The sociological history of the two migration movements provides a framework for our ethnographic research which, mediated by the sociological imagination, investigates the relations between history and biography within society or the links between “the personal troubles of the milieu and the public issues of social structure” (Mills 2000: 6, 8). It is comparative due to the cross-cultural comparison between Japanese immigrants’ families and transnational Japanese Brazilian families (Baily 1990; Baily and Ramella 1988; Kosminsky 1996, 1999, 1999a, 2000b).
Detailed Fieldwork
My first fieldwork step started in 2005 when my students and I interviewed the elderly immigrants who had arrived years earlier as landowners in Bastos. They had come directly from Japan and settled on land that their parents had bought before leaving. Among these immigrants were Mrs. Saito and Mrs. Tanaka. Monica Sasai conducted most of Mrs. Saito’s interview in Japanese and translated it into Portuguese. A couple of Nisei, Elisa and Cesar, who ran a local photo shop, introduced my students and me to Mrs. Saito’s daughter, who owned a gift store. Takahashi Akira drove us to Mrs. Tanaka’s home; she spoke Portuguese in her interview. Both women spoke about their childhood and youth, their families’ relationships, their experiences, and their feelings about their immigration. Both were middle class, although Mrs. Tanaka might be considered upper middle class in Japan. They came with their own families, as proprietors of land in Bastos and brought capital with them. They felt their adjustment to life in Brazil ran smoothly. I noticed how they valued their links with Japanese culture and their concern about keeping Japanese customs, especially when they talked about marriage and the responsibility of the oldest son to his parents.
My second fieldwork step occurred in 2006 when my students and I arrived at the kaikan 5 (Associação Cultural e Esportiva Nikkei de Bastos—ACENBA—Nikkei Sport and Cultural Association of Bastos), where we were very well received. We sat down around a big table in the meeting room that displayed pictures of former directors on the wall. Old picture albums of directors and houses were on a small table in the corner. Mr. Takahashi Akira introduced us and then presented everybody who was there: Mr. Goichi Watanabe, Mr. Kobayashi, Mr. Fukui, Mr. Roberto Hiroshi Takeuchi, Dr. Yoshi, professor of anthropology at Rikkyo University in Tokyo, who spoke only Japanese, and came with a grant to assemble the Regional Museum Saburo Yamanaka of Bastos; Cleide Yamamoto, a bilingual young woman who had been helping Dr. Yoshi and later showed us the city and a poultry farm, and Ms. Yanagisako, professor of Japanese who came through JICA (Japan International Cooperation Agency) in order to teach Japanese at the ACENBA. The following day Mr. Hasegawa and Dona Luisa, who were labor brokers, were interviewed.
My students and I interviewed seven men and two women: Takahashi Akira, seventy-eight;6 Goichi Watanabe, a medical doctor and president of ACENBA, in his late seventies; Mr. Kobayashi in his late sixties; Mr. Fukui in his early seventies; Mr. Hasegawa in his early seventies, Antonio Suzuki, eighty-three; Dona Luisa in her early thirties, and sixty-eight-year-old Keiko Fukui,7 who with her husband owned the hotel where we stayed as guests during the field research.8 All the interviews with men were collected at the kaikan, with the exception of Antonio Suzuki, whom we interviewed at his home, and Keiko Fukui, interviewed at the hotel. Takahashi Akira also spoke about the colonization process. I also interviewed Mr. Roberto (fifty-four years old), as he was known, at the kaikan and at the shoe store that he owns. Mr. Kobayashi immigrated after World War II, and for this reason is called New Japan (Japão Novo).
After talking to Japanese and Japanese–Brazilian migrants to Bastos, I decided that it was time to interview the Dekasegi. Then, my students and I interviewed two elderly women, one man, one woman, two couples, one teenager, and a psychologist who attended Dekasegi children. I noticed that the dominant presence among the first group is male. Maybe it’s an inheritance of the patriarchal society, where men had an active voice.
The final fieldwork step was realized in 2006 at the seminar on the Centennial of Japanese Immigration to Brazil, at UNESP–Marília, financially supported by CNPq, where I collected the testimonies about colonization of Mr. Takahashi Akira, from Bastos, Ms. Fumiko Morita, in her seventies, who represented the Buddhist temple of Marilia, Mr. Akihiro Otoko, in charge of Tenrikyo Church, and the lawyer Dr. Rodolfo Yamashita. All the three last colonization witnesses lived in Marilia.
NOTES
1. The term crioulos refer to children of African slaves who were born in Brazil.
2. Azeite-de-dendê is a vegetable oil used in European industrialized countries, especially in England. It is also used as cooking oil in Bahia State, Brazil.
3. Aguardente is an alcoholic beverage made of sugarcane.
4. Taiko in Japanese means any kind of drums.
5. Kaikan is the Japanese translation of community center.
6. In Japan, the family name comes first followed by the given name. We noticed in this research that some of our interviewees followed the Japanese tradition, and others were influenced by Western culture, saying their given name first followed by their family name. The use of Mr. replaces the Portuguese Seu, used as a sign of respect when one is dealing with older or unknown men. The same is the case for older or unknown women, where Mrs. or Ms. replaces Dona. The male interviewees talking to each other added the suffix San, such as Takahashi-San.
7. She is called Mrs. Keiko, as Brazilians call older people by their first name preceded by the word Dona.
8. The students who participated in the field research were also guests at the hotel. All the fieldwork expenses were paid by my CNPq research grant.
An Overview of Japanese Migration to the Americas
The Background to the Japanese Migration
A detailed history of Japanese migration is beyond the scope of this book, but I will provide a brief history to establish the context of Japanese migration to Brazil. At first, Japanese migration was connected to the industrial development and urbanization that started in Japan in 1868. This year marked the beginning of Japan’s modern history and the start of the Meiji Era (1868–1912), which ended long centuries of isolationism (1600–1867, the Tokugawa Era). In the last years of the Tokugawa Era, Japan introduced Western technology in several branches of industry. Metallurgy industries and shipyards were developed in around fourteen han (usually translated as feudal property or clan, this refers to the property under the dominion of a daimyo, an important feudal owner who was a vassals of the Tokugawa government) (Vieira 1973: 25–26)1 .
By the 1800s, rural villages became characterized by very few landlord-occupied households, a limited number of small, autonomous landholders, and a relatively large and increasing number of partial or full tenant farmers who might be away from home working for extended periods. All these changes, which started in the late seventeenth century, became more pronounced in the nineteenth century, leading villagers to engage in protests, lodge lawsuits, and commit violent acts against their wealthy landlords, moneylenders, and small businessmen. These well-to-do people were often the village’s own officials. In the late years of the Tokugawa Era, villagers demonstrated their dissatisfaction due to crop failures and famines (1783–1786 and 1836–1838) and the uncertainty around the Meiji Restoration (Totman 2005: 281–82).
From the 1720s onward, deprivation in cities and towns increased due to monetary manipulation by the government, losses of income and employment due to the reduction in the numbers of samurai, the ruralizing of production, irregular food shortages, and price oscillations due to crop failure. Police action was often used to quiet
