slaves, with whom they worked on the São Paulo coffee plantations (Mitta 1999: 99). But the non-related Japanese immigrants’ cohesion was vulnerable, especially in regard to their link to Japan.
Thus, the Japanese government emphasized patriotism to overcome the immigrants’ distant location and their internal cultural differences. It stressed emperor worship and civic virtues as the most important elements of Japanese national identity in order to strengthen the link between the Japanese state and the immigrants (Endoh 2009: 9). Japanese immigrants in the Bastos colony adopted the Emperor Jimmu, whose accession has been recorded as occurring in 660 BC in their mythology, as the spiritual leader of their community. Other colonies did so as well. This attitude provided much-needed cohesion for a disparate people trying to come together as a community. They celebrated the anniversary of the colony’s foundation, the New Year, sporting events, and official school ceremonies to strengthen their social links. Every Japanese family’s living room boasted a picture of the Japanese imperial couple next to a picture of Brazilian President Vargas. This was true even after World War II, and this proved to be true, at least until 1952 (Mitta 1999: 96–101). For immigrants, it symbolized the affirmation of their ethnic identity, their strong connection to Japan, and their integration into one civil religion.
Sociologists note that a civil religion has the function of preserving a society’s values and providing social cohesion (Marshall 1998: 73). Robert Bellah was one of the first sociologists to make use of this concept. Based on Durkheim, he stated that any social group has a way of expressing its identity that is “religious.” Civil religion is a way of connecting a nation and a people through ethical principles, helping guide the population “to some form of self-understanding” (Bellah 2006: 221).
Reverence for the emperor played a very important role before World War II. When war came, immigrants and their descendants divided into two groups, those who refused to believe that Japan was losing the war and those who did not question it. The first group, Kachigumi, created an association called Shindo Renmei (“Liga do Caminho dos Súditos,” Association of the Emperor’s Subjects), which attacked and killed some members of the second group, the Makegumi (Morais 2000; Mott n.d.; Nakasato 2011). They believed that the relationship between the emperor and the Japanese people was akin to the relationship between father and son (Bastos Shuho 1952: 8). “To betray the Nation is the same as to betray one’s own father” (Nakasato 2011: 142).
Bastos represented, in microcosm, the trajectory of the transnational experience and its lifespan, which is not the same as that of the individual. It has, as Oscar Nakasato beautifully portrayed in his novel Nihonjin (2011), a movement and life of its own, based on the comings and goings of generations of its inhabitants. His book traced the genesis of the initial Japanese immigration (first generation) to Brazil (a coffee plantation in São Paulo State), and followed the third generation as they return to Japan as immigrants in their ancestors’ native land.
When the second and third generations returned to Japan, they found a world far different than that of their parents and grandparents in the 1920s. This ethnic return migration affected their ethnic identity. If in Brazil they were called Japonês/Japonesa (Japanese male and female), in the land of their ancestors, they were seen as foreigners, even if they shared the same phenotype. Their cultural identity was now Brazilian. Many emphasized this identity as a reaction against discrimination (Tsuda 2009, 2003)
In Brazil, not all Japanese immigrants saw themselves similarly. They separated into two ethnic groups: those who had come from Nippon and those from Okinawa, an island that Japan conquered in 1879. Japanese immigrants devalued people from Okinawa, who had their own language, their own cooking, and their own culture. They did not want their children to marry Okinawan immigrants. According to Kubota (2008), there were conflicts between the two groups in Campo Grande City located in Mato Grosso do Sul State. Nihonjin (Japanese people) used derogatory terms to refer to Okinawans such as “Black Japanese” or “non-Japanese,” although there were more Okinawans than Nihonjin in this city. For this reason, the immigrants founded two associations: the Clube Nipo (Japanese) and the Clube Okinawa. During her fieldwork, Kubota observed that the two groups and their descendants never felt comfortable with each other. In contrast, Brazilians from a variety of origins did not perceive the differences between Okinawans and Nihonjin.
Soba, a dish that originated in Okinawa and was incorporated by Nihonjin, became so popular that Brazilians currently consume it too. Soba became a symbol of the entire Campo Grande Japanese colony, and in 2006, it became a national cultural patrimony according to Instituto do Patrimônio Histórico e Artístico National, IPHAN (Historical and Artistic National Patrimony Institute) (Kubota 2008). Although the differences between the two groups still persist, they have lessened in Brazil.
Applying Weber’s definition of ethnic groups (Weber 1978: 385–98), Tsuda elaborates the concept of ethnic return migration as a new kind of transnational migration in which poorer countries have expelled diasporic descendants to their richer ethnic homelands. Homeland governments, such as Japan, welcome them back “through preferential immigration and nationality policies as ‘ethnic brethren’” (Tsuda 2009: 6, 7).
Ethnic return migration is not a new phenomenon in the history of capitalist societies. However, it presents peculiarities according to the stage of capitalism in each society. In the nineteenth century, an ethnic return migration sent former enslaved Africans and crioulos 1 from Brazil to Lagos (a city currently located in Nigeria). Brazil was then a capitalist plantation society based on slave labor. The return migration started in 1830, and most of the migrants belonged to the ethnic group Yoruba. It was not a matter of choice for them. They were coerced to choose between working for plantation owners and leaving the country. Brazilian politicians and elites were afraid of slave revolts, as slavery was the only secure way of ensuring labor. Some free men decided to remain in the cities, although they were politically persecuted, others went to work in plantations, and those with enough capital returned to Africa.
The return migrants were seen as foreigners in Africa, although they made use of this identity on their behalf. They were merchants; they exported slaves and azeite-de-dendê 2 and imported aguardente 3 and tobacco. Others were proud of working as artisans as they did in Brazil. Brazilian women were well known as seamstresses and cooks. African Brazilians were seen as a sophisticated bourgeoisie. They retained the Portuguese language as much as possible and preserved the Portuguese names of their former masters, and they professed Catholicism (Carneiro da Cunha 1985).
African Brazilians preserved their separate identity as a badge of distinction. According to the circumstances, they were either Brazilians, returnees, or returnee Yorubas. However, the most important trait of their identity was Catholicism. Their ethnic Brazilian identity in Lagos was only possible as a local identity not as a remnant of earlier circumstances (Carneiro da Cunha 1985: 15).
Japanese Brazilians are more than a labor migration. They are part of a kind of transnational migration that involves ethnic return. Some migrants settled permanently in the host society, some went back and forth between Japan and Brazil, and some returned to their homeland and remained there. Although they belonged to the middle class, the economic crisis of the 1980s in Brazil and the Japanese preferential immigration policy for “ethnic brethren” compelled them to migrate to Japan to work as cheap labor in its factories (Tsuda 2009: 230).
However, Japanese Brazilians occupy a status of lower middle class in 2004 based on their level of education as most had only as elementary or middle-school education. Among those Japanese Brazilian laborers interviewed in Japan in that year, nobody had a master’s degree or Ph.D., while in Brazil, Japanese descendants have a higher scholarship than the population median (Beltrão and Sugahara 2006: 70).
Japanese Brazilian immigrants arrived in Japanese society as marginalized minorities in their ethnic homeland. Their position in the labor market, their cultural differences (many were second and third generation born and raised in Brazil) and even their different phenotype due to mixed ancestors,
