenichi says, “Look around, this is the most Latino we will be here in Japan, when we all get together for parties like this.”
In comparison to the other couples I have presented, Kenichi and Angela have more flexibility in terms of where they can live because they are still young and have not had children yet. Angela says that she would be fine with living in Japan if her family could come live there with her. Kenichi says that he wants to move to New York in the next couple of years, “We earn and live well here, we have everything we need and everything we want, but things are very closed off here. The U.S. is more open minded.” Angela agrees and says, “Our families are in the
Dominican Republic and in New York, but we’re all alone here, really.”
Luis Sasaki in Tokyo: Dominican Cultural Diffusion through Bachata and Merengue
I met up with Luis Sasaki at a dance studio in Shinjuku where he has not only been teaching the Japanese how to dance Bachata and Merengue, but also how to move, act, and think
153 like Dominicans (See Figure 5). Raised by a Dominican mother in Vicente Nobles, Luis had minimal contact with his father’s Japanese side of the family after his death, and it was not until he went to Japan that he even met other Nikkei Dominicans. Luis says that he had always felt different from other Dominicans growing up, and that arriving in Japan felt like coming home for him:
On the train ride from Narita airport, I looked out the window at everything that
was passing us by, and I thought to myself, “I don’t feel like a foreigner, I’ve
been here before.” I was coming to this modern country after having practically
lived my entire life in a small rural village, but it all felt normal to me.5
Luis was 19 years old when he first arrived in Japan, and he had initially only planned to stay there for just a few years. After working a couple of part-time jobs in Tokyo’s restaurants, he moved to Kagoshima where he worked at a factory with other Nikkei Dominicans. Over the next
5 years, he moved around switching between jobs, never really ever that far away from other
Dominicans. Looking for a pastime, Luis started taking dance lessons and ended up enjoying them much more than he expected. One day, his instructor told him that he should consider pursuing a career in dance. In 2000, a 25-year-old Luis took a leap of faith by leaving Japan’s factories behind to pursue dance in New York City.
Luis then moved in with his half-sister in the Bronx and commuted to a dance school in
Manhattan daily where he learned ballet, jazz, and hip hop. After six months, he had to leave
New York because his visa had expired, but Luis did not return to the Dominican Republic, or to
Japan. Instead, he made plans to resettle permanently in Madrid where another of his sisters lived. In comparison to his life in Japan, he felt like there were more opportunities for him in
Spain:
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I saw other Latinos who had become famous on TV there. But that doesn’t really
happen for us in Japan. The system [in Japan] is based on age, so it’s even
difficult for Japanese people themselves to move up the ranks in their own
country. Japan is hard on its own people, so it’s nearly impossible to get ahead as
a foreigner.6
It was a smooth transition for Luis in Spain, but he eventually returned to Japan for two reasons: it was hard to “make it” in Madrid with so many other Latino immigrants there trying to do just that, and he also unexpectedly began to miss Japan. However, rather than return to Japan’s factories, Luis used his new skills to become a dance instructor at a local gym. His classes were a huge success, and he was quickly able to work as an instructor full-time and start networking.
In 2010, Luis and Alex Toguchi, a Nikkei Brazilian entrepreneur, converted an office space across the street from Kabukicho’s famous Koma Gekijo theatre into a bar-disco called
Fiesta, or party. Fiesta has allowed Luis to focus on teaching the dances that come most naturally to him: Dominican Bachata and Merengue. Although he learned both at a young age,
Luis says that he only came to truly understand them after teaching them to the Japanese. Today, he has students from all age groups, though they tend to be older Japanese women. Many of them have dedicated themselves to learning for several years and can now dance like naturals.
Over the years, Luis has become well known not just by the Dominican community, but also among other Latin American groups. In 2013, Luis helped lead Sancha Matsuri, an annual
Latino carnival/parade in Tokyo, through streets lined with Japanese spectators.7 Tokyo’s
Association for Nikkei Women from Latin America and the Caribbean hosts a yearly Latin
American Bazaar.8 This past year’s representative country was the Dominican Republic, and so
Luis was unanimously chosen to produce its El Caribe show. Newspapers for Japan’s Spanish-
155 speaking community have celebrated him as a pioneer for Bachata and Merengue in Japan.9 He has made appearances on Dominican television networks as well.10 Luis Sasaki’s success in the
Latin entertainment industry as someone who started out as a dekasegi worker is due to his own efforts and sacrifices. He has also inspired others to follow in his footsteps, including Ryuichi
Kameda, a Nikkei Dominican from El Cibao, who currently teaches Bachata in Tokyo.11
The Dominican Embassy in Tokyo has recognized Sasaki on several occasions for his contributions in advancing Dominican culture in Japan. Luis claims that anyone can dance
Bachata, and do it well, if they have sufficient knowledge of its underlying culture and people.
