have replaced Japanese Brazilians. The population of Japanese Brazilians exceeded 300,000 in 2007, the third largest group of foreigners in the country. The first were Koreans, numbering around 600,000 people, and the Chinese were second with around 500,000 people (Ishikawa 2012: 223). Currently, according to the General Consulate of Brazil in Tokyo, based on a Brazilian Federal Division of Justice’s report, the number of Brazilians in Japan decreased 4.2 percent from a total of 185,694 to 177,953 people between June 2013 and June 2014. It now ranks fourth, following the Chinese (648,734 people), Koreans (508,561), and Philippines (213,923). The Vietnamese population holds fifth place, increasing 38.1 percent in one year from 61,931 to 86,400 people (“Comunidade: Número de Brasileiros no Japão Cai 4.2%, para 177.953,” October, 2014).
Comparing the Japanese immigrants’ family relationships in the beginning of the twentieth century to the transnational migration of the Japanese Brazilian family relationships in the twenty-first century is a fruitful way to examine the adjustment process of migrating in both countries. Adjustment process consists of treating all their conflicts “as directly affected by macroeconomic and macrosociological factors that have an impact on immigration” (Gans 2000: 76).
The hypothesis that guides our research is: the Japanese immigrant family kept strong ties among its members under the patriarchal authority of the head of the family in Brazil in the first decades of the twentieth century.1 This is due in part because Japanese immigrants settled in rural areas and family members worked together on plantations to insure their prosperity. As immigrants settled in agricultural colonies, relatively apart from Brazilian influence, they were more likely to keep their original culture, such as the Japanese language, the respect for the elderly, and the adoration of the emperor. These three aspects helped maintain strong links among family members. As Japanese immigrants settled in a patriarchal society, this cultural trait was reinforced in Brazil (Kosminsky 2004). Although the immigrants did not plan to stay long in Brazil, World War II caused them to change their plans and remain definitively in the country.
The Brazilian government, whether it was the empire in the nineteenth century or the republic in the twentieth century, opposed a Japanese immigration it considered to be “the yellow danger.” However, the Japanese immigrants arrived in 1908 in order to replace African slave labor and replenish the dwindling supply of white European workers for the coffee plantations in São Paulo State. Plantation owners, intellectuals, and the Brazilian Federal and São Paulo State government would have preferred white Europeans to Asians, to further their efforts to alter the Brazilian population by making it white through miscegenation. According to them, Brazil as a modern nation needed to build its race (white) and civilization (following the European model). They considered Chinese, Hindu, and Japanese people as representatives of decaying civilizations, who would only serve to hinder these “advancements” they saw as necessary (Seyferth 1996: 56–57). Brazilians saw Japanese, upon their arrival, as an odd people, who had a different phenotype, spoke another language, were not Catholics, and had different mores.
These feelings began to change at a time when many Japanese immigrants and their descendants started to move to cities and blend into Brazilian culture. They learned Portuguese, attended Brazilian schools, converted to Catholicism, and began marrying outside their ethnic group. Brazilians conceded that those whom they would always still call Japanese were an intelligent, hardworking people.
If the Japanese immigration to Brazil was mostly composed of families, the transmigration of Japanese Brazilians to Japan was not, as stated before. At first, it was men leaving their families behind. It soon included women immigrating alone, followed by couples that left their children with grandmothers. In the last decades, nuclear families immigrated. According to Japanese Brazilian associations, there were several cases of family ruptures between those who immigrated and those who stayed behind including problems regarding the interruption of sending the remittances. Even among whole families in Japan there were ruptures, which were directly connected to the daily stress that migrants faced.
Parents have to work many hours a day, between eight and twelve hours, if they want to save money to return to Brazil quickly. Children are often neglected; some go to Japanese schools and others to Brazilian ones, and then they stay by themselves at home or stay on the streets. Families often move to find jobs, which means that they move their children from school to school (Ishikawa 2009, 2012, 2014). In this environment, some adolescent children form criminal gangs (Sasaki 2009: chapter 7).
Continuing with my hypothesis, I maintain that Japanese Brazilian transmigrant families living in the highly industrialized Japanese society face an excessive level of stress, exacerbated by discrimination due to their lack of Japanese language proficiency and their different mores. All of this can have a profound and negative effect on families. Literature points to a comparable situation with that experienced by Eastern European Jews immigrating to a similarly newly industrialized New York City in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Seasonal jobs, a lack of money, and awful living conditions led husbands and fathers to abandon their wives and children. Women faced with this situation had no other choice than to institutionalize their children in orphanages while they searched for work that would enable them to bring their children home (A Bintel Brief 1990). All those entering America at this time faced the same fate, with orphanages arranged in order to keep races and ethnicities separate.
I also compare the experiences of Japanese Brazilian children who lived in Japan and returned to Bastos to that of children who were left behind by their parents in Bastos. I study their socialization within the family, between students and teachers, and within peer groups (Plaisance 2004). Currently, it is fashionable to consider children as social agents, but children can be both social agents and vulnerable, which is one of our hypotheses. Children who attend Japanese schools serve as translators for their parents and neighbors. However, children have no decision-making power regarding staying in Japan or moving to Brazil. The second hypothesis is that due to the transnational process, the socialization of children is interrupted several times, due to the back and forth of their families. A possible result is that children can have a crisis of identity, feel insecure about their mother’s love, have difficulties adapting to one country or the other, and face severe learning challenges at school.
I examined a child’s life experiences as an extended case study (Burawoy 1991). I refer to its peculiarities, such as the seven years spent attending school in Japan; six years of elementary school, plus one year of junior high school. This almost exceptional social fact highlights the difficulties that most Japanese Brazilian children face in attending school in Japan (Kawamura 2003). Japanese Brazilian children finish junior high school because there is no repetition of elementary and junior high school grades. Although they are able to speak Japanese fluently, “very few possess an adequately high skill in reading and writing the language” (Ishikawa 2014: 8–9).
As one considers “problematic the exceptional or deviant cases,” one is “driven outside the field situation to the broader economic and political forces” impacting the Japanese Brazilian migrants, especially their children. Through the perspective of transnationalism, “the social situation becomes a completely different object, one threaded by patterns of power” and domination on one side, and resistance on the other (Burawoy 1991: 278). This case is an exception due to this student having continued to improve her Japanese skills in Bastos, where she taught the Japanese language. She wanted to attend college in Japan. It is rare for Japanese Brazilian children to want to continue their education in Japan after junior high school (Ishikawa 2014: 8–9).
NOTE
1. I use hypothesis as a guide to conduct the research and not as a relationship between two or more variables.
This book was made possible because at the time fieldwork was done, 2005–2006, São Paulo State University (UNESP), Marília, was a strong university, in the sense that one could receive the financial and emotional
