By Mario Osava
RIO DE JANEIRO, Mar 19 1996 (IPS)

Brazilians of Japanese descent who have migrated to their ancestral homeland are discovering that cultural differences with native Japanese run deeper than their physical similarity.

Some 170,000 Japanese-Brazilians now work in Japan. But their shared ethnicity has not succeeded in integrating them into local society. Many feel rejected and are seeking to organize their own communities, according to reports here.

Known as “dekaseguis” some 1.2 million Japanese immigrants and their descendants live in Brazil. Most are in the states of Sao Paulo and Parana. They constitute Brazil’s best-educated and highest-income ethnic group.

But some dekaseguis who have gone back to live in Japan return to Brazil displaying such “persecutory reactions” as hearing voices and believing themselves under continual surveillance.

These symptoms are like those associated with the psychological condition known as schizophrenia, says psychiatrist Decio Nakagawa, who has treated hundreds of returnees and is himself the son of Japanese immigrants.

Persecution complexes can be found among any group of immigrants, Nakagawa noted, but the problem affects “somewhat more” than two to three percent of Japanese-Brazilians who lived in Japan and then returned to Brazil.

This appears to be a low percentage, but amount to between 3,400 to 5,100 people afflicted with schizophrenia-like symptoms and who have little access to professional help.

The psychiatrist said some disturbed returnees hid in the airplane’s bathroom during the entire return flight. Others went directly to his clinic, baggage and all, on arriving in Brazil. Nakawaga’s treatment is generally completed within a month. But some patients are hospitalized for a longer-term social rehabilitation through occupation therapy.

The specialist said the persecution disturbance generally emerges after about eight months in Japan. In many cases, the problem was traceable to the harsh working conditions dekaseguis experienced in that country.

Isolated, often working more than 12 hours per day on split shifts, knowing little Japanese, and bereft of social security and health benefits, the dekaseguis say they are also victims of social discrimination.

“It’s impossible to live like that, always excluded,” concluded Kioko Rosa Kohara, who lived in Tokyo for six years as her Brazilian physicist husband pursued his doctoral degree in Japan.

Kioko taught Portuguese to businesspeople, diplomats and police officials in the Japanese capital, but most dekaseguis labor in the industrial centers of Japan’s interior.

“We are all foreigners” in Japan, including Japanese- Brazilians who were born in Japan, Kioko asserted. The Japanese reason that the Brazilians “already betrayed the country once”, Kioko explained. They were especially intolerant toward the youngest dekaseguis, whom they judge boisterous and untrustworthy.

“Japanese culture is exclusionary,” particularly when it comes to personal relations, she added.

Alzira Ranako Tokue is another language teacher (English and Portuguese) who decided at age 42 to change her “boring and trivial life” in the Santo Andre suburb of Sao Paulo.

She joined the dekaseguis and returned to Japan in 1990 when Brazil was in the throes of a recession precipitated by President Fernando Collor de Mello’s freezing of personal bank savings accounts.

She stayed in Japan for only 11 months because she had to return to Brazil to take care of her ill mother. During that period, she worked in a belt factory for five months and later worked in a heating device factory and for the Sony corporation.

But she made only enough money to survive and pay for her return airplane ticket. And she lost feeling in a finger when she caught it in a press. She also failed to learn more than rudimentary Japanese. “I developed a block on my first job” when she was exhorted to learn the language within a month, Ranako explained.

On returning to Brazil, she described a “lack of communication and openness” among the Japanese themselves that is made worse when they deal with immigrants, whom they regard as “dumb.”

But despite the discrimination they endure, a Japanese survey shows that 25 percent of the Brazilian dekaseguis who have immigrated to Japan want to live there permanently.

Although he questioned the survey’s findings, Nakagawa acknowledged that job security, the comparatively high wages available in Japan, and technological conveniences had a powerful attraction for many dekaseguis.

Moreover, many migrant dekaseguis were peasants or laborers in Brazil and not unused to working hard, he added.

Japanese-Brazilian migrants in industrial cities like Oizume, near Tokyo, also benefited by organizing their community to provide such services as Brazilian restaurants, Portuguese- language newspapers, and imports of Brazilian food and musical recordings.

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