He uses his dance room to teach his students about Dominican culture in both direct and indirect ways. Although his lessons are mostly in Japanese, he also often intermingles some instructions in Spanish, which has piqued their interest in the language. The women have even begun using
Dominican slangs such as dique for “supposedly” and coño for “darn.” Luis also regularly hosts dinners at his apartment to introduce them to Dominican dishes. Each Spring, he takes a group of students on a tour of the Dominican Republic, which includes a stop in his hometown of Vicente
Noble where they can put their dance skills to the test with locals. Dominicans look on in disbelief and stand in line for a chance to dance with las Japonesas.
According to Leo Frobenius, cultural diffusion is “the spread of cultural items—such as ideas, styles, religions, technologies, languages, etc.—between individuals, whether within a single culture or from one culture to another.”12 Orchestra de la Luz was an all-Japanese member salsa performance group that formed in 1984. They rose to international fame in 1990 with the release of their U.S. debut album De la Cruz (Salsa Caliente del Japon), and also toured throughout many Latin American countries. What is most surprising about them is that Spanish
156 was not the native language of any of its members. Though they dissolved in 1997, they left behind contributions to salsa as a more global musical movement.13
Bachata and Merengue have helped transmit Dominican culture to the Japanese. There are also even some Peruvian Bachateros in Tokyo. Luis’ dance students often perform for the
Dominican embassy in Japan, and they even go as far as dressing up in traditional Dominican wear (See Figure 6). These women are evidence that cultural diffusion and Nikkei Dominican acculturations have also affected the dominant Japanese majority. Especially in an international city such as Tokyo, some Japanese often seek temporary escape from Japanese society through interactions with “fun and open-minded” foreigners. However, for Luis’ students, immersing themselves in the Dominican culture has, according to them, had more to do with them wanting to see how the world, and life outside of Japan, actually are.
Luis has similarly acculturated to some aspects of Japan. Luis is proud of his Dominican roots, but he also admits that he is not the conventional dominicano. He had always felt different, but this sentiment has deepened for him after having lived in Japan for so many years. “I’ve picked up some Japanese mannerisms here and there. I’m more punctual and majime, or serious,” he says. Yet, as happens with many Nikkei in Japan, Luis feels a heightened sense of being Dominican when he is furthest away from his country. Much of this has been attributed to a performative reaction from the Nikkei when they are doubted or denied their Japanese identities by the dominant majority.14 Once placed into the foreigner category, these minority groups have not only had to define themselves in terms of their differences and similarities with the Japanese, but also with other foreigners many of them had never even been exposed to before coming to Japan.
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My interview with Luis revealed that he had not really felt like others in the Dominican
Republic growing up, and that he finally felt like he belonged somewhere when he arrived in
Japan. Being denied his Japanese identity could have been an extremely disorienting experience for him. Luis and many other Nikkei Dominicans I met during my fieldwork, especially if they were of the younger generation and/or living abroad, seemed to be potential “third culture individuals.” These are people who have not had the opportunity to sufficiently develop their personal and cultural identities because they have constantly moved between countries. TCI populations are on the rise with increases in globalization and transnational migration.15
Luis has created homes in both countries, but says that he hopes to retire in the
Dominican Republic where he would probably be more comfortable in his old age. He notes that
Japan can be a very lonely and isolating country. That being said, he plans to visit Japan regularly, and says that he would feel like something was missing any otherwise.
Mistuhisa Nishio: Sushi Mambo and U.S. Asian Latinos
Sushi Mambo is a bar restaurant located in Washington Heights, a neighborhood in the northern region of Manhattan Island. In its décor, ambience, and menu, Sushi Mambo specializes in Japanese-Dominican fusions, placing sweet plantains on top of sushi rolls and serving eccentric dishes such as Dominican Yakisoba. Although it sees customers from all over New
York City, most of its patrons are actually Dominican residents looking to try something new, yet with a familiar twist. It is only fitting that Sushi Mambo’s head chef is none other than someone who has origins in both of these worlds: Nikkei Dominican U.S. immigrant Mitsuhisa
Nishio, or as he is referred to by his friends, El Ninja (See Figure 7).
