POPULATION-BRAZIL: Emigrants Seek Red Sun of Japanese Ancestors

By Mario Osava Reprint | | Print |

Mario Osava

RIO DE JANEIRO, Feb 26 2002 (IPS) - The sun is red in Japan and yellow in Brazil. This difference can prove confusing to the thousands of children who accompany their Brazilian parents of Japanese descent, known as Nikkei, as they emigrate to the land of their ancestors.

This wave of Brazilian emigrants, which began in the 1980s and intensified in the 1990s, also accentuates the insecurities of the Nikkei with respect to their national identity. In Brazil they are referred to as “Japanese”, but in Japan they feel more like foreigners, despite their physical likeness to the local population.

The Dekasegi, as the Brazilians of Japanese origin who emigrate to the country of their forebears are known, number approximately 250,000, or a quarter of the total Nikkei in living in this South American country.

In Japan, most are limited to low-skilled jobs because they are rejected by local employers. In general, the Dekasegi stay in Japan for a few years to save up money, and then return to Brazil.

Many take their families with them to Japan, which can mean difficult periods of adaptation for young children. The colour of the sun is just a small example of the culture shock they face, pressured to “renounce what they learned earlier,” Maria Helena Uyeda, a journalist and leader of the Brazilian Association of Dekasegi, told IPS.

The Association was founded four years ago in Curitiba, capital of the southern Brazilian state of Paraná, to provide services – psychological, educational, legal and business – to the Dekasegi returning to the country.

The difficulties of economic, social and cultural reinsertion in Brazil have prompted some families to return to Japan several times, because they do not feel at home in either country, said Uyeda.

Sumika Osawa has spent most of the last decade, in four different periods, in Japan, where she found relatively stable work and was increasingly able to integrate into society, such that now she would prefer to live in the country that her parents left more than 70 years ago.

Osawa, 54, a former English teacher, admits that she feels like a foreigner in Japan and that she suffered from the strong discrimination against Nikkei, but she made an effort to adapt and continues perfecting her language skills and adjusting to what she calls the “strait-laced” Japanese culture.

Her Japanese boyfriend, an engineer who has travelled overseas extensively and speaks several languages, is helping her in that process.

“The Brazilian and Japanese cultures are completely opposite,” said Osawa, who prefers the Asian graciousness. But she admits that the rigid formality, the indirect mode of speaking and the cultivation of “humility” prevent the Japanese from freely expressing themselves, in contrast to the famously extroverted Brazilians.

Her definitive emigration is on hold, she says, because her parents, now in their eighties, refuse to return to Japan. Her father says he prefers living among the Brazilians, who he considers “open-hearted.”

Osawa saved enough money to buy two apartments and a house, to meet her objective of providing better living standards for her parents, who live in Campinas, a city of 1.5 million people, 100 km from Sao Paulo.

Two nephews of hers who also spent several years in Japan said they do not want to go back because life there “is very boring.”

“I don’t feel completely Brazilian or Japanese. I lost my points of reference. But I made myself more Japanese in these last few years,” Osawa says.

She does have some criticisms about Japanese customs, such as arranged marriages, “which young people no longer accept,” and the “tyranny of the man towards the woman.”

Her favourable view of Japan, meanwhile, is due to the fact that the population “rigorously follows the rules” and is trustworthy. She said she is tired of the violence in Brazil and the “rudeness of Brazilians, who can be very offensive,” though she does appreciate their informal attitude and directness.

The Nikkei may feel “more comfortable in Japan even if they do suffer discrimination,” because there are no doubts about identity there, they are “100 percent Brazilian,” not “half Brazilian” as they are considered in Brazil, says Jeffrey Lesser, history professor at Emory University in the U.S. city of Atlanta.

Lesser, author of “Negotiating National Identity”, about Arab and Japanese immigration in Brazil, is now studying the Nikkei community here.

He lives in Sao Paulo, though frequently visits Oizumi, a Japanese city in Gumma province where 6,000 Brazilian Dekasegi live, comprising 15 percent of the local population.

Confronted with the culture of their parents and grandparents, these Dekasegi often feel more clearly Brazilian, forming a minority community in the city. They frequent supermarkets that sell products typical of Brazil, read their own newspapers in Portuguese and even rent videos of the latest Brazilian films and soap operas.

The Brazilian identity of the Dekasegi is also evident in women’s beauty contests, a tradition among the Nikkei. In Brazil, the contestants model typical Japanese dress, but in Japan they compete wearing Brazilian bikinis, Lesser said.

In Brazil, the duality of the Nikkei reality is not very well understood by the broader society, which is multicultural but does not completely accept difference.

This is evident in the relative absence of minority communities in the historical debate, in the arts and other cultural manifestations, in contrast to the experience of the also multicultural United States, said the academic.

Non-European immigrants, such as Arabs and Japanese, were met with strong rejection by the Brazilian elite, particularly for race-based reasons, according to Lesser’s book. They argued that these immigrants “would disfigure the Brazilian population” and would not be “assimilated” by Brazilian culture.

Ironically, the Nikkei community today is “the whitest in the country”, according to the social criteria that have traditionally been more transcendent than the race, because the Japanese immigrants and their descendants have higher average income and education levels, said Lesser.

But pressure to assimilate continues to be strong, even if it is pure illusion, because it is “impossible to dilute the differences,” according to the historian.

An illustrative example is the fact that the plastic surgery most sought by Nikkei women is a procedure that “Westernises” the shape of the eyes.