Mitsuhisa Nishio is a second generation Nikkei Dominican born in Constanza to Yoko
Nishio, another one of my interviewees (See Figure 8). He recalls that the only time he was
158 made to feel a bit different growing up was in elementary school where his Dominican peers would laugh at roll call when his Japanese name was called out. When he was 18 years old, an uncle of his from Brazil helped him find work in Japan. Back in the 1990s, and even today, it was common for people to emigrate from the Dominican Republic looking to better themselves economically. Many decided to move to the U.S. in pursuit of the “American dream.” Between the 1980s and 1990s, New York City’s Washington Heights neighborhood became a predominantly Dominican community. Michu had two choices: either emigrate to Japan or to the
United States. He ultimately chose Japan because his mother was afraid of New York City’s high crime rates since it was notoriously known as “the U.S. murder capital” back then.16 After four years in Japan, Michu returned to the Dominican Republic and started working for the Japanese embassy as a project coordinator in San Francisco de Marcoris. There, he met his Dominican wife.
Michu then returned to Japan with his wife, arriving in Aikawa where they lived for three years. He was actually there at the same time as many of my other interviewees, including
Yanerys and Luis. Although he grew up speaking Japanese with his parents, Michu never had reason to read or write it. Of his time in Japan, he recalls:
They still considered us strange, even though we were Japanese, because we don’t
have the same customs, and we speak different languages. I still didn’t know how
to read kanji when I got there, so I would ask them what things meant and they
would just reply, “Well don’t you know Japanese? Why don’t you read it?” I told
them that I didn’t know, that I wasn’t from there, but they would just look at me
like I was dumb…It’s a very monotonous life for us over there. A lot of work, and
nothing else. Nothing to sort of free your mind, absolutely nothing.17
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Michu’s first son, Toshi, was born in Japan during this period (See Figure 9). Michu and his wife ultimately decided to leave Aikawa because they missed their families, and she also could not adjust to life there. By that point, his wife’s relatives had already immigrated to the United States and were living in Washington Heights. In 2002, Michu and his wife relocated to New York City in a compromise between seeking a better standard of living than in the Dominican Republic, and being in a more familiar Dominican environment. They could also now be closer to their families. In this way, the New York City area has been a perfect cultural and economic space for
Michu and other Nikkei Dominicans who have left Aikawa.
As in Michu’s story, as well as those of others mentioned in this chapter, we continue to see a pattern of Nikkei Dominican movement to cities of the Dominican diaspora through pulls from relatives already living there. These sorts of anchoring associations are what make moving to places such as New York City and Madrid not only more imaginable, but also more feasible.
Furthermore, high intermarriage rates in the Dominican Republic’s Nikkei community, from its inception until today, increases the likelihood that Nikkei Dominicans actually have this
“anchor,” be it a spouse, sibling, cousin, etc. This has made migrations such as that of Michu and his family to New York from Aikawa all the more possible.
Michu learned much of what he knows about Japanese cuisine by cooking meals his mom taught him for his friends growing up. When he first arrived in New York, a friend of his found him a job working at a Japanese sushi bar in Long Island. The daily commutes there from
Washington Heights were too long, and so he was always looking for other similar offers. In
2003, Michu was presented with an opportunity to create the menu for an Asian Latin bar, and though its location and name have changed over the years, he has been helping shape Sushi
Mambo ever since.
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In recent decades, no other country has sent more immigrants to New York City than the
Dominican Republic.18 According to a 2013 census, 747,473 Dominicans were living throughout
New York City’s five boroughs, and more Dominicans were living in NYC than in any city in the world other than Santo Domingo, the Dominican Republic’s capital.19 New York’s
Washington Heights neighborhood has even been termed “Little Dominican Republic” and
“Quisqueya Heights,” Quisqueya meaning Hispaniola in the native Taino language. Bodegas and other small Dominican-run businesses make it so that residents of Washington Heights can easily live their entire lives with limited interactions with other ethnic groups.20 There have been so many Dominican citizens in New York City that Dominican presidential candidates have also begun running campaigns in New York City.21
When asked about how he identifies, Michu explained that although he considers himself
Dominican, he still feels very Japanese in certain situations. He says that “There’s really nothing
I can change about by appearance; I look more Japanese because I don’t have a typical
Dominican face. But on the inside, I am more Dominican than I am Japanese.” Characteristics that make him Japanese are his punctuality and sense of responsibility, while he is most
Dominican in his constant drive and hunger to get ahead. Michu also says that unlike the
Japanese, he has never been shy about approaching women he finds attractive. He and his wife now have three children, two of which were born in the United States. Michu says that his children generally identify as Dominicans because they live in New York City where they are constantly surrounded by other Dominicans. “They are probably just Americans elsewhere,” he says. Michu has also made sure to teach them about their Nikkei roots so that they are aware of all aspects of their identities (See Figures 10 and 11).
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Michu and his children are part of an increasing trend of mixed raced Asian-Latinos in the United States. About six months ago, the City University of New York’s Asian/Asian
American Research Institute released a video report on Asian Latinos currently living in the
United States.22 In it, we hear the story of a Korean-Dominican whose parents immigrated from
S. Korea to the United States, and then re-migrated to the Dominican Republic, where he was raised. We are also introduced to others like him currently living in New York City, a place defined by its strong immigration history. One of their largest shared experiences, and complaints, is in being automatically called Chino, or Chinese, by other Latinos, regardless of what their Asian backgrounds actually are. Michu says that “it just depends on how they say it to you. Sometimes it can be offensive, but you don’t necessarily have to take it that way. There are times when they do say it trying to offend you though.”
A recent census reports that Asian Latinos now make up over half a million of the U.S. population and are concentrated in Texas, California, and New York.23 New York in particular is interesting to us because it coincides with the largest Dominican diasporic community, and it is within this complex intersection and narrative that we found Michu and his family. Michu arrived in the U.S. as an Asian Latino, but he also has a Nikkei Dominican friend who was born in the U.S. and whose Japanese mother and Dominican father met after immigrating to New
York City independently. Although they share several similarities, Michu notes that his friend is a bit more “Americanized” and that he “does not even speak Spanish.” Of note, some of the
Nikkei descendants from Choko Waki’s extended family in Honduras currently live in Los
Angeles, California. Los Angeles happens to be a target destination of the Honduran diaspora, and also coincides with one of the three highest state-based concentrations of Asian Latinos.
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Michu remains physically connected to the Dominican Republic through his mother and some childhood friends who still live there. He usually visits his mother, Yoko, alone, and his wife and children travel there separately every couple of years. Some of his Dominican relatives also visit him in New York. Michu says that he likes Washington Heights, and that he thinks he will end up staying there for the rest of his life:
Look, Japan is very pretty and quiet, but I don’t like it as a place to live in. Why?
Because I feel imprisoned over there. Meanwhile here in New York, we speak
nothing but Spanish and can eat our rice and beans whenever we like. So I feel
like I’m in Santo Domingo when I’m here, but with a bit more order. Yes,
because I think that there aren’t enough rules in Santo Domingo.24
While New York may just be an extension of their Dominican lifestyles for Michu and his wife, it can have many more implications for their children, whose different education, language, and identity introduce yet a new variation to the Nikkei Dominican experience.
Cleo Sasaki: Identity Within the “Transnational Generation”
Nikkei Dominicans are now living and raising families abroad. As was the case with the
Dominicanization of the second generation in the Dominican Republic, third and fourth generation Nikkei Dominicans are being exposed to new influences in other countries. This could potentially lead to the erosion of their Nikkei Dominican identities. On the other hand, contact with a third culture may just mean the development of a second hyphen, creating Nikkei-
Dominican-Americans, Spaniards, and even paradoxically, Japanese.
Yanerys’ daughter, Cleo Sasaki, was born in Madrid and brought to the Dominican
Republic when she was 10 months old (See Figure 12). She then went to Japan with her mother when she was 5 years old. Now 22 years old, she has lived nearly all of her life in Aikawa. When
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I asked her for an interview, she shyly said that she was not sure about how much she would be able to help me with considering that she had not grown up in the Dominican Republic. After seeing how she carried herself, and hearing her speak Spanish with a typical Dominican accent, it was hard to believe that she had only been in the Dominican Republic for fewer than 4 months within the past 17 years. Though she has spent most of her life in Japan, Cleo says that she has never really felt any inclination to get a Japanese passport, and that she instead plans on applying for Spanish nationality. Cleo refers to other Dominicans as “us” and to the Japanese as
“foreigners.” She has little notion of belonging with them, or even in this country:
Among the Japanese? I don’t really feel like I’m among my people when I’m with
them. For one, I don’t look too Japanese and for another, yes, I admit that I think
a bit like them, but not too much. They live under strict definitions. If something
is black, it’s black. If it’s white, it’s white. They think like that with everything.
They also lead too stressful lives. They’re too katai, stiff. I’m not like that at all.25
Cleo also says that for her, Aikawa feels just like a small Dominican village: “We go out more during the summer, not too much in the winter, but yes, in the summer we feel like we’re at home.” In other words, for Cleo and many other of its residents, Aikawa is merely a recreation of their previous, or imagined, lives in the Dominican Republic.
Schooling plays an important role in identity formation for children of immigrant parents who often work long hours. Migrant parents ultimately control how much of their roots to project onto their children while living transnationally, but if the parent knows nothing other than their own country’s language and culture, the child will have no choice but to navigate two different worlds within the home and at school. Some of Japan’s minority groups, particularly larger groups such as Koreans and Brazilians, have been able to establish school systems of their own.
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At Hiro Gakuen in Ogaki, a Brazilian Junior and Senior High School co-founded by the Japanese and Brazilian governments, students are taught core courses such as Math and Science in
Portuguese.26 Immigrant parents expecting to someday return to their country send their children to these schools in the hopes that this will make those future transitions back home easier.
Most of Japan’s minority children end up attending public Japanese schools, which are free of cost. This is especially the case for groups that are not able to establish school systems specific to their children’s needs because of their small sizes and dispersion throughout the country. Older students struggle the most because they are assigned class years by their age, even if they do not understand the level of Japanese that is spoken there.27 Bullying in Japan is more severe than in any other society in terms of its frequency, cruelty, and insidiousness.28 Foreign and mixed-raced children, most of which are automatically recognized as different because of their appearances, become easy targets for bullying. Many drop out early. Compulsory education in Japan does not apply to foreign children, and so, for example in 1999, only 7,500 out of a total of 40,000 Brazilian children under fifteen were registered at Japanese public schools.29
Especially as families prolong their stays, many of these same children end up working as dekasegi alongside their parents in the factories, continuing the cycle of Nikkei marginalization in Japan.
Local governments with high foreigner populations have responded to the needs of these communities by implementing several measures. For example, they have made translation services more easily accessible, and have also translated their neighborhood announcements and notices into several languages (See Figure 13).30 Bilingual television programs such as Tudo
Bem inform their viewers of their locality’s updated rules and regulations in Portuguese. Funds are also allocated for Japanese language reinforcement classes for foreign children in the public
165 schools.31 Though they stay together with their Japanese classmates for music, art, and physical education, foreign students are separated for more rigorous subjects such as language arts, math, and social studies.32 This essentially puts their academic learning on hold until they have managed to catch-up, which is often impossible as the Japanese students only continue to simultaneously move quickly ahead in their studies. Most of their teachers are also not adequately trained in cross-cultural communication or second-language acquisition.33
Growing up, Cleo attended Aikawa’s public schools with Japanese students and other foreigners. She and her foreign classmates were kept separated from their Japanese peers for the entirety of their education because of the Japanese language reinforcement classes. Cleo says that she was often bullied by classmates who called her “broccoli” because of her curly hair, and who would also throw her notebooks and supplies out into the garbage bin. Her offenders were not only Japanese children, but also other Nikkei from Brazil and Peru who evaded these taunts because they appeared more phenotypically Japanese. Cleo felt even more ostracized because the foreign children were not her friends either. She says that over time, these students grew ashamed of their Latino identities, and had convinced themselves and others that they were
Japanese. One day, her Japanese teacher even asked her, “What do you do? You go home and speak Spanish, and then you come to school and speak Japanese, how do you do that? Do you change brains, or what?” Despite the challenges she faced, Cleo says that, all in all, she enjoyed her Japanese education. After finishing high school, she moved to Tokyo where she worked for a year before returning to Aikawa. She currently works at a factory, though she was quickly promoted from the assembly line to office work because of her Japanese fluency. Meanwhile,
Cleo’s sister looks like she will have to do an extra year of high school because she has missed too many classes. Her brother has already dropped out and is now working at a factory.
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Although she identifies more as Dominican than Japanese, Cleo admits that she also possesses some Japanese-like traits. She explains it to me using the following analogy: During women’s volleyball competitions between Japan and the Dominican Republic, Cleo roots for the
Dominican team until they start losing, at which point she will instead start rooting for the
Japanese team. She says that like the Japanese, she also pays things a lot of mind and easily holds grudges. Cleo also feels a bit different from other Dominicans in Aikawa. She had thought that this was just with them, but then confirmed that she was different from Dominicans in general after visiting the Dominican Republic. “Dominicans can be a bit too carefree, and maybe too direct and confrontational in comparison to the Japanese,” she says. Cleo considers herself
Dominican in that she is not embarrassed to display physical affection towards family and friends. She enjoys music entertainment from all over the world: Latin Pop, Bachata, Japanese
Pop, and music from the United States. Most of her friends are, like her, Nikkei Dominican, but she does have a few Japanese friends from high school. In terms of living in a Japanese society, she is frustrated most by their seniority system in which experience outweighs talent. Cleo hopes to emigrate elsewhere in the future, though she expects to visit Japan often. She says:
I think that I can live anywhere, as long as I’m surrounded by other Latinos.
Surrounded by people who like the same music as me, people who share the same
passions as me, people who go to parties to dance, not just to complain about their
problems [like the Japanese.]34
An increasing loss of the mother tongue is a trend for both Aikawa’s younger generation, and children of foreign migrant workers in Japan. Especially among children younger than ten, many become so assimilated that they refuse to study it, or even use it in conversations at home.35 Dominican parents have generally not been teaching their children Spanish unless they
167 are “really Dominican.” Cleo speaks Spanish because her mother does not speak Japanese, and she often had to translate things between languages for her growing up. She can speak both languages equally well because she has taken it upon herself to maintain her Spanish by reading novels and watching online TV programs. Even then, many Japanese people she encounters in everyday situations will try to speak to her in English, even when she starts the conversation speaking very clear Japanese to them. Luckily, she has also been studying English, and so she follows along with them until they have to revert back to using Japanese. At the end of the conversations, the Japanese person will always say “Nihongo wa umai desu ne” to her, meaning
“Your Japanese is great!” as if she was not already a native speaker. She comments, “I can’t imagine my life without Spanish.” Most of her childhood classmates now regret not having learned their parent’s native tongue. Her younger siblings were born in Japan and have put much less effort into learning Spanish. All three of them speak with one another almost exclusively in
Japanese. Other Nikkei Dominican children I met throughout Japan reflected a similar loss of the
Spanish language, though they did still have Dominican identities.
Johnny’s sons often bring their friends home to play video games, and nearly all of them are Japanese. His oldest son has grown up with the same group of friends since kindergarten, and he had not experienced much bullying for being Nikkei until entering middle school recently.
Students from other schools have already started asking him all sorts of offensive questions, and
Johnny says that he is glad that his son still has his Japanese friends from his elementary school there to defend him as one of their own. Johnny worries about high school though, and says that
“the bullying becomes much crueler there, and there are kids who commit suicide because of it.”
As much as Nikkei Dominican parents have reminded their children of their Dominican roots,
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Johnny admits that “They think in Japanese and translate their thoughts into Spanish. Regardless of how they look, they are more Japanese now than they are Dominican.”
After more than 25 years of migrant labor, the Japanese are growing more accustomed to foreigners, though they are not necessarily accepting of them. Tsuda argues that as these migrant families settle for the long term, their children are likely to fully assimilate into Japanese society.
This means that they will acquire a new ethnic status, abandoning the factories and leveling up in society.36 However, this sort of assimilation depends on several factors. For example, a Nikkei’s ability to “blend in” phenotypically depends on their country of origin. Brazilians have had much less intermarriage, and thus appear more Japanese than Nikkei Dominicans who can have much darker complexions in comparison. Yamashita writes that under pressures to pass as or even become mattaku, or completely, Japanese, many Nikkei have succumbed to psychological stresses by committing suicide. The future Nikkei assimilation that Tsuda alludes to would also depend just as much on whether Japanese society would allow it.
Even recently, influential Japanese figures such as Ayako Sono have highlighted current social problems relating to foreign groups as reasons for keeping them separated from mainstream Japan, promoting what seem like apartheid communities.37 Japan’s population is predicted to shrink from 127 to 100 million by 2050. Yet, Japanese officials outright dismiss any immigration proposals. Prime Minister Shinzo Abe says that “The U.S. is a country of immigrants who came from all around the world and formed [the United States.] We won’t adopt a policy like that.”38 Some have argued that Japan must first address and improve working conditions for women, those with disabilities, and foreign workers already in the country.39
Although the future of Nikkei groups in Japan remains ambiguous in many regards, it is clear
169 that the lives of those who remain will be just as influenced by interests from within their community, as those from the Japanese Other that surrounds them.
Members of the transnational generation of Nikkei Dominicans still have Dominican identities, regardless of where they live in the world. However, they differ in how they have come to terms with their inherited identities and those they have formed in their new countries.
They consequently identify as Dominican for different reasons. Nikkei Dominicans in Japan fall under the melting pot theory as “their descendants gradually let go of their birth culture’s inherent values and distinctive elements” in a society that values conformity above all else.40
They are Dominican in Japan because they are not accepted as anything else, especially not as
Japanese. In other words, a Dominican identity is more forced in Japan than it is chosen. Josefina says that, for the time being, she would rather her grandchildren stay and integrate themselves into Japanese society, and that she cannot even bear the thought of them living in the Dominican
Republic. However, she still wants them to know that they are Dominican and also learn
Spanish, saying that “Nowadays, we walk around with computers in our hands. We can learn languages through phone applications. Languages open doors, and you never know when they can come in handy, so I say the more the merrier.”
In comparison to their counterparts in Japan, Nikkei Dominicans in the United States have access to a much larger Dominican immigrant community. They consequently have more understanding of Dominican culture, be this through its food, people, or language. In contrast to melting pot theory, multiculturalism in New York City allows for the creation of Nikkei-
Dominican-American identities as immigrants “fuse their cultural heritage with that of the host country, creating a new culture.”42 Moreover, their parents have actively decided to live in a place that not only encourages a Dominican identity, but also works to cultivate and maintain it.
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Conclusion
Contemporary Nikkei Dominican migrations generally take one of two forms, and each asks that the individual access a separate part of their identity. As Nikkei descendants, they have returned to the ethnic homeland where an Othering by the dominant Japanese majority has led them to either identify more strongly as Dominicans, or adopt more ambiguous identities. Under a shared foreigner status, a number of them have also entered relationships with other Nikkei, learned their cultures and languages, and even sometimes relocated to their spouse’s home countries. As acculturated Dominicans, this community also migrates to parts of the Dominican diaspora, often through a Dominican relative or spouse who “anchors” them there. In both cases, permanent resettlement abroad comes about because they have already had children in these new countries, or perhaps because they have not had strong ties to the Dominican Republic.
Specifically in Josefina’s narrative, we see that lacking bonds with any one specific group allows some Nikkei Dominicans to easily situate and blend themselves within new environments. The first “transnational generation” of Nikkei Dominicans are only recently coming of age (around their early 20s). Their acculturation processes have differed depending on their country, and their parents may not have necessarily taught them about what it means to “be Dominican.” It will be up to them to discover this for themselves, and if they decide to do so, they can find many online resources (Dominican literature, film, history, music, art, etc.) that will immerse them within
Dominican culture in just a matter of seconds.
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Figure 1 Josephina Kawazoe and her husband. Photo taken in January of 2016 during her nephew’s birthday party in Nagoya, Japan.
Figure 2 Johnny Kawazoe with one of his nieces.
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Figure 3 Emilio Montes de Oka and Diana Tanaka with their two daughters.
Figure 4 Kenichi Takayoshi and his wife, Angela Cepeda.
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Figure 5 Luis Sasaki celebrating his birthday with his dance students in Tokyo, Japan. (Photo Courtesy of Luis Sasaki)
Figure 6 Luis Sasaki after a dance performance for the Dominican consulate in 2015. His students are wearing traditional dresses in the colors of the Dominican flag. (Photo Courtesy of Luis Sasaki)
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Figure 7 The author and Michu Nishio at Sushi Mambo in New York’s Washington Heights neighborhood. Photo taken in October of 2015.
Figure 8 Michu Nishio as an infant with his mother, Yoko Nishio, in Constanza in the early 1970s. (Photo Courtesy of Yoko Nishio)
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Figure 9 Michu Nishio’s wife and son, Toshi Nishio, in Aikawa in the mid-1990s. (Photo Courtesy of Michu Nishio)
Figure 10 Toshi Nishio with his younger sister wearing kimonos in the early 2000s. (Photo Courtesy of Michu Nishio)
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Figure 11 Toshi Nishio and his younger brother at Time Square in 2015. (Photo Courtesy of Michu Nishio)
Figure 12 Cleo Sasaki (center) celebrating the Dominican Indepence Day in Tokyo this past February of 2016. (Photo Courtesy of Cleo Sasaki)
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Figure 13 A sign at Aikawa’s Middle School indicating the emergency refuge site in Romanized Japanese, Japanese, Spanish, and Portuguese.
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1 Kawazoe, Josefina. 2016. Interview with Omar Pineda. Ogaki-shi, Japan. 17 January. 2 Riva Kastoryano. Kastoryano, Riva. "Settlement, Transnational Communities and Citizenship." Int Social Science J International Social Science Journal 52.165 (2000): 307-12. 3 Kawazoe, Johnny. 2016. Interview with Omar Pineda. Gifu-prefecture, Japan. 4 Takayoshi, K. & Cepeda, A. 2016. Interview with Omar Pineda. Gifu-prefecture, Japan. 17 January. 5 Sasaki, L. 2016. Interview with Omar Pineda. Tokyo, Japan. 8 January. 6 Sasaki, L. 2016. Interview with Omar Pineda. Tokyo, Japan. 8 January. 7 “Sancha Matsuri 2013 – Luis Sasaki Team” Youtube. Accessed 2 February 2016. 8 “Bazar Latinoamericano 2015: Bazar de Caridad.” Embajada de la Republica Dominicana en Japon. 9 “La fiesta en Shinjuku.” International Press Japon en Español 9 February 2010. 10 “El Poder de las 12 – Buscando.” Super Canal 33 13 March 2013.
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immigrants and the struggle for integration and identity in the Japanese homeland.” University of California, Davis Sociology Department Dissertation. 2010, 231, 85 33 Ibid., 87 34 Sasaki, C. 2016. Interview with Omar Pineda. Aikawa-machi, Japan. 9 January. 35 Hirabayashi, New Worlds, New Lives, 255 36 Tsuda, Strangers in the Ethnic Homeland, 388 37 Tomohiro Osaki. “Outrage grows over Sono ‘apartheid’ column.’” The Japan Times 20 February 2015. 38 Soble, Jonathan. "Japan stands by immigration controls despite shrinking population." Financial Times 2 June 2014. 39 Hagiwara, Risa. “Desirable Immigration Policy for Japan: Based on a survey of economic empirical analysis.” Japan Research Institute of Economy, Trade and Industry March 2014. 40 “Melting Pot.” Wikipedia. Accessed 31 March 2016.
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Afterword
Today, Nikkei Dominicans make up just a fraction of a percent of Japan’s diaspora. Some of their biggest struggles are in ensuring that their descendants not forget about their Japanese origins, and likewise, that they not be forgotten by the international Japanese community. Within the last decade, Nikkei Dominicans have ascended to global infamy following their lawsuit against the Japanese government. Just this past summer, they hosted COPANI 2015 and reaffirmed their place within the international Nikkei community. This coming summer, they will be celebrating the 60th anniversary of their first arrival in the Dominican Republic.
The Nikkei Dominican community has dispersed from their original colonies to large cities in the Dominican Republic, and to countries all over the world. Although I could not explore their stories in this study, I also found leads to Nikkei Dominicans in Quebec, Canada, and in Port-au-Prince, Haiti. A niece of one of my interviewees, Yoko Nishio, also lives in
Russia where she is a world-renowned ballerina. In conceptualizing diasporas, we must keep an open mind to the intersections that determine an individual’s migratory destinations. By limiting ourselves to only considering Japan-Host Country migrations in our study of Nikkei, we lose sight of many of the factors that actually determine migration in today’s globalized world.
As this study demonstrates with Nikkei Dominicans in Miami, New York City, and
Madrid, cities part of the Dominican diaspora, Nikkei have also adopted the migratory trends of their host countries. Though the United States seems to be the most likely place to find Latin
American Nikkei convergence, future scholarship should also look at Nikkei Peruvians in Spain, and Nikkei Brazilians in Portugal. How do Nikkei experiences in these countries differ from those in Japan? It would also be interesting to see how Nikkei group interactions with one another, which are exceptionally cooperative in Japan, may differ in other countries.
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The recent introduction of literature concerning Asian Latinos in the United States coincidentally aligned with the writing of this thesis. New York City in particular can present an interesting case study on the role that Nikkei Latinos play in the United States’ Asian Latino community. In fact, we have already seen evidence of additional Nikkei presence there through other fusion restaurants similar to Sushi Mambo in the tri-state area. At Aquario in Westchester
County, Nikkei Peruvian chef Eduardo Oshiro prepares dishes that are a diverse mix of his
Chinese, Japanese and Peruvian backgrounds. A number of Asian Latinos have also come to study at universities in the United States. Other hyphenated non-Latino Asian identities such as those of Jamaican-Chinese also warrant further attention.
Our study of Nikkei Dominicans reveals how globalization has evolved over time in relation to media and migration. As we look towards a more globalized future, we must also consider the implications that increased fluidity and movement of people have on identity. As was briefly mentioned in Chapter 4, constant movements have led to the emergence of “Third
Culture Individuals” who lack roots to any particular place. Although this might not be an immediate result of globalization, increased movements will still lead individuals to disassociate themselves from their native lands. A globalized future will also continue to make it so that geographical constraints are superseded by larger ideas of what it means to be part of a community, be this tied to a specific location, an entire nation, or even a diaspora on a global level.
As we have seen with Nikkei Dominicans, Nikkei migrations have led to generation shifts in what constitutes the “homeland” and the ease with which migrants have been able to maintain ties to it. This has been markedly paralleled by a propulsion of media that allows them to consume literature, music, film, etc. from their home country, despite living thousands of
183 miles away from it, or even being constantly on the move. Media has ultimately helped transnational communities, such as Washington heights in New York City and Aikawa in
Kanagawa Prefecture, remain sustainable over time.
I hope that what the readers will remember most about this study are the individual narratives of these migrants. In the context of the current international Nikkei Dominican
Community, we find its members occupying transnational communities in which they are extremely proud of being Dominican, but also proud of their Japanese ancestry. Globalization has made it easier for them to develop and maintain this unique identity. At least for the next few generations, they will be Dominican no matter where in the world they may be. Dominicano
Donde Sea.
184